Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

Preface

X V Preface F or a time, I used to travel each year from my home near Phoenix to the San Juan River in southern Utah, a journey that took me through the western part of the Navajo Reservation. Framed by my car window, windswept moonscapes layered in pink, salmon, and gray, volcanic pinnacles, and sandstone spires broke the monotony of the vermillion tablelands, speckled with gray-green shrubs. As I gazed across the breathtaking yet bleak landscape, I sometimes wondered what part the Navajos had played, if any, in creating such desolation. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country seeks to answer that question. An environmental history , this book explores the dynamic relationship between livestock grazing , environmental change, cultural identity, gender, and memory during the New Deal era of the 1930s and its aftermath. I argue that although Navajos indeed ravaged the range by allowing their livestock to overgraze, federal officials made matters worse. Soil conservationists and policymakers with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, led by Commissioner John Collier, ignored the deeper cultural meanings of livestock and failed to treat Navajos , especially women, as real partners in developing and implementing a workable conservation program. The result has been a collective memory of trauma, a long-lasting rejection of range conservation policies, and a chronic wasteland. When I began this research, my initial questions went to the heart of the conservation program: Did Diné (their name for themselves) ­ overgraze the range, or was the problem actually drought, as many Diné maintained? With some notable exceptions, most scholars have assumed that over­ grazing desiccated the land, based both on the word of New Deal scientists and on the scholars’ own observations of the current landscape. So I began with the contrary assumption that the Diné were right and searched for evidence that might prove or disprove that claim. After a good deal of digging, I concluded that the issue was more complicated than some have thought. A brutal combination of climatic change, which began in the late nineteenth century, and overgrazing by Diné livestock led to the accelerated erosion that prompted the New Deal program.1 At the same time, I came to realize that the New Deal scientists and policymakers, as well as the Diné, bore responsibility for current conditions. The New Dealers gave insufficient attention to the cultural, economic, and ecological implications of their conservation program and dismissed those Navajos who tried to help them create a more culturally coherent approach. In consequence, they exacerbated the crisis. New Dealers and Diné, thus, shared complicity and culpability for an increasingly depleted land.2 I had been curious at the outset about what Diné women had thought about the conservation program. As a former anthropology student, I was vaguely aware that Navajos had historically lived within a matricentered web of relationships. And yet the scholarship on the New Deal program f­ ocused largely on the response of the Navajo Tribal Council and other male political leaders. So I wondered: How did New Deal range policies impingeonwomen?Didwomenfiguresignificantlyintherebellionagainst the New Deal program? I discovered that livestock reduction threatened women’s economic autonomy by nearly eradicating their flocks of goats, destroying their means to support their families with their sheep, and restricting their use of traditional grazing areas. And so women, like men, fought back against Collier’s conservation program and helped shape the memories that continue to cloud modern efforts to manage the range. A number of historians have already narrated the story of livestock reduction on the Navajo Reservation. Donald Parman, in The Navajos and the New Deal, argued that stock reduction, though necessary, brought excessive trauma to the Navajos largely because of poor planning and because Collier was only dimly aware of just how attached the Navajos were to their sheep, goats, and horses. An excellent administrative history written in the 1970s during the early emergence of ethnohistory, his book gave uncommon attention to the Navajo perspective. Yet it left the impression X VI preface that opposition to the conservation program emerged primarily because a handful of Navajo men fanned the flames while acting out their political and personal rivalries.3 Even more mindful of Navajo culture and ideas was Richard White’s masterful book, The Roots of Dependency, which persuasively argued that stock reduction transformed the once self-­ supporting Navajos into an impoverished “colonial appendage.” That decline was all the more reprehensible, White wrote, because a concern for...