Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (review)

Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger historicizes how the evolving policies implemented by the federal government impacted Navajo women in ways that remain underresearched until now. In telling detail, Weisiger describes the systematic destruction of 50 percent of Diné livestock during the Depression. During three successive waves of reduction, government resolve hardened, and organized round-ups turned into slaughter-fests as range riders killed thousands of stock too distant from off-reservation markets to ship by rail car. The shock and revulsion experienced by Diné reverberate today as elders and their descendants relate the horror of seeing sacred gifts from the Holy People destroyed. The chasms in communication between government officials and Diné leaders widened as mutually exclusive epistemologies shaped starkly different understandings of the People's relationship to Diné Bikéyah and their livestock.

Since the formation of the Navajo tribal council during the 1920s, women were essentially shut out of the political process. Given women's high status traditionally, as reflected in Navajo Creation narratives and matricentered social geography, women's absence from the political sphere created an environment inimical to their interests as stock owners, which backfired as New Dealers encountered increasing resistance to their "rational" policies mandating stock reduction to revitalize the overgrazed Navajo range. Thus, the tribal council was caught between a rock (the federal government) and a hard place as they faced the wrath of their female relatives when the latter were informed about forced reduction of their herds. Most studies of stock reduction have tacitly relied on essentialized portraits of the "traditional Navajo woman" drawn by social scientists influenced by societal norms.

Through a combination of archival research, oral history interviews, and relevant academic sources, Weisiger's richly textured narrative redresses shortcomings of other studies, as she foregrounds cultural, ecological, and gender issues throughout the book. Using gender as a category of analysis exposes the destructive effects of patriarchy: the use and influence of exclusionary language, the skewed construction of the census, and the tacit assumptions regarding male authority served to obliterate Navajo women's status. This is only one reason why Weisiger's book makes such an important contribution. She articulates why the signal failure of stock reduction revolved around the New Dealers' complete disregard of Navajo women's roles and positions as owners of all the goats and most of the sheep. Because the entire land management program as conceived by the federal government undermined the very tapestry of matricentered Diné relations, it was doomed from the outset. Stock reduction, like Hwéeldi, continues to evoke cultural genocide in the stories told by Diné even today.

The book begins with an insightful foreword by William Cronon and is divided into four parts aptly titled with geologic terms. "Fault Lines" delineates the crucial differences between Diné and European American ways of "narrating nature." Weisiger lays out the crucial differences in Diné's relational ontology, counterpoised to the convictions of federal New Deal conservationists headed by Commissioner John Collier, who privileged their perspectives based on "hard scientific evidence" of range deterioration. Although Indian agents had periodically warned about overgrazing, Washington had encouraged the increase in Diné flocks because they ensured self-support. For decades, reservation traders were not allowed to purchase breeding stock.

In part 2, "Bedrock," Weisiger discloses why she was unable to "write a history of the Navajos" without taking into account Blessingway, the epic story of the genesis of the Diné and their livestock (70). She takes Navajos' claims about their origins seriously, and she develops her case by articulating the mutually exclusive differences in epistemologies: the Diné's relational ontology, which incorporates networks of reciprocity encompassing the nonhuman world, vis-à-vis Western perspectives, which emphasize ownership and control of property by championing possessive individualism and buttressed by the "truth" of scientific facts necessary to properly manage the range. She also highlights the remarkable amount of economic and social independence enjoyed by women due to their control of land and livestock...