Stories Are Law
Introduction
In 2021, five Diné community land users recounted their land use stories to our non-Diné law student intern, Tanner Hancock from American University Law School, who had previously been an editor with an Appalachia region community newspaper. Below are their stories as told to Tanner.
Naschitti
The sight of massive herds of livestock numbering in the hundreds was once common in the valley.
The Chuska Mountains, a forested, ecologically diverse mountain range straddled between Arizona and New Mexico, is today home to a vital yet dwindling Diné agricultural tradition in the form of Navajo ranching. To the east of those mountains, near the Naschitti Chapter of the Navajo Nation, there lies a sparsely populated valley in New Mexico’s northwestern corner, home mostly to native wildlife, grazing livestock, and ranchers like Navajo Elder Gloria Dennison who claim the valley as home.
Over Dennison’s 69 years of life, her homestead in the valley has always played a central role in how she perceives her identity as a Diné. Though Dennison has shared the homestead at varying times with parents, a husband, and two children and grandchildren, her husband and parents have since passed and her children moved away, leaving Dennison mostly alone on the homestead save for the company of her neighboring brother and the flock of sheep under her care.
“There is a difference when you get attached to the land. You can see the earth, you can see the dirt, you could see the ground,” says Dennison of her relationship with her homestead. Though she describes herself as a homemaker, Dennison formerly worked for the Navajo Nation Tribal Government for 36 years, both as an election administrator as well as a representative. In travelling across the Navajo Nation and across the country at large, Dennison’s connection with her homestead is one which, as she describes it, carries with her no matter where she goes.
“I wanted to see the ground, the dirt, and I wanted to see from home where all the highest peaks of the mountain were,” said Dennison of her past travels and the connection she feels with the valley upon returning home. “Travelling back, I wanted to get back to the reservation here and get back to my homestead where I’m comfortable. That’s how I felt. That’s how attached I am to the land.”
That land, though beautiful, is not without hardship. Persistent droughts affecting much of the Western United States have not spared ranchers in the Navajo Nation, making the raising of livestock increasingly difficult and more expensive as resources become scarcer. Vandalism of the area’s water and public resources is a persistent and costly issue. To escape the heat, Dennison must move herself and her flock into the neighboring mountains, a multi hour hike that offers some relief from the elements. To buy food or other resources, Naschitti area ranchers and sheep herders like Dennison must travel 40 miles south to the nearest market and nearly double that distance to the north. The beauty of the land does not always reflect its hardships, yet Dennison’s connection with her homestead is one which persists regardless.
“On the reservation here, it may be a struggle, but it’s ok so long as you can make a living,” says Gloria of her life on Navajo land. “I think that’s the reason why I enjoy being here.”
In addition to dealing with hardships like drought and heat common in the New Mexico desert, as a sheepherder on Navajo Land, Gloria must also manage the difficulties often inherent to tribal land use management.
As a rancher living on Navajo land, Dennison is subject to permit regulation by the Navajo Tribal Government.
Because no large-scale conservation plan exists to govern farmers and ranchers across the Navajo Nation, each individual rancher must necessarily create their own, a substantial burden for someone like Dennison with no background in ecology or conservation.
“Even though the government states that you have to have such a thing [a conservation plan], we don’t have [any] assistance anywhere to look for,” says Dennison of the tribal government’s lack of guidance in managing the issue of overgrazing amongst rancher permittees.
“They [The Navajo Government] keep telling us we need to have a conservation plan. To some extent it can work. It’s doable, but it’s just an open range. You have to look at other ranchers to see whether they’re going to be in compliance with what you’re trying to do.”
The history of stock reduction and federal management of Navajo ranchers to protect against overgrazing has a troubled history dating back to the 1930’s, yet for ranchers in the valley like Dennison, the current reality of such restrictions exists very much as a present-day burden.
“Eventually, when they started developing the laws and policies after the Long Walk, things changed. I know my parents used to talk about things like that before they left.” From her youth, Dennison says the sight of massive herds of livestock numbering in the hundreds was common in the valley. Though she recognizes that the effects overgrazing is serious, she, like many ranchers, is often left confused and misled by the way in which the land is managed from above.
