Water-rich Gila River tribe near Phoenix flexes its political muscles in a drying West

SACATON, Arizona (AP) — Stephen Roe Lewis grew up seeing stacks of legal briefs at the dinner table — often, about his tribe’s water.

His father, the late Rodney Lewis, was general counsel for the Gila River Indian Community and fought for the tribe’s rights to water in the Southwest, eventually securing in 2004 the largest Native American water settlement in U.S. history.

Years later, Stephen would become governor of the tribe, whose reservation is about a half-hour south of downtown Phoenix. Amid his tenure, he’s been pivotal in navigating a water crisis across the seven-state Colorado River basin caused by existential drought made worse by climate change and decades of Western states overdrawing from the river.

Lewis, 56, has leveraged the Gila River tribe’s water abundance to help Arizona, making his tribe a power player in the parched region. His fingerprints are on many recent, high-stakes decisions made in the West about the future of the river that supports 40 million people, and the tribe’s influence is only growing.

“You never choose your path,” he said, “but it was laid out for me through my parents.”

Breakthroughs at pivotal moments

The tribe, with about 15,000 members living on its reservation, is one of two in Arizona each with rights to more than 650,00 acre-feet (801 million cubic meters) of water from the Colorado and other sources. (The other is the Colorado River Indian Tribes.) An acre-foot is enough water to serve roughly two to three U.S. households in a year. On average, tribal households use significantly less.

For years, the Gila River tribe has made a business of banking the water it gets from the Colorado River and leasing some of it to cities in Arizona in exchange for money. One such deal