Opinion ID: 3066057
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The federal reserved water rights doctrine

Text: In Katie John I, we approved the Secretaries’ use of the federal reserved water rights doctrine to identify which waters are “public lands” for purposes of ANILCA’s rural subsistence priority. Because that doctrine underlies the 1999 Rules, the parties’ arguments in this case, and our conclusions, some background on the doctrine and its place in Alaska’s history is necessary. Congress had unfettered power to regulate the Territory of Alaska from 1867, when the United States purchased the 22 J OHN V . A LASKA F ISH & W ILDLIFE C ONSERVATION F UND land from Russia, until 1959, when the Territory attained statehood.60 Under the “equal footing” doctrine, when Alaska was “admitted into the Union, it gain[ed] ‘the same rights, sovereignty and jurisdiction in that behalf as the original States possess within their respective borders.’”61 More specifically, the equal footing doctrine gave Alaska “presumptive title to its submerged lands when it join[ed] the Union.”62 “The shores of navigable waters, and the soils under them, were not granted by the Constitution to the United States, but were reserved to the states respectively. . . . The new states have the same rights, sovereignty, and jurisdiction over this subject as the original states.”63 Thus the State of Alaska has the same rights over lands under navigable waters within it as, say, the State of New York and the State of California do over such waters within their borders. This authority is constrained by two separate federal rights: the navigational servitude and the federal reserved water rights doctrine. “It is settled law in this country that lands underlying navigable waters within a state belong to the state in its sovereign capacity and may be used and disposed of as [the state] may elect, subject to the paramount power of Congress 60 The U.S. Constitution gives Congress “the power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory . . . belonging to the United States.” U.S. Const. art. IV, § 3. 61 United States v. 32.24 Acres of Land, 683 F.3d 1030, 1035 (9th Cir. 2012) (quoting Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Mississippi, 484 U.S. 469, 474 (1988)). 62 Id. at 1034. 63 Pollard v. Hagan, 44 U.S. 212, 230 (1845). J OHN V . A LASKA F ISH & W ILDLIFE C ONSERVATION F UND 23 to control such waters for the purposes of navigation in commerce among the states and with foreign nations . . . .”64 Thus, where rivers and streams are navigable in interstate commerce, the United States has authority to protect a navigational servitude, but the states own the river beds and other submerged lands. Since 1908, the courts have also recognized that a federal reservation of land carries with it the right to use water necessary to serve the purposes of federal reservations. Under the federal reserved water rights doctrine, water rights for federal reservations are distinct from the federal servitude for navigable waters. So, for example, in Winters v. United States,65 a non-navigable stream was protected upstream despite the admission of Montana to statehood and despite its non-navigability, because diverting the upstream water could turn the downstream Indian reservation into a “barren waste,” which would be inconsistent with reservation of the land for the use of the tribe.66 Winters involved an Indian reservation, but the federal reserved water rights doctrine applies to all federal reservations.67 The word “reservation” does not mean only an Indian reservation—there is only one Indian reservation in Alaska, the Metlakatla Indian Community of Tsimshian Indians at the Annette Islands Reserve south of 64 United States v. Holt State Bank, 270 U.S. 49, 54 (1926). 65 Winters v. United States, 207 U.S. 564 (1908). 66 Id. at 577. 67 Akiak Native Cmty. v. EPA, 625 F.3d 1162, 1173 n.5 (9th Cir. 2010). 24 J OHN V . A LASKA F ISH & W ILDLIFE C ONSERVATION F UND Ketchikan—but rather “any body of land, large or small, which Congress has reserved from sale for any purpose.”68 Reservations in Alaska serve a variety of purposes, such as military bases and parks. Cappaert v. United States,69 a modern case, shows how the federal reserved water rights doctrine works outside the context of an Indian reservation. In Cappaert, the federal reservation of a national monument featuring a notable pool of water required enough water to fill the pool to protect an endangered species living there. As a result, the state could not grant a permit to a ranch two and one-half miles away to pump so much groundwater that the pool (and the species) would be further endangered. The Supreme Court held that a federal reservation acquires for the federal government a right to “appurtenant water then unappropriated to the extent needed to accomplish the purpose of the reservation,” regardless of whether the waters are navigable or nonnavigable.70 The federal right, though, “reserves only that amount of water necessary to fulfill the purpose of the reservation, no more.”71 In United States v. New Mexico,72 the Court reiterated that the federal reserved water rights doctrine is limited to the quantity of water necessary to fulfill the primary purposes of the reservation.73 68 United States v. Celestine, 215 U.S. 278, 285 (1909); see also Coeur D’Alene Tribe of Idaho v. Hammond, 384 F.3d 674, 693 (9th Cir. 2004). 69 Cappaert v. United States, 426 U.S. 128 (1976). 70 Id. at 138. 71 Id. at 141. 72 United States v. New Mexico, 438 U.S. 696 (1978). 73 Id. at 716–18. J OHN V . A LASKA F ISH & W ILDLIFE C ONSERVATION F UND 25 Notably, in these cases the United States sought water itself, for the need of the reservation itself. In Winters, the water was needed on an Indian reservation for the Indians’ farms and ranches, and in Cappaert for the deep pool of water for which the federal land was reserved. In New Mexico the Supreme Court held that federally reserved waters are limited to the primary purposes for which the land was reserved, without which “the purposes of the reservation would be entirely defeated.”74 Applying this narrow rule, the Court rejected a federal claim to water rights for “aesthetic, environmental, recreational, or wildlife-preservation purposes,” because those were not the primary purposes for which the national forest lands at issue had originally been reserved.75 What makes this case difficult is that, until now, the federal reserved water rights doctrine has operated in the context of the United States enforcing its right to that amount of water necessary to fulfill the purpose of a particular reservation.76 That is, previous applications of the federal reserved water rights doctrine have focused on the amount of water needed for a specific federal reservation, rather than the locations of water sources that might generally be needed for 74 Id. at 700. 75 Id. at 708, 713–15; see also id. at 700 (“Each time this Court has applied the ‘implied-reservation-of-water doctrine,’ it has carefully examined both the asserted water right and the specific purposes for which the land was reserved, and concluded that without the water the purposes of the reservation would be entirely defeated.”). 76 See, e.g., Colville Confederated Tribes v. Walton, 647 F.2d 42, 46–47 (9th Cir. 1981) (first considering the existence of water rights and then considering the amount of water reserved). 26 J OHN V . A LASKA F ISH & W ILDLIFE C ONSERVATION F UND subsistence living from many such reservations. We, and perhaps the Secretaries, failed to recognize the difficulties in applying the federal reserved water rights doctrine in this novel way, and in retrospect the doctrine may provide a particularly poor mechanism for identifying the geographic scope of ANILCA’s rural subsistence priority management when it comes to water. Of course, we had the opportunity to revisit Katie John I in Katie John II, and while a majority of the en banc court agreed for diverging reasons that Katie John I was incorrectly decided, we could not come to a controlling agreement about why that was true.77 We accordingly concluded that the decision “should not be disturbed or altered.”78 Katie John I therefore remains controlling law, and we must attempt to apply it in this case.