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Marsha L. Weisiger. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country. Foreword by William Cronon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. 418 pp. Cloth, $35.00.
Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger historicizes how the evolving policies implemented by the federal government impacted Navajo women in ways that remain underresearched until now. In telling detail, Weisiger describes the systematic destruction of 50 percent of Dine livestock during the Depression. During three successive waves of reduction, government resolve hardened, and organized round-ups turned into slaughter-fests as range riders killed thousands of stock too distant from off-reservation markets to ship by rail car. The shock and revulsion experienced by Dine reverberate today as elders and their descendants relate the horror of seeing sacred gifts from the Holy People destroyed. The chasms in communication between government officials and Dine leaders widened as mutually exclusive epistemologies shaped starkly different understandings of the People's relationship to Dine Bikéyah and their livestock.
Since the formation of the Navajo tribal council during the 1920s, women were essentially shut out of the political process. Given women's high status traditionally, as reflected in Navajo Creation narratives and matricentered social geography, women's absence from the political sphere created an environment inimical to their interests as stock owners, which backfired as New Dealers encountered increasing resistance to their "rational" policies mandating stock reduction to revitalize the overgrazed Navajo range. Thus, the tribal council was caught between a rock (the federal government) and a hard place as they faced the wrath of their female relatives when the latter were informed about forced reduction of their herds. Most studies of stock reduction have tacitly relied on essentialized portraits of the "traditional Navajo woman"...