Some six months after the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth
Circuit refused to grant constitutional protection to the sacred land of the
Cherokees, permitting the impounded waters from the Tellico Dam to flood
their ancestral homeland in the Little Tennessee River Valley basin, the
United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado,
dismissed the appeal of Navajo Indians similarly confronted with the dis-
appearance of sacred land under invasive waters impounded from yet
another government-sponsored dam.

In this case the river was the Colorado, which rises in the high Rocky
Mountains of north central Colorado, cutting a winding path for 1,440 miles
southward to the Gulf of California. Its drainage basin covers 244,000 square
miles and includes parts of seven states--Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New
Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. For seventeen miles it forms the
international boundary between Arizona and Mexico before flowing eighty
miles through Mexico to the gulf. Draining the largest, most arid sector of
the North American continent, the Colorado River continues to be a criti-
cal source of water for the states through which it flows. In 1922 the Colo-
rado River compact was signed, dividing the entire river basin into two
parts, the Lower Basin, consisting of Arizona, Nevada, and California, and
the Upper Basin of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Accord-

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