Mary Mary 🌻🦔👵🏻👜🐔🐄🐂🪴☕️

The United States government decided in the 1930s that the Navajo had too many sheep, and when the buyers could not take the animals away fast enough, its agents shot them in the canyons and left them for the scavengers. The flocks had been built back from almost nothing. In the 1860s the army had marched the Navajo off their land at gunpoint, and when they were allowed home they started again. By the 1870s there were 15,000 sheep on the reservation. By the 1920s there were half a million, and within a few more years well over a million sheep and goats. The flock was mutton for the pot, wool for the loom and half the cash a Navajo family earned. It belonged to the extended family, in a society that traces its descent through the mother, and for a great many Navajo women it was the only income they had. In 1930 a government forester toured the reservation, saw erosion, and wrote that there were too many animals, goats above all. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt's new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, sent the head of the Soil Erosion Service out to look. He stayed less than a week. There was another worry too, a long way downstream: silt washing off Navajo land into the great new dam on the Colorado, the one they would later call Hoover. The verdict was that the herds had to be cut in half. It began as a buying scheme in 1933 and became compulsory in 1935. The goats went first, as the forester had recommended. Where the traders could not ship the animals east, the agents killed them where they stood. Whole flocks were shot in box canyons and left where they fell. People who were there tell of sheep driven over the edge of a mesa. Navajo who resisted were arrested. They gave it the name they still use: the Second Long Walk. The herders kept telling the officials that the land was in a drought and would come back with the rain. Nobody treated that as evidence. By 1946 the reservation's sheep were down from more than a million to under 450,000. The grazing permits that replaced the old family flocks went to the men, as heads of household, in a society where the flocks had always run through the women. People who had fed and clothed themselves for generations were pushed into wage work, and many onto welfare for the first time. The land did not recover either. The historians who have been through the programme agree it never stopped the decline it was built to stop. The range stayed degraded. The sheep stayed gone. In 2023 a paper from Ireland's Department of Agriculture modelled culling around 200,000 dairy cows to meet a climate target. The Navajo already have a name for that.