|
|
|
Gendered Injustice: Navajo Livestock Reduction in the New Deal Era
MARSHA WEISIGER
Navajo livestock reduction illuminates the gendered politics of conservation and the crucial contribution of women in resisting environmental injustice. In developing programs to halt soil erosion on the Navajo Reservation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Soil Conservation Service made matters worse, largely because they ignored the importance of women as livestock owners. Women's resistance helped bring an end to stock reduction and the conservation program.
|
|
|
|
IN 1936, LOCAL NEWSPAPERS in Winslow, Arizona, and Gallup, New Mexico, reported that the women were inciting a revolt on the Navajo Reservation. For three years, John Collier, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, had pressured Navajos to slash herds in an effort to conserve severely overgrazed rangelands. Now trouble was brewing, the Gallup Independent claimed, in the language of yellow journalism, "due to the dissatisfaction of the squaws over Collier's policies."1 Evidence of this simmering rebellion is admittedly meager. Very few Navajo women spoke English, and the government officials who created much of the historical record tended to ignore them. But the few clues that do surface here and there are suggestive.2 Consider the account of a community meeting near Kayenta, where perhaps 250 Diné (as they call themselves), nearly all of them men, had gathered. Before them stood Denehotso Hattie. Although almost blind from trachoma, she was the meeting's "unquestioned, dominating leader," and an "aggressive and vigorous speaker." Pointing her finger at E. R. Fryer, the newly appointed superintendent of the Navajo Service, Hattie denounced the government's plan for range management. She spoke so heatedly and rapidly that Fryer's interpreter, Howard Gorman, could not keep up, or perhaps Gorman was reluctant to translate her invective. Nonetheless, it was clear that the woman did not blame government officials alone. She scolded Diné men, too, pointing at them as they hung their heads.3 Diné councilmen and community leaders had acquiesced to the wholesale slaughter of stock and the confinement of flocks into grazing districts, bringing poverty and despair to their people. Hattie held them all accountable. |
1
|
|
This story illustrates the significant, but often overlooked, part that Diné women played in resisting and remembering the environmental injustice known as Navajo livestock reduction. The term "environmental justice" is usually reserved for the recent political movement to fight for poor and marginalized racial and ethnic communities that bear the burden of our society's toxic wastes and other environmental hazards. But noxious neighborhoods are not the only sites of environmental injustice. Between 1910 and 1933, the Blackfeet lost their right to hunt and fish in Glacier National Park, the Timbisha Shoshones became "squatters" on their own land when Death Valley became a national monument, and the Spanish land grant communities of northern New Mexico lost their communal lands to the Carson National Forest, all in the name of conservation. Today, the indigenous peoples of the American West and Nuevo Mexicanos define their ongoing struggles against the federal agencies that dispossessed them from their lands and livelihoods as battles for "environmental justice," a useful, if sometimes unsettling, way of viewing conservation conflicts. Significantly, women have been on the vanguard of the environmental justice movement in the American West and throughout the nation, as they were on the Navajo Reservation.4 The story of Navajo livestock reduction illuminates the gendered politics of conservation and the crucial contribution of women's resistance to the failure of the New Deal program to save the soil. |
. . . |
There are about 9717 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
