Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of thousands of sheep; goats; and horses were killed -- was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead; the policy was a disaster; resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos -- especially women; the primary owners and tenders of the animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands.Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals; hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers; tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century; grazing lands were showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened; weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses; until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals.Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Navajos; and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts; she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story; she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history.Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today.
#620833 in Books 2003-09-01Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 8.50 x .45 x 5.51l; .51 #File Name: 0295983027192 pages
Review
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A Refreshing Addition to Native History of WashingtonBy Dusty J; SummitChristopher Miller begins his book Prophetic Worlds by claiming; "Flagrant disregard for the complexities of human motivation has led us to credit our ancestors with godlike omniscience. This; in turn; has forced us to invent devious plots or to question the moral fiber of these people in order to explain why they did not act on their all-encompassing knowledge and behave as we think they should have." (p. 2) Such a statement sums up Miller's argument of his short book. He argues that models of western expansion based on the characters of the "ethnocentric settler" and the "noble and graceful Indian" are of no use to us anymore; being that the frontier is long since closed and all we have left is our post-modern conscience trying to explain what happened in a respectful way.Miller is one of a new order of historians who are combining multiple fields of study to better understand our heritage. This multi-facetted view is used to explain ethnohistory. Ethnohistory is actually a compellation of history and anthropology that subscribes to methods of a literacist; an artist; an oral historian; and a scholar of mythology. Miller has adopted a form of ethnohistory to reinvigorate the story of the native-white contact of the eighteenth; nineteenth; and early twentieth centuries.Miller has two objectives in his book. First; he wishes to better explain the importance of pre-existing conditions of the native landscape. Miller uncovers many interesting details of the pre-settler native society. He explains the "task group system" (a specialized labor system of sorts) and how it bound natives groups together through an economic system that seems to have pre-dated many tribal systems or systems of an Indian "nation" (in my experience; this idea is unique to this book). He explains how plagues swept through the Indian society leaving them weak; dissolved in numbers; and without a functional "task group system." This population and energy crisis caused native groups to support warrior-chiefs rather than diplomatic chiefs; and thus grew a class of warring and raiding tribes - the image that would be known by the white settlers.Miller's second objective is to elevate the role of prophecy; oral tradition; and ideologies of both the native groups and the white settlers. Miller claims that "myths and folk stories can no longer be passed off as quaint stories dreamed up by the childlike imaginations of "primitives."" (p. 3) Miller highlights a particular prophecy told by a Columbia plateau people in response to a volcanic eruption in the west. There would arrive a new group of people; the prophecy went; who would bring a message and a book that would cause the native world to fall to pieces. Curious - It being that the native world had already began to fall to pieces (through plague and war) it is no surprise that the arrival Lewis and Clark (and the groups to follow) were both feared because of the prophecy and revered because of the hope that they would bring a new and better way of life. The whites had their own set of prophecies which were articulated by Jeffersonian progressivism and Judeo-Christian ideologies of man's role as a marshal of morals and God's will. Miller echoes the view of Carolyn Merchant; renowned historian of feminism and environmental perceptions. Merchant; like Miller in a way; argued that the western ideas born of the scientific revolution endowed the white man to believing he was to improve and conquer the wild lands of the west. This was personified through manifest destiny. The stage was set; a native society who was willing to accept the new way of life; the settlers who were prepared to tame the land and its' indigenous population (this of course was not always the case - something the 7th Calvary would learn many years later).My only complaint of Prophetic Worlds is the author's reliance on "self-fulfilling prophecies" as historical characters and canals in which history had no choice but to follow. As historians; we are charged with explaining and documenting the past transgressions and human dramas and are not ourselves - "prophets." Labeling a fall or rise of a society or individual as a "self-fulfilled prophecy" coming to fruition is nearly as ambiguous a claim as the prophecies themselves and are too vague to ultimately explain anything. This aside; Prophetic Worlds is a refreshing new look at the drama of whites and natives in the west and would serve any historian or anthropologist looking for new ways to tackle catastrophic societal collisions.
