Diné Be’iina and the Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land
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 Oñate 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 of
their
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."
___________________
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.
Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land
Carol Snyder Halberstadt
P.O. Box 543, Newton, MA 02456
carol@migrations.com
http://www.migrations.com/
Regions:
ArizonaOrganization type:
Business - small (<20 employees)


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