Voices: Return the Great Salt Lake to Native stewardship

Utah’s water crisis begins with snow — or with its absence.

This winter’s snowpack is the worst on record. At the start of February, it stood at half its typical level at that point of the year.

The most immediate impacts are on the empty ski slopes, cutting brown slashes instead of typical white across Utah’s mountains. The state’s winter recreation economy — worth $2.5 billion and supporting 31,800 jobs — depends on reliable snow. But this poor ski season might be the least of Utah’s snow problems.

Snowpack supplies 95% of Utah’s water. Every snowflake that falls in the Great Basin flows downhill, toward a single terminus: the Great Salt Lake.

Today, much of that water never reaches the inland sea. Snowmelt is drunk up by thirsty farms, lawns, cities and industries. As inflows decline, the lake retreats. Exposed lakebed, contaminated by decades of industrial waste, becomes dust that has become a public health and economic “nuclear bomb,” as the New York Times put it.

A new documentary, “The Lake,” by filmmaker Abby Ellis, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, captures this moment’s deadly stakes. The two scientists at its center, BYU’s Ben Abbott and Westminster’s Bonnie Baxter, are not forecasting about distant futures. They estimate that, without drastic changes, the Great Salt Lake will completely disappear by 2028.

Abbot, Baxter and Ellis aren’t the only ones sounding the alarm.

Utah Indigenous leaders like this essay’s co-authors, Darren Parry and Forrest Cuch, along with historian Max Perry Mueller, have been warning about this coming apocalypse for decades.

Parry, former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, puts it plainly: The Great Salt Lake isn’t disappearing because the studies aren’t unclear. This is not a science crisis. It is a moral one.

That moral failure is visible in Utah’s governmental response. As the snowpack collapsed, Gov. Spencer Cox urged Utahns to pray for snow. To be sure, the impulse to pray — especially for the citizens of the state that is also home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — is understandable. In moments of fear, people reach for hope. But Indigenous traditions draw a sharp line between prayer and pleading.

As Forrest Cuch, a Ute elder and former director of Indian Affairs for the State of Utah, explains: Prayer is not about asking the Creator to provide more after humans have taken too much. In Indigenous teachings, prayer is also about mutual obligation. Prayer asks not, “What else can I receive?” Instead, it asks, “How do I care for what has already been given?”

But, in Utah’s dominant culture, land and water have been reduced to “natural resources” to extract to maximize profits. The result is predictable: Environmental destruction accumulates, impoverishing land and communities, while just a handful get richer.

Against this deadly cycle, an Indigenous life-giving cycle is rooted in relationship and reciprocity. Water is not a commodity. It is a relative, existing for all life, not just for those with the deepest pockets or oldest paper claims. And reciprocity is the governing ethic. The question is not, “How much can I take?” It’s “How do I care for what keeps me alive?”

This is why the solution to the Great Salt Lake crisis cannot be incremental reform. What is needed is a new system, one rooted in relationship, humility and respect for life itself.

That new system is perhaps the old one. We propose to return the governance of the Great Salt Lake to the Native nations who managed the Great Basin’s waters for generations before settlers arrived in the 1840s. The idea is to create a Great Salt Lake Inter-Tribal Coalition. Such a coalition would oversee existing state and federal agencies, so that long-term ecological survival and intergenerational responsibility — not short-term profit — define the flow of water into the Great Salt Lake.

This approach has clear precedents. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition provides a template for shared governance grounded in sovereignty, treaty obligations and existing administrative law. The tribal-nation led restoration of California’s Klamath River also highlights the fruits of such a practice: Ecosystems have been revived, fisheries restored and communities — Native and non-Native alike — strengthened rather than sacrificed on the altar of profit growth.

Critics will object that such a water authority reordering threatens agriculture, municipalities and industry. Yet, under the current system farmers, cities and businesses already struggle to plan without predictable water.

And on a far more basic level: People cannot breathe toxic dust.

Indigenous stewardship does not mean shutting off water. It means setting enforceable limits in a closed basin system where unlimited extraction is unsustainable. The choice is not between Indigenous governance and economic stability; it is between planned restraint and chaotic collapse.

For Utah’s Indigenous peoples, healing water and healing people have always been the same work. To protect this lake is to protect our future. To ignore it is to tell the next generation exactly who, or what, mattered more.

Forrest S. Cuch (Ute Indian Tribe of Utah) is an author, environmental advocate and the former director of Indian Affairs for the State of Utah.

Darren Parry (Northwestern Band of the Shoshone) is an author, professor, tribal elder and the former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation

Max Perry Mueller is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of “Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West.”

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