Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

1. Counting Sheep

17 1 • Counting Sheep I t was a terrible sight where the slaughtering took place. . . . Near what is now the Trading Post was a ditch where sheep intestines were dumped, and these were scattered all over. The womenfolks were crying, mourning over such a tragic scene.” Nearly four decades had passed since the 1930s, but still Howard Gorman could not erase the mental images of the calamitous period of Diné history known simply as “livestock reduction.” A handsome, educated man and eloquent orator whose short dark hair and suits suggested a business executive, Gorman served as vice chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council from 1938 until 1942 and represented Ganado on the council for another three decades. More than most Diné, he had gained a broad perspective of the New Deal conservation program, for he often acted as a liaison between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Diné during that era, in part as assistant and interpreter for General Superintendent E. Reeseman Fryer, with whom he traveled across the reservation to explain the government’s policies. Still, he recalled the era with anger and profound sadness. The butchery he witnessed at the Hubbell Trading Post near his home outside Ganado seared his memory.1 Billy Bryant bitterly remembered that time, too. At first, stock reduction had largely escaped his notice. The bia launched the program in 1933, but it did not affect Bryant right away. He and his wife, who lived near the western boundary of the Hopi Reservation, went about their daily lives 18 part 1 • fault lines as they always had, herding their livestock, eating goat meat and mutton, and occasionally butchering a fat lamb for a feast with their relatives and friends. Then one day in October or November 1934, all that changed. Perhaps on that day Bryant saw a cloud of dust on the horizon announcing a visitor, who arrived to round up his wife’s goats.2 The government at first shipped herds of confiscated goats to various slaughterhouses, where the meat was canned for distribution to Navajo schools, but canneries quickly reached capacity, among other problems. So federal agents simply killed the goats while their owners looked on.3 Bryant would never forgive the cruelty and waste he witnessed on that terrible day in 1934, nor the powerlessness and indignity he felt at the hands of federal authorities. “Our goats . . . were put into a large corral where they were all shot down. Then the government men piled the corpses in a big heap, poured oil or gasoline on them and set fire to them. This happened just below Coal Mine Mesa at a place called Covered Spring. One still can see the white bones piled there. . . . Not only the goats, but the sheep, too, were slaughtered right before the owners. Those men took our meat off our tables and left us hungry and heartbroken.”4 Sarah Begay recalled those nightmarish days, too. Out of the blue, some men rode up to her place in Narrow Canyon, near Kayenta, and killed her goats. “They did it right before my eyes. I was there with my husband. They took so many.” Some were actually her mother’s, and some belonged to her older sister. “‘That is enough; it is enough,’ I tried to say.” But the men ignored her; they herded the goats to a place behind a bluff, where they beat them with clubs and shot them. “Some of the women were really crying,” she remembered. “That is why we don’t sleep well sometimes. All we think about is that.”5 Like Begay and Bryant, hundreds of Diné women and men watched helplessly while federal agents destroyed their means of subsistence, their years of labor invested in building herds, their legacy to their children. But those scenes proved singularly traumatic for deeper, spiritual reasons, too. As Howard Gorman explained, “Some people consider livestock as sacred because it is life’s necessity. They think of livestock as their mother.”6 Livestock had long nurtured the Diné, and as their animals lay dying on the parched, naked ground, the Diné felt an overpowering sense of foreboding. Horses and sheep had been a gift, a life-sustaining blessing from the Diyin Dine’é, the spirits who manifested themselves as wind, thunder, rain, and sun.7 The ruthless destruction of that gift was savage counting sheep 19 and wasteful, but more than that, it showed profound...