‘We can’t let these sheep go’

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.

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.

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 erected Boulder Dam,” today called the Hoover Dam.

In 1930, William Zeh, a forester with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was tasked with assessing the ecological damage on Navajo land. He “concluded that erosion was spreading like a cancer across the reservation,” wrote University of Oregon environmental historian Marsha Weisiger in her 2012 paper “Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature.” The reservation—which spanned more than 27,000 square miles by 1934, roughly the same size as West Virginia—was home to 1.3 million sheep and goats. Zeh argued that this “exceeded the range’s carrying capacity by a factor of two or three,” Weisiger added.

Three years later, Collier sent Hugh Hammond Bennett, head of the newly created Soil Erosion Service, to survey erosion on Navajo land. “Bennett’s study consisted of a whirlwind tour lasting less than a week, but everywhere he looked, he saw destruction,” wrote Weisiger. Officials didn’t grasp what the land was like before the Navajo and their livestock occupied it, relying instead “on assumptions about the land’s historical condition that they barely acknowledged and never scrutinized.”

Different parties agreed that the land showed signs of degradation, but they disagreed on the cause. “Government officials blamed Navajo herding practices for the decreased range capacity, while many Navajo herders noted that they were experiencing a temporary drought,” wrote the anthropologist Lawrence A. Kuznar in his 1997 book Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology. “This cause, independent of Navajo grazing practice, was ignored by conservationists in 1928.”

Weisiger blamed the accelerated erosion on a combination of overgrazing and climate change in another paper, published in 2007 in Western Historical Quarterly. Navajos called for a variety of solutions—some administrative, some ecological, some spiritual. What they got instead was a brutal top-down effort that neglected input from the people most directly impacted. Setting aside any questions about how accurate the federal government’s early 1930s assessments were, this was a recipe for disaster.

“It’s always said it was because of overgrazing, but that’s the excuse that was made to assimilate people and to take the economic stability that the sheep and the culture of sheep provided for the Diné people,” argues Piechowski.

A big part of what went wrong was “the disjuncture between these two stories of land, native and scientific,” wrote Weisiger. “Federal authorities alone, however, had the plenary power to prescribe their view of nature. They largely ignored or even dismissed the Navajos’ understandings of the natural world and their local knowledge of the land.”

Collier agreed that the Navajo land could not sustain the number of livestock living there. He approved what came to be known as the Navajo Livestock Reduction—a program that would cut the number of livestock on the reservation in half. (In reality, Weisiger argued, reduction “was already well under way” by the time “the first comprehensive studies of the reservation began to roll off the typewriters.”)

At first the reduction was voluntary. BIA agents and local traders used federal funds to buy more than 86,500 sheep from the Navajo. “They came in and were paying them terrible prices to sell them,” McNeal says.

But the initial phase of the reduction did not go far enough in the feds’ eyes. The culling soon became mandatory, often carried out by force.

Federal agents resorted to cruel methods to eliminate livestock. “In one notorious incident,” wrote Weisiger in her 2007 paper, a BIA stockman “purchased 3,500 head of goats and sheep around Navajo Mountain, an utterly remote area on the extreme northwestern edge of the reservation.” The stockman soon realized that the animals would die on the journey back to a passable road. “So he herded them into a box canyon, ordered them shot en masse, and left them to the coyotes, buzzards, and crows.” An unsubstantiated story from the era spoke of federal agents “burning goats alive.”

Once federal agents had run out of sheep to take in easily accessible parts of the reservation, “where they could ship the sheep back east for butchering,” adds McNeal, “they just started shooting them, killing them on sight, a lot of times in box canyons. Sometimes they’d run the sheep over the cliff of a mesa and just kill them that way.”

“It was terrible,” he recalls. “I remember in the early years, seeing piles of those sheep bones—skeletons—on the reservation where this had taken place.”

“You see it in the archives, you see it in the oral histories…people had so much sorrow,” Denetdale says. Some acted on that grief in drastic ways. While conducting interviews for a museum exhibition on the livestock reduction, Denetdale and her co-curator met a family in the northern part of the Navajo Nation, “where there was the most visible physical resistance.” The family’s ancestors “physically kidnapped” the district supervisor, his wife, and a range rider after the district supervisor denied them “a sheep permit for one animal that they really loved and cherished.”

The Navajo-Churro was a unique target. “Navajo people valued Churro for their wool and for their meat qualities,” notes Denetdale, but that breed was supplanted as outsiders “introduced different kinds of sheep that range management specialists thought [were] more conducive to producing sheep for an outside market.”

When all was said and done, Collier’s stock reduction robbed Navajo families of an enormous number of animals and a huge amount of their wealth. The reservation’s prereduction sheep population of over a million sheep declined to under 450,000 by 1946. A tiny share of those remaining were Navajo-Churros.

From the beginning, defenders of the livestock reduction program argued that it was intended to stave off ecological devastation on Navajo land. Yet though officials removed as many animals as they had hoped to take, the land continued to suffer.

Conservationists “failed to stem the process of desertification” on Navajo land, where “grazing and periodic drought brought a spiraling decline in the ability of the soils to produce their historical forage,” argued Weisiger in 2012. “The result has been a chronically degraded range.”

This came at a huge cost to Navajo wealth. Though “stock reduction succeeded in pushing down the number of sheep on the reservation,” wrote American University law professor Ezra Rosser in a 2019 article for the Connecticut Law Review, “it did so by undercutting tribal economic independence and the Diné way of life.” When he tried to get buy-in for the reduction program from the Navajo Nation Council, Collier promised “that new employment opportunities would fill the economic holes created by stock reduction,” Rosser continued. “Many Diné did find jobs working for New Deal government programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Soil Conservation Corps. But the promised jobs did not fully offset stock reduction losses, nor did such jobs continue in the post-war period.”

