Developing Resilient Water Supplies for Great Plains Native American Reservations: Rosebud Sioux Tribe (South Dakota, USA) Challenges

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe of southern South Dakota provides a case of study of the challenges Native American tribes in the Great Plains region face in developing sustainable water supplies that are resilient to both droughts and long-term climate change. The Rosebud Indian Reservation has a semiarid climate with water supplies that are particularly vulnerable to natural climate variation and a drying climate. The adaptive capacity of the tribe is constrained by the reservation having one of the highest poverty rates in the United States. Non-Indian irrigators are the largest groundwater users on the reservation, but their use is beyond the tribal government’s control. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe continues to implement measures to increase the resilience of its water supply. The Rosebud Sioux Rural Water System provides potable water to the majority of the reservation’s population using multiple water sources, both surface and groundwater, which increases the resilience of the residential potable water supply to climate change. Interventions, such as deepening or replacing shallow household wells and augmenting stock ponds with groundwater, can mitigate some immediate vulnerabilities. Establishing a large herd of bison (Wolakota Buffalo Range), a species well adapted to the Great Plains climate, will result in ecological restoration, increased economic development, and better food security. However, continuous, long-term drying and associated groundwater impacts may eventually force more transformative adaptations, particularly with respect to agriculture.