Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Chapter 6: Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature

Chapter 6 Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature Marsha Weisiger “The talk about grazing conditions was not true,” asserted Frank Goldtooth in the early 1970s. “There was plenty of vegetation and water. The ranges and valleys were covered with tall grass and beautiful flowers.” The elderly Diné (Navajo) man recalled the traumatic New Deal era of the 1930s, when officials with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) pressured Navajos to slash herds in an effort to conserve severely overgrazed rangelands on the Navajo Reservation. Located on the Colorado Plateau, the reservation encloses some twentyfive thousand square miles at the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Goldtooth had helped implement the program to reduce livestock and restrict stockowners to circumscribed areas, but looking back, he concluded that the government program had been misguided. Federal conservationists had misread the land and the relationship of the Diné to it. The Diné themselves, he told his visitor, long conserved the range by moving in an annual cycle, yet government policy-makers, disdainful of traditional ways, disrupted those patterns, and in so doing they degraded the land. In the old days, he explained,“the people moved with their sheep whenever and wherever they wished with the seasons.” It seemed clear to 130 | Marsha Weisiger him, in fact, that the Diné knew how to live in harmony with the land. “A homesite,” he explained, “is not good when a family lives in the same place too long. The vegetation is tramped on too much, and it never gets a chance to grow again. Long ago, moving with the stock from one place to another was much better than what we do now. It gave the vegetation time to grow again.”1 But in the 1930s, federal conservationists portrayed a landscape much different from the one Goldtooth remembered. Rather than reporting lush vegetation, John Provinse, an official with the Navajo Service, exclaimed in a radio broadcast that anyone “could look around and see that great barren areas existed on the Reservation, that the grass was short and becoming shorter, that the wind was whipping sand out of dry washes and from barren spots and piling it up into sand dunes, that there were gullies everywhere.” Provinse described a weary waste of sheet erosion, exotic and unpalatable vegetation, and large areas of grassland, once in excellent condition, but “now so denuded of grass that they will scarcely support a saddle horse.”2 Each of these narrators told a radically different story about the land, and each presumed an utterly different solution, much as Jacob Tropp found in the Transkei (chap. 5 this volume). For Provinse and the conservationists , the earth was eroding before their eyes. Only a drastic cut in the numbers of livestock and a written permit tying each stockowner to a particular piece of land would restore the grasslands and avert disaster. Many Diné disagreed. Like Goldtooth, they maintained that the land remained healthy, that the problem was temporary drought. It was as though Goldtooth and Provinse saw completely different landscapes. Two sets of “experts,” one scientific and one native, offered diametrical descriptions of the land. Each reflected different values and understandings about the way nature works and the relationships of humans to nature.Conservationists employed scientific theories of equilibrium, succession, carrying capacity, and arroyo development to depict the Navajo range as seriously overgrazed. Diné, by contrast, drew on their understandings of cosmology, the mosaic of landscapes, and the inter­ relationships between livestock and land learned through generations of experience grazing the southern Colorado Plateau, and they concluded that they were witnessing nature’s cycle: rain would follow drought,and all would be well again.Neither the Diné nor the New Dealers fully grasped the complexities of nature. Each, no doubt, held pieces of the puzzle, but neither could see the value of the other’s. Today, the Navajo Nation is, if anything, in worse shape than it was in the 1930s. Conservationists managed to bring livestock numbers down to Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature | 131 the so-called carrying capacity, and yet they failed to stem the process of desertification. Grazing and periodic drought brought a spiraling decline in the ability of the soils to produce their historical forage, so that by the late 1950s, a decade of severe drought, range conditions crossed an ecological threshold, the point at...