The 2004 Arizona Water Settlements Act eventually provided the Gila River Indian Community with the largest single water rights settlement in American history to that point.

The water that had been taken from them was, in some legal and practical measure, being returned.

This happened fifty years after Ira Hayes died.

He did not live to see it.

He did not live to see the water come back to the community his people had built along the river.

He did not live to see the legal recognition of rights that should have been protected all along.

He was thirty-two years old when he died on the flats of the reservation, and the settlement that partially addressed the injustice his community had suffered was still half a century away.