Reviving Navajo identity, one sheep at a time

Irene Bennalley steps out into the fierce afternoon sunlight wearing jeans and a maroon sweater, her long gray hair knotted in a braid.

Brandishing a long white stick as her crook, she picks her way across her parched desert farm toward the sheep pen. Answering their bleats with firm instructions in Navajo, she shepherds them out onto the dry, dusty range.

She doesn’t know exactly how many Navajo-Churro sheep she has, but she ballparks it at around 100 head. It’s bad luck to keep exact counts of your livestock, her father taught her. Don’t boast about your animals, he would say, or they’ll start dropping.

Out here, ranchers like Ms. Bennalley can’t afford to lose animals. The winters are cold and hard, and the summers are hot and relentless. Water is scarce and feed is expensive. It’s the main reason she has come to love the breed, known colloquially as churros, that she’d grown up only hearing about in stories.

The Navajo, who refer to themselves as Diné, have long been a pastoral society. Sheep are prominent in their creation myths, and after Spanish colonists first brought the churro sheep to the Southwest, the hardy, adaptable breed became, over centuries, the heart of a self-sufficient economy and vibrant Diné culture.

But the days of sheep camps and flocks roaming the arid plains and valleys here are long gone. On two separate occasions the churro came close to full extermination. From over 1 million head at one time, by 1977 there were fewer than 500 left in the world.

Efforts have been gaining momentum in recent years to rebuild the breed and return flocks to the Navajo Nation. Decades of painstaking, sometimes dangerous, work by a handful of committed ranchers and animal scientists have helped restore the population to over 8,000. 

Now, people on the Navajo Nation are working to bring flocks back to the reservation, to try and fill the economic and cultural void left by their near extinction. 

“We’re back in a place of reevaluating how we live,” says Alta Piechowski, whose family has been involved in restoring the Navajo-Churro for decades.

“When you’re walking the land [with the sheep], there’s a different kind of healing,” she adds. “It heals your heart, and when it heals your heart you’re going to want other people’s hearts to be healed too.”

Ties to identity

The Navajo-Churro is a striking breed, almost perfectly designed for the dry, rugged Navajo Nation. 

An “unimproved” breed – meaning one that hasn’t been selectively bred for market – churros are long and lean, with thick, double-coated fleece (coarse outercoat and a fine undercoat) that comes in a range of natural colors. Rams and ewes can both grow horns – as many as four at once. They are resistant to most diseases, and have adapted over the centuries to thrive in the dry, low-forage climate of the Southwest.

For the Navajo people, the churro were something of a panacea. They provided a healthy and sustainable source of food and income; their many-colored fleece are ideal for weaving iconic Navajo blankets. And culturally, sheep have always been prominent in Navajo spiritual traditions. One of the six sacred mountains that bound the Navajo Nation, Dibé Nitsaa, translates to Big Sheep Mountain.

But for the best part of a century, Navajo-Churro have been hard to find on the reservation. 

The official term used by the U.S. government in the 1930s was “livestock reduction.” The Midwest was in the grips of the Dust Bowl, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, led by commissioner John Collier, concluded that too many livestock were causing land to erode and deteriorate.

The policy resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of churros, often on the reservation, and sometimes on the properties of their owners.

And it came after the Navajo people had spent over 70 years steadily rebuilding their churro herds. The U.S. Army killed swaths of livestock as part of a scorched-earth campaign against the Navajo in the 1860s. In 1868, part of a treaty that saw the Navajo people return to their sacred lands gave each family two sheep to start breeding herds again.

Nearly a century since the stock reduction, the collective memory is still raw. Ms. Bennalley speaks mournfully of what she calls “the John Collier days.” For a long time no one spoke of it at all.

“Some people never really got out of losing their sheep that way,” says Ms. Bennalley. “My family, my dad, nobody really talked about it, because it wasn’t something to be proud of.”

While there is evidence that Mr. Collier and others genuinely thought they were helping the tribe, many Navajo people see little difference in what the U.S. government did in the 1930s and what the U.S. Army did in the 1860s: attempted forced assimilation.

“That connection to the sheep is the connection to the land, which is the connection to the culture, which is the connection to the spirituality of the Diné people,” says Dr. Piechowski, a career psychologist for reservation schools.

“If you exterminate the sheep, you’re pretty much eliminating [those] connections,” she adds. “In that way, we were an easy target.”

Flocks for the future

The churro never disappeared from the reservation, but the few that remained stayed hidden in some of the reservation’s most remote corners – so remote that the man who first led efforts to bring the churro from the brink of extinction almost died trying. 

In the early 1970s, Lyle McNeal saw his first churro: some stunning four-horned rams on a ranch in the Salinas Valley. He convinced the rancher to give him six breeding ewes and two four-horn rams (one black and one white). Thus, the Navajo Sheep Project was born. Dr. McNeal and his students formed and tended a “nucleus flock” of churros in California, and beginning in 1977, he began visiting the Navajo Nation to search for more. He estimates there were just a few hundred remaining on a reservation the size of West Virginia. 

With the help of Navajo students, they would track down families with churros. To build trust, he would offer to buy one sheep, then bring back two after they’d bred – surviving perilous snowy mesas and flash floods to deliver them. Dr. McNeal now believes there are as many as 9,000 Navajo-Churro around the country.

Many of them are on the Navajo Nation itself, but they are still far from the economic and cultural presence they used to be. In a time when there are easier ways to make a living on the reservation than keeping livestock, it’s possible the churro will never be such a core feature of Navajo society again.

Ms. Bennalley grew up on her ranch with Dibé Nitsaa a fixture on the northern horizon. Her father taught her to raise and care for their animals, and to not cry when you lost one, because you always gain some soon after. (That was a difficult lesson for her at first.) 

And he taught her about the churro, after she saw her first one – a striking four-horn – on the side of a road. She got her own a few years later: a ram she leased from the Navajo Sheep Project, named Dibé Nitsaa, for the sacred mountain.

It relaxes her to be out here on the range with the sheep. Spinning and weaving with their wool calms her as well. But more than anything, she says, the churro have given her a livelihood.

“I don’t have to depend on the government or handouts or any kind of assistance,” she says.

“The sheep have helped me,” she adds. “The sheep is the one that’s providing for me.”

Dr. Piechowski says rebuilding the churro population can do that, and more, for the Navajo.

Her father grew up with churros, and now she is helping to establish the Hozho Center, a nonprofit organization that will be based on 2,000 acres of private land with the broad goal of revitalizing the traditional Diné economy and culture. The center will house a permanent flock of Navajo-Churros, to help repopulate the breed on the reservation and restore the culture around them.

Physical and psychological benefits could also pair the economic and cultural benefits, Dr. Piechowski believes. More churro meat in the Navajo diet could help tackle the high rates of diabetes and food insecurity on the reservation, for example. The churro can be “a healing tool,” she says.

The Hozho Center is something of a retirement project for her, after 35 years of working with schoolchildren. 

“We’ve been traumatized over and over. … You see it in the schools. You see young people carry a lot of trauma,” she says. “We don’t know how to live with each other anymore.”

“We can’t totally go back to how it was, but we can attempt to have more of a positive relationship with our Earth and a more positive relationship with other people,” she adds. “This is another beginning for us.”