“This is the introduction of wage-work because of the loss of sheep,” adds Denetdale. “When you’ve destroyed people’s way of life that’s self-sustaining and you’re introducing a new system of life, you’re attempting to destroy systems that have been a part of [them] for generations.”

“Collier’s hope was that stock reduction would protect Diné self-sufficiency by preventing overgrazing from ruining the range,” argued Rosser. “Ironically, stock reduction forced the Diné into dependency.” It robbed many Navajos of their livelihood, pushing them onto welfare for the first time. “High poverty rates and welfare dependency cannot be attributed entirely or even primarily to stock reduction,” he cautioned, “but stock reduction had a devastating impact on tribal agency and independence.”

One of the most contentious legacies of the livestock reduction era is the Navajo Nation’s sheep permit system. “The sheep permits today—sheep permits that were issued in 1947 [and came] out of livestock reduction—those are the pieces of paper that [legitimize] your entitlement to land,” says Denetdale.

The U.S. secretary of the interior has the authority “to protect Indian tribal lands against waste,” according to federal law. That includes working to adjust “livestock numbers to the carrying capacity of the range in such a manner that the livestock economy of the Navajo Tribe will be preserved.” In practice, “livestock grazing on the Navajo Nation requires an individual to possess a valid grazing permit issued by the BIA based on a recommendation from the Navajo Nation District Grazing Committees,” according to Indian Country Grassroots Support, a nonprofit focused on capacity building in the Navajo Nation.

The grazing permit system is based on several misunderstandings about Navajo practices, says Denetdale. Before the permits came along, herds might have had “800 sheep, 1,000 sheep,” she explains. “But not one person owned them. It was part of the extended family’s holdings.” The permits, by contrast, “get held by one person and there’s an assumption of a nuclear family.” And they were “initially assigned primarily to [male] heads of household,” even though “we’re a matrilineal society.”

“For many Diné families, a grazing permit is their most prized, most defining, and most contentious possession,” wrote Rosser. Denetdale recalls how her sister asked what they should do about their mother’s sheep permit, offering to split it among the five siblings. “I said, ‘No, it doesn’t make any sense to fractionize it. It does no one good,'” Denetdale says. They resolved the situation amicably, but “there’s so many people, families who are fighting over a lot of bitterness and jealousy and hurt over these sheep permits.”

“Council delegates and leaders don’t dare touch them or talk about this because it’s assured they will be voted out of office immediately,” she continues. “It’s really difficult just to even begin to broach to talk about the absolute critical need to change land-use laws and policies on the Navajo Nation.”

In 2023, the Los Angeles Times reported that “thousands of people have been waiting for years for grazing permits. Meanwhile, others have permits they don’t use or trespass on land they don’t have the right to graze on.” Citing Leo Watchman, director of the Navajo Nation Department of Agriculture, the newspaper noted that “grazing management is the worst it’s ever been on the reservation,” thanks in part to “bureaucratic inconsistencies between the federal government and Navajo jurisdictions and holdups on environmental studies that determine how many animals can be kept on any given area of land.”

Given what the breed—and the Navajo people—have gone through, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Navajo-Churros were near extinction when McNeal first encountered them in 1972. As their numbers dwindled, so did the number of people maintaining flocks. “We don’t have our sheep culture as it was in the past anymore,” says Piechowski. “Today, you see small flocks of sheep here and there,” but people who keep Churros do so more for personal use. It’s rare to see the big flocks of days past.

That raises the question: How do Navajo-Churros fit into modern life?

It’s in large part thanks to McNeal’s work that people can consider that question at all. Starting in the late ’70s, he would travel to the reservation with students to search for remnants of the Navajo-Churro population. “Many of those trips, we didn’t find sheep. But some we did,” he recalls. “I promised [the Navajo] that I would bring sheep back to them. I said, ‘They’re not my sheep. These are your sheep.'”

“We can’t let these sheep go,” he says.

McNeal had raised enough sheep by 1982 that he could start bringing them to the reservation without hurting the nucleus flock. He remembers the first one he returned to the Navajo Nation—a four-horned black ram—during a trip to Window Rock, the reservation’s capital. So many people showed up to see it, he says.

“When I’d deliver sheep every year…it’s the grandmothers—and the mothers sometimes—but the grandmothers [were] so excited to see these,” McNeal says. “Sometimes they would come up to them when I was getting gas at a trading post or something and they’d say, ‘These are the real sheep!'”

These days, the N-CSA records 3,000 Navajo-Churros across the country; thousands more are unregistered. The Livestock Conservancy still designates the breed as “critical” on its conservation priority list. But efforts to promote and produce Navajo-Churros, many of them led and funded by passionate individuals, have brought the breed back from the brink and introduced it to younger generations of farmers, hand-spinners, weavers, and other fiber artists. The N-CSA lists breeders throughout the Southwest, but also in states as far-flung as Wisconsin, Washington, and Indiana.

For Piechowski, Navajo-Churros are an important part of her nonprofit, the Hozho Voices of Healing Center. “There’s just been a disruption that we’ll never recover from in the long term unless there’s a specific focus that this is what we’re going to do,” she says. “It’s never going to be the same,” but “we can still do a little bit of what we lost.”

“When you interact with the animals and care for them, you have to have a humbleness about you. You have to slow down,” she adds. “It’s a relearning. But we used to know, so in that way, it’s a regeneration of culture and understanding and healing.”