Reconnecting the People and the Forest

Cameron, Arizona · By Peter Friederici and Roberto Nutlouis

From most of the western Navajo Nation, in north-central Arizona, the diamond summits of the San Francisco Peaks are landmarks on the horizon. To the Diné, as the Navajo call themselves, the Peaks are one of the four sacred mountains that demarcate their traditional homeland. They’re topped with snow for much of the year, and cloaked with a dark green forest.

During recent years of drought the snow has been off-kilter: it’s come late and melted early. Many of the forests around the mountain, too, are out of balance. Once-open ponderosa pine forests have become dense with flammable vegetation due to more than a century of livestock grazing and fire suppression. This combination has worked together to eliminate the frequent but light ground fires that once kept the forests sunny and spacious. Now, when fire comes, it quickly climbs into the forest canopy and can char tens of thousands of acres. Since 1996 several large, devastating fires have sent towering plumes of smoke into the sky south of the small town of Cameron, about an hour north of Flagstaff.

In response to these ecological changes, the U.S. Forest Service and other land managers have launched an ambitious program of thinning the forests and reintroducing ground fires. But a major snag concerns the question of what to do with the trees that are cut, the vast majority of which are too small for conventional lumber mills.

In Cameron, one elegant solution to that problem is being shaped – a solution that is simultaneously addressing a grave need for affordable housing on the sprawling Navajo Nation. The tribal government recently estimated that 22,000 new housing units are needed on the reservation to replace flimsy mobile homes or old, decaying hogans – the round or eight-sided homes traditional to the Diné.

Why not, Mae Franklin mused a few years ago, use the small-diameter ponderosa pine logs from forest thinning projects to build modern, affordable hogans? Mae, who grew up in the Cameron area, works as a tribal liaison for the Forest Service and National Park Service. In 1999, she became one of the founders of Indigenous Community Enterprises (ICE), a nonprofit group whose mission is to work directly with indigenous communities to develop local economies that respect and incorporate traditional culture. One of ICE’s first undertakings has been the “Hogan Project,” which makes use of the abundant small-diameter timber to meet the housing needs of reservation residents. ICE worked with the Cameron community to develop a manufacturing plant that utilizes pine timber for hogan construction. The plant, SouthWest Tradition Log Homes, is a model of effective collaboration, as shares in the business are owned by ICE, the Navajo Nation, the Cameron Chapter, the plant’s managing partners, and plant employees.

ICE continues to operate as a nonprofit with Mae on its board of directors. It finds affordable-housing funding for hogan construction, especially for tribal elders living in substandard housing. ICE conducts financial literacy workshops that allow Navajo youth to learn basic financial skills and gain economic self-sufficiency through such new tools as mortgages on reservation land.

ICE also coordinates “community build” projects, in which high school students work on hogan projects to learn construction skills. Recently, for example, local youths helped build a hogan for Grandma Anna Cly, who had lived in the same hogan in southern Utah’s Monument Valley for forty-five years. The students learned everything from the ground up – from taking inventory of building materials to reading blueprints, preparing the land, framing, and putting up the walls. They watched how the plumbing and electrical work were done. Later, they were able to brief congressional offices on their participation.

SouthWest Tradition Log Homes now offers kits for octagonal hogans and more conventional log homes to buyers both on and off the reservation. The plant is run by Ron Taylor, who has spent more than twenty-five years working with log homes in the United States and Germany. Ron developed proprietary equipment that allows the company to use eight-inch-diameter pine logs for construction. That is the exact material that has the least value in traditional processing, he points out. “The smaller stuff can be used to construct pallets, and the larger material has value for dimensional lumber. We’re taking the stuff in the middle that no one else really wants, and we’re trying to make a value-added product out of it.”

First the logs are milled perfectly round, like giant dowels, then dried in the dry desert air for up to eighteen months. They then receive a rounded, lengthwise “Swedish Cope” cut that allows one log to be laid atop another; finally, they are cut to length and saddle-notched to fit together. Leftover wood is cut for firewood, which is also in great demand on the reservation. It’s a highly efficient process that produces little sawdust; most producers of log homes, in contrast, first square off round logs, then round them again, which wastes a great deal of wood.

The modular construction allows these hogans to be built quickly, which helps keep costs down – in fact, they are much cheaper than most log houses, and about the same cost as frame houses of equivalent size. The walls can be put up in as little as a day. But they’ll last a long, long time. As Ron says, “There’s a lot of warmth in log homes. And if your great-great-grandchildren come by, these structures will still be there. In that time a conventional home would have been replaced a few times, and a mobile home ten or twelve times. The value is there.”

Every month the plant processes enough logs to build between five and eight hogans or cabins. But this rate of production is only a beginning. Ron hopes in a few years to be processing enough logs to build 175 homes a year, which he says might offer up to 145 jobs on the reservation, where jobs that pay well are scarce.

It’s a compelling vision that connects the well-being of the Diné with that of the surrounding forests and that connects the past and the future. For centuries, native people here have relied on the region’s forests and woodlands for firewood, fence posts, corrals, construction materials, plant foods and herbal medicines, and more. Converting the forest’s excess into modern shelter is a powerful way of reaffirming the close link between a people and their place.

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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.