Sheep Is Life

Navajo Nation, Arizona · By Gary Paul Nabhan

When one first sees a flock of Navajo Churro sheep moving across the sage-covered flats of Navajo Nation lands, it is easy to imagine that they have been here, adapting to this land, since time immemorial. Their colors – buffs, browns, silvery-blues, cream, and black – seem to reflect the sky and the geological strata on the cliffs above them. They are the first and oldest continuously produced breed of sheep in North America. The ones on the Colorado Plateau today are probably descendants of those brought into northern New Mexico by the Oٌate entrada in 1598, after their ancestors had adapted for millennia to the arid conditions in Spain, northern Africa, and the Middle East.

The progeny of the original herd of Churros brought up from New Mexico survived the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, after which many Puebloan families moved into Navajo communities on the plateau; the Puebloans, who had learned Hispanic weaving practices, then passed those practices along to the Navajo. By 1700, both sheepherding and weaving had already been widely adopted by Native Americans from the Rio Grande to the Little Colorado.

It is no wonder, then, that some Navajo believe that sheep have always been part oftheir culture, and assumed that their own flocks were somehow derived from the desert bighorn that persist in the arid canyons around them. Some Navajo recount that wool was a gift from the Holy People. In one version of the Navajo Creation story, weaving was first learned by Spider Man, who then taught Spider Woman, who then taught Changing Woman and the rest of the Navajo. As medicine man James Peshlakai was admonished by his grandmother to remember, “The blood running through the sheep that you’re herding is the same that ran through the veins of your great-grandfather’s sheep. Don’t ever forget their energy. They will feed you, they will clothe you, and your sheep corral will be your bank account.”

Those are the values that two small but courageous groups are reinstilling in Navajo youth in dozens of communities across the largest reservation in the United States. One of the groups is called Diné Be’iina (Navajo for “sheep is life”), founded in 1991 by the Begay family and their friends in the Ganado area. Diné Be’iina (DBI) has been widely successful in attracting an allegiance to its Sheep Is Life festivals for many years running. The other group, called Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, was founded in 1998 and is a project of the international organization Cultural Survival, Inc.

Working with Utah State University’s Navajo Sheep Project and with a larger coalition of Navajo, Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo sheep producers called the Navajo-Churro Sheep Association, DBI and the Black Mesa Weavers have helped revive and improve the quality of this endangered livestock breed over the last decade. The breed had dwindled to a few hundred pure-bred individuals before Dr. Lyle McNeal of Utah State began a breeding program to restore the Churros to the vitality they had prior to the federal livestock reduction program of the 1930s. At that time, hundreds of Navajo sheep flocks were destroyed in an attempt to reverse desertification.

Fortunately, the Churros had enough unique qualities – long staple wool; tender meat and rich milk; and resistance to helminthic parasites, liver flukes, and ovine foot rot – that both the Navajo and their Hispanic neighbors in the Four Corners saw reason to work with McNeal. By some accounts, the Churros have now rebounded to a population of 3,000 to 5,000; many, however, are no longer the original purebred strain but crosses between Churros and Merinos or Rambouillets. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy continues to list the Navajo-Churro as a Conservation Priority Livestock Breed.

But the genetic restoration of this sheep breed is only part of the story. Working with Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land and the Institute for Integrated Rural Development at Diné College, DBI has fostered a revival of orally transmitted sheep cultural lore and traditional practices. The Navajo are relearning traditional songs about sheep, ways of building wooden corrals and lambing pens, and uses of traditional plant dyes to color their wool. As former DBI project director Malcolm Benally explains, Navajo rugs are not merely decorative; they embody many teachings critical to the cultural survival of his people: “There is a story to a Navajo rug,” he says. “It’s not a game. There are teachings in the weavings.”

Colleen Biakeddy, field coordinator of Black Mesa Weavers, agrees with Malcolm wholeheartedly that there is something unique about the relationship among the Navajo, their original breed of sheep, and their weaving traditions. “We need to get this wool back into the hands of more Navajo weavers,” she says, “for the traditional part it has always played in our lives. It was our dress. It was our ceremonial sashes. The knowledge is still there on how to make these things, but we’re teetering on the brink of losing this knowledge.”

The project director for DBI, world-renowned weaver Roy Kady, feels that this knowledge will persist among his people only if the younger generation is enriched with it from the very start. He takes DBI’s “Spinoff” programs into elementary schools and even into Head Start programs, and has taught children as young as ten months of age to sit before a loom and weave.

For their parts, Colleen and Malcolm, both from the Hardrock Chapter on Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona, know that sustaining this cultural tradition also means moving back to rotational grazing practices to sustain the land itself. Colleen’s vision is that healthy land fosters healthy communities, and vice versa. “We look for ways to keep Churro sheep nutritionally sound and healthy, and one way to do that is rotating their grazing through shrubs, grasses, and herbs,” she says. “Navajos did rotational grazing a long time ago, even granting permission to let others graze across their own traditional territories to help their neighbors. Then, fifteen to twenty years ago, many herders walked away from that tradition, so now we have to bring it back.”

Malcolm’s personal vision of how to stimulate the return to sustainable grazing practices is by embedding the “Sheep Is Life” philosophy into a new initiative on Navajo Nation lands. The initiative, set in place by the tribal council’s passage of the Local Governance Act, calls for each chapter house to devise a land use plan for common lands in its area.

“We need to make sure that our cultural teachings about sheep inform those plans,” Malcolm suggests. In his view, the goal is not only to learn the land stewardship practices of elderly sheepherders who were excellent stewards of the land, but also to learn from the sheep. “I’ve learned a lot from the sheep themselves,” Malcolm says, chuckling. “Every time I think I’ve learned everything about sheep, they teach me.”

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.