“They kind of throw that back on us and say ‘it’s you that has to deal with your overgrazing …’ Maybe the land has really deteriorated … and now we’re dealing with that. But we’re trying to revitalize somehow to conserve some of the things that are out there.”
Ultimately for Dennison, the restrictions, whether on the size of her herd or the use of her land, represent more than just an inconvenience, but rather a fundamental intrusion on a traditional Navajo way of life.
“We’re comfortable out there, we can extend ourselves to do certain things, but now it’s limited. Limited to do what we have to do because of some of the restrictions that they put onto the land.”
As a Diné, the issues surrounding the use of Dennison’s land strike not only to her occupation, but to her cultural identity. As ranchers and livestock owners within the Navajo Nation seek out resolution to the issues surrounding their livelihoods, the answers they seek will ultimately decide more than just how they work, but how whether they can live in a manner consistent with their cultural identity.
“From the beginning, if you are a Navajo, if you are a Diné, land is not just a place for us, it defines us,” says Dennison. “It kind of speaks to us as we are Diné.”
Chi Chil Tah
Navajo elders, some born in 1880’s, advocate for traditional land use separate from an economic incentive.
“Our umbilical cords are tied here to the land.”
Beneath the dirt of her family home in Chi Chil Tah Chapter, New Mexico, the umbilical cords of Anna Rondon’s children nestled beneath the ground, her daughter’s near the cornfield, her son’s by the corral. The Navajo practice of placenta and umbilical cord burial, a ceremony dating back hundreds of years, serves to bind Diné children like Rondon’s to the land, ensuring that no matter where they go, they always remain spiritually and physically tethered to their ancestral home.
“That umbilical cord is our connection to the earth, to our mother,” says Rondon of the ceremony. “Your body reunites with the earth, becoming part of the sacred plants, the sage, the cedar, and the different medicinals, those are our relatives emerging in the essence of who they are. Together, we give life back to the earth.” That is why the land connects us.
Since 1968, Anna Rondon has worked tirelessly as a community organizer and activist advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples, first in the California Bay Area, then in the Navajo Nation itself. A member of the Kinya’aa’aanii Towering House Clan, Rondon’s work runs the gamut of the most pressing issues facing indigenous peoples, from highlighting the adverse health effects of uranium mining on Navajo Land to securing masks and food to those indigenous persons most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In many ways, Rondon’s journey to her spiritual connection with her ancestral land begins with her mother. As a child, Rondon’s mother, Gertrude H. Rondon who attended the Indian boarding school at Fort Wingate just outside Gallup, New Mexico. The product of a federal policy to force assimilation. The conditions of Indian boarding schools across the country were often cramped and unsanitary, leading to widespread disease and sometimes death for their Native American attendees. Despite being stricken with severe illness while enrolled in the boarding school and receiving her last rites, Rondon’s mother survived. Her life intact, she made the fateful decision to leave the reservation in 1943; moving to the California Bay Area to work on the railroads and establish a better life for herself and for her growing family.
Growing up as part of the Navajo diaspora, Rondon’s childhood in the California Bay area was far from perfect. A product of school busing and racist bullying from the school’s white majority, Rondon often started fights to combat the white supremacy she and other native students experienced in school. Between the ages of 12 to 18 she was on probation. The inner peace, often absent from Rondon’s life in California, was found in the land her mother left behind and in which she has set out to rediscover.
“When you light the fire in the hogan and you pray, the wind starts picking up, and the birds begin to sing. I’ll walk outside the hogan and there are no clouds in the sky, but a small drop of water will land right on my forehead. That’s the connection. That’s the spiritual realm of connecting to the other side,” says Rondon. “Those sacred moments are what really validates our way of life”
Since moving back to Chi Chil Tah in 1981, Rondon has worked to map out the culturally significant locations in and around her ancestral home, retracing and cataloging sacred sites associated with natural springs, sweat lodges, and “Nine-Night” ceremony sites central to Dine identity. Whereas her mother sought a better life for her children away from Navajo land, Rondon says that as she’s grown older, watching her children and grandchildren develop their own cultural and spiritual connections to the land has brought new joy to her life in the Navajo Nation.
“There are many customs and traditions that I want to ensure my grandchildren have knowledge of today. Knowledge of the land, of who we are, our lineage, and the importance of protecting our land for the future,” says Rondon.
“My four-year-old [granddaughter], she goes around the hogan and says ‘Ya at eeh’ to everyone, and then she goes to the fire and gets ashes and blesses people and she prays so they are protected. That’s what it’s about. Having my granddaughters pick up the traditional ways, however little it is.”
To preserve and use Navajo land in ways consistent with Diné tradition is vital. Rondon sees systemic and structural barriers as the biggest obstacle to achieving that goal, both from the Federal Government and the Navajo Tribal Government itself. The framework of “settler colonization,” found in the U.S. Constitution and in the works of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, promotes the use of Native American land for “economic development.” Rondon specifically cites Title 25 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Rondon says a new approach must be taken in order to promote traditional land use in a manner consistent with Dine culture. This must be advocated for at the federal and tribal level.
To Rondon, this approach to land use is far from revolutionary, but is rather based in the living culture of the Navajo Nation. In her youth, Rondon says she witnessed first-hand Navajo elders, some of them born as early as the 1880’s, advocate for traditional land use separate from an economic incentive. That kind of appreciation for the land, based in tradition, and once common among the Navajo people, finds no support in the current framework of the law.
“We don’t have that today. We as a people lack the knowledge, that really grounded our elders before assimilation,” says Rondon. “Even our own people, to me it’s not really about color, it’s about the character. The heart of the person … A lot of our Navajos have conformed or have bought into the American way. It’s an easy way of life. You just worry about yourself and no one else.”
“We keep doing the same thing over and over and expect something to change. It’s not going to happen. Radical change has to happen.”
When it comes to solutions to fundamental problems, Rondon ultimately believes only fundamental change will offer any real relief to the Navajo people. Activism by persons like Rondon and others who believe in customary land use and advocate for a framework of laws to support that philosophy may represent the only real chance for Dine people to live in a way consistent with their traditional, cultural identity.
“Since 1923, the government has just been oppressing the people, and [we’re] being good Indians to the federal government,” says Rondon. “What’s supporting our philosophy is all based upon Dine fundamental law, and that’s what needs to be exercised more.”
Tse Daa K’Aan
Many Navajo living solitary lives far removed from the community system once synonymous with Dine culture.
“Just a little further.”
With the sun starting to set and fuel running low, Gloria Emerson was beginning to worry. When Emerson agreed to drive an elder hitch-hiker home, she did so without realizing just how far away “home” truly was. As the minutes turned to hours, the elderly woman reassured Emerson in her native Navajo that home was “just a little further.” Once arrived, far into the desert and separated completely from mainstream society, Emerson glimpsed an isolation familiar not only to the traveler, but to the many Navajo living solitary lives far removed from the community system once synonymous with Dine culture.
Today, Emerson lives alone on a similarly remote plot of land near Tse Daa K’aan Chapter, New Mexico. From the southern portion of her home, Emerson frequently basks in the sprawling landscape dominated by the San Juan River, by far her favorite feature of the expansive plot inherited from her father. Though she’s no longer able to walk along the river banks, Emerson makes a point to drive to the more accessible parts when she can, a gesture of familiarity and deep-seated appreciation for the land of her family and of her ancestral roots.
Despite the river and the quiet peace of the desert, Emerson admits life alone can be an isolating experience. Though many Navajo can and do choose to lives of solitude, the ability to live within a traditional Dine community presently has no home within either the federal or tribal framework of individual leases and permits.
Prior to the Long Walk of 1864, Navajo society was structured around matriarchs who managed the land for the good of the community. Following the forced displacement and subsequent resettlement of the Navajo by the federal government however, the traditional culture of communal land management was almost completely