Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

415 Pages·2012·4.072 MB·English

by  Marsha Weisiger

Weyerhaeuser environmental Books
William Cronon, editor
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with
natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast
new light on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the
ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the
ways that different cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our
sense of the world around us. A complete listing of the books in the series
appears at the end of this book.
Marsha Weisiger’s work on Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
has benefited from the support and intellectual community of the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist
University.
Dreaming of Sheep
marsha Weisiger
university of Washington Press
in Navajo Country
foreWord By William Cronon
seattle and london
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is published with the assistance
of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment,
established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of
the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
Additional support was received from the William P. Clements Center
for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
© 2009 by the University of Washington Press
First paperback edition, 2011
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Pamela Canell
Maps by Barry Levely
15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
University of Washington Press
P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A.
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weisiger, Marsha.
Dreaming of sheep in Navajo country / Marsha Weisiger. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Weyerhaeuser environmental books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99141-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Navajo Indians—Land tenure.
2. Navajo Indians—Domestic animals.
3. Land use—Navajo Indian Reservation—History.
4. Navajo Indian Reservation—History. I. Title.
e99.n3w437 2009 979.1004'9726—dc22 2008050290
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least
50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
∞
Chapter 5 appeared in somewhat different form in Journal of the Southwest 46
(2004): 253–82. © 2004 by the Arizona Board of Regents
Chapter 9 appeared in somewhat different form in Western Historical Quarterly 38
(2007): 431–49. © 2007 by Western History Association
To Tim
When I go to sleep I dream about herding the sheep. I know as I get
older I’ll do what others have done. I’ll start imagining all of that in
my mind even during the day. People do that when they get real old.
They talk about the sheep day and night, all the time. It’s like they
forget everything else except the sheep. That’s because that’s all we
were raised with, that’s all we did—take care of the sheep.
—’Asdzą´ą´ Tsosie (Slim Woman) (quoted in Mitchell 2001)

Contents
foreWord • Sheep Are Good to Think With, by William Cronon ix
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Prologue • A View from Sheep Springs 3
Part 1 • fault lines 15
1 • Counting Sheep 17
2 • Range Wars 31
Part 2 • BedroCk 61
3 • With Our Sheep We Were Created 63
4 • A Woman’s Place 79
Part 3 • terra firma 103
5 • Herding Sheep 105
6 • Hoofed Locusts 128
vii
Part 4 • erosion 153
7 • Mourning Livestock 155
8 • Drawing Lines on a Map 181
9 • Making Memories 202
ePilogue • A View from the Defiance Plateau 228
Notes 245
Glossary 337
Plants 339
Bibliography 341
Index 377
foreWord
Sheep Are Good to Think With
By William Cronon
I
n 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced
the notion that all manner of plants, animals, objects, and things are
“bonnes à penser” (good to think with). This phrase has since become
among the most suggestive and celebrated ideas in modern social science.
Its core insight is that human beings interact with the world around them,
not as a vast collection of individual material objects but instead as a com-
plex, multilayered, endlessly rich web of symbolic meanings that exist
only in relationship with each other. For us, a rock is never just a rock, a
tree a tree, a cow a cow. Instead, we label these things with words whose
denotations and connotations of similarity and difference become the raw
materials from which we create the metaphors and narratives we use to
construct our identities and cultures—and thereby navigate our lives. And
because different people in different times and places have thought so dif-
ferently about things like rocks or trees or cows, environmental histories
of these things must also be cultural histories of the changing ideas and
relationships human beings have woven around them.
In her brilliant new book Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country, Marsha
Weisiger takes a notorious episode in twentieth-century American Indian
history and demonstrates the value of using sheep to rethink its many
meanings. The broad outlines of the story are familiar enough. In the
iX