Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

9. Making Memories

202 9 • making memories I n the late spring of 1936, as rumors of grazing districts and renewed stock reduction swirled across Diné Bikéyah, newspapers in border towns claimed that Navajo women were threatening revolt. Trouble was brewing on the reservation, the Gallup Independent claimed, in the racist language of yellow journalism, “due to the dissatisfaction of the squaws over Collier’s policies.”1 Solid evidence of this simmering rebellion is admittedly meager. Very few Navajo women spoke English, and the government officials who created much of the historical record tended to ignore them. But the few clues that do surface here and there are certainly suggestive.2 Consider the account of a community meeting near Kayenta, where perhaps 250 Diné, nearly all of them men, gathered. Before them stood a woman known as Denehotso Hattie. Although almost blind from trachoma, she was the meeting’s “unquestioned, dominating leader,” and an “aggressive and vigorous speaker.” Pointing her finger at Superintendent Fryer, Hattie denounced the government’s plan for range management. She spoke so heatedly and rapidly that Fryer’s interpreter, Howard Gorman, could not keep up, or perhaps Gorman was reluctant to translate her invective. Nonetheless, it was clear that the woman did not blame government officials alone. She scolded Diné men, too, pointing at them as they hung their heads.3 Diné councilmen and community leaders had acquiesced to the wholesale slaughter of stock and the confinement of making memories 203 flocks into grazing districts, bringing poverty and despair to their people. Hattie held them all accountable. Diné men and women like Denehotso Hattie challenged stock reduction and the government’s entire range-management program. Their protests proliferated between 1936 and 1941 as conservationists imposed maximum limits on the numbers of livestock each family could graze; these limits leveled wealth—striking for the first time at the richest stockowners —and targeted horses, the markers of masculine prestige. One might argue that these protests involved relatively few people, who were concentrated within only a few areas and manipulated by a handful of politically motivated men. And yet this resistance movement held a significance far beyond that of the participants themselves, for it tattooed an indelible memory of this era, a collective memory of Collier’s conservation program as an economic and environmental injustice. The man Collier chose to administer this phase of his conservation program was E. Reesman Fryer, whom friends called “Si.” Fryer headed a reorganized reservation that combined the former six jurisdictions into one and merged the local operations of the bia and the scs into a single, centralized Navajo Service.4 He was a young ecologist who had grown up in the Mormon community of Mesa, Arizona, before studying fisheries and forestry at the University of Washington. Upon graduation, he supervised a ranch and citrus farm in the Phoenix area, and he and his wife owned a dude ranch in the Sierra Ancha mountains, south of Payson, Arizona, before it went bust in the early days of the Depression. But he was also no stranger to Navajo Country. He had overseen construction of the Mexican Springs Demonstration Project and administered a similar effort at Ganado before becoming director of land management for the Pueblo Indian Agency.5 Nonetheless, Fryer was an inauspicious choice to head the Navajo Service . The tall man, with a thatch of curly blond hair, was only thirtyfive years old when Collier appointed him, and his youth did not draw the respect that the Diné had bestowed on his older predecessors. He was sympathetic to the Navajos, especially the small-scale stockowners, and he could be restrained in his dealings.6 Yet with his forceful, combative personality, short temper, blunt language, and stubborn streak, he often struck the Diné as callous and abrasive.7 He himself admitted that many of the actions blamed on Collier were, in fact, his own decisions.8 Fryer’s temperament was poorly suited for the task of implementing a radical revolution in class hierarchies on the Navajo Reservation. 204 part 4 • erosion Nor did he endear himself with the poor. Long after he left Navajo Country, Fryer wrote that he continued to be haunted by a memory of two destitute old women who had walked from some distant corner of the reservation to his office in Window Rock. The only animals they owned, they told him, were two burros, which they used to carry wood and...