The course of Lyle McNeal’s life changed in 1972.

Then a professor in California Polytechnic State University’s Animal Science Department, McNeal led the college’s Boots and Spurs club on a weeklong trip to the state’s agricultural Salinas Valley. The group visited a ranch whose owners, a father and son duo, provided horses to Hollywood productions. A few sheep who were there to graze the land caught McNeal’s eye.

They turned out to be Navajo-Churro sheep. The descendants of animals brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1540s, Navajo-Churro sheep are of deep importance to the Navajo—and of great use to their keepers. Their fine wool comes in many colors and can be spun for use in weaving and other crafts, and they produce desirable meat and milk. They also make “dang good mothers,” in McNeal’s words, lambing twice a year and often yielding twins.

After the trip, McNeal began to look into the breed. He learned that they were sacred to the Navajo people—and he learned that fewer than 450 of the animals were left. “I said, ‘This sacred sheep is similar and almost equivalent to what the bison was,'” he recalls.

“I thought, ‘I can’t let this happen,'” recounts McNeal. “A few years later, after I got some land on campus to graze, it was in 1977, I asked the rancher up there in Salinas if he would be willing to either donate or sell some ewes and some rams to me to start a nucleus flock to start bringing them back.”

The rancher agreed, letting McNeal pick six breeding ewes and two rams. With the help of some students, McNeal spruced up an old poultry facility for the sheep on campus. “That’s kind of how it got started,” he says—that is, the Navajo Sheep Project, a decadeslong, ongoing effort to breed Navajo-Churro sheep and return them to the Navajo Nation.

Some estimates say that Navajo-Churros numbered in the millions at their height. How did this breed dwindle to just a few hundred in the space of a few decades?

The answer lies in a New Deal–era conservation program that purported to save the Navajo Nation from itself. Ordered by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the 1930s Livestock Reduction Program led to the removal of half the tribe’s sheep.

Proponents of the Livestock Reduction Program may have had good intentions, worrying that the future of Navajo prosperity was jeopardized by overgrazing and soil erosion and acting accordingly. But they nearly eradicated the sacred and economically critical Navajo-Churro and wiped out a large share of Navajo wealth. The work to recover from this cultural and economic damage continues—and so does the government’s interference.

First Sheep

Sheep and weaving are intertwined with Navajo—or Diné, in the Navajo language—culture, including the Navajo creation myth. Spider Woman, a revered figure in Navajo mythology, “gave Diné the gift of weaving,” wrote Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas in their 2020 book How to Weave a Navajo Rug and Other Lessons from Spider Woman. “Our Holy People instructed her to weave her pattern of the universe and teach the Diné to weave Hózhó (beauty) to bring harmony and beauty to their lives.”

“Diné oral history does not credit the Spanish with introducing sheep to the Southwest in the late 1500s, as scholars propose,” explained Joyce Begay-Foss in her essay “Spider Woman’s Gift: From a Weaver’s Perspective.” Their stories present the sheep as “a gift from Spider Woman, and from Changing Woman,” who “was responsible for forming and molding all the animals, including the first sheep.”

The Navajo-Churro is “the first domesticated sheep breed developed in North America,” according to The Livestock Conservancy, a nonprofit that preserves and promotes rare livestock breeds. Its ancestor, the Churra sheep, “was prized by the Spanish for its remarkable hardiness, adaptability and fecundity,” according to the Navajo-Churro Sheep Association (N-CSA). Churros were a fixture on Spanish ranches by the 17th century. As tribes in the Southwest acquired flocks, “herding and weaving [became] a major economic asset for the Navajo.”

“As European settlers came west and the demand arose for fine wool in the American textile industry, the churros were ‘graded up’ by crossing with Merino and English longwools,” the N-CSA notes. But some sheep flocks remained “in the remote Hispanic villages, among the isolated Navajos and on the West Coast.” They came to be known as Navajo-Churros.

“It’s almost like they’re part of your family,” says Alta Piechowski, chair of the Hozho Voices of Healing Center, which aims to promote environmental stewardship and self-sufficiency within the Diné community. “That’s how people saw it—these animals are part of our extended family here.”

The Navajos experienced two “holocausts of the sheep,” McNeal says.

The first came in the 1860s, when the U.S. government forced Navajo and Mescalero Apache Indians to relocate to what is now New Mexico. Thousands of Navajos endured the “Long Walk”—a roughly 350-mile journey to the inhospitable Bosque Redondo reservation. One in five Navajos died on the journey, according to the New Mexico History Museum, and the tribe suffered from disease and violence during its internment at Bosque Redondo. Mountain man Kit Carson, who the U.S. government tasked with carrying out the campaign, stole and killed livestock owned by the Navajos.

An 1868 treaty allowed the Navajo people to return to their ancestral homeland. In “a small but symbolic acknowledgment by the government that the Navajos had been severely mistreated through the forced march and incarceration,” wrote the historian William H. Wroth for New Mexico’s Office of the State Historian, federal officials allotted 15,000 sheep and goats to the tribe (along with payments to each member). This worked out to two sheep per person, according to the N-CSA.

Within six decades, the Navajos had expanded their flocks to roughly 575,000 sheep. But as the Dust Bowl rattled the Great Plains during the 1930s, federal officials began to worry that livestock could bring similar damage to the Navajo Nation. Federal reports spoke of “denuded land” and “environmental deterioration,” explains Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. “The topsoil had blown away because it was so arid and there were so many sheep that had eaten the roots of their grasses.”

The assessments ultimately led to a federal program that nearly eradicated the Navajo-Churro a second time.

‘Two Stories of Land’

It seemed clear to the federal government that the reservation’s soil was in trouble—something that could threaten the Navajos’ continued ability to live on the land. Another concern, says Denetdale, “was that the topsoil blowing off of the Navajo Reservation would clog the newly erecte

Read More

Article from Reason.com

Reason Magazine

The Reason Magazine website is a go-to destination for libertarians seeking cogent analysis, investigative reporting, and thought-provoking commentary. Championing the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets, the site offers a diverse range of articles, videos, and podcasts that challenge conventional wisdom and advocate for libertarian solutions. Whether you’re interested in politics, culture, or technology, Reason provides a unique lens that prioritizes liberty and rational discourse. It’s an essential resource for those who value critical thinking and nuanced debate in the pursuit of a freer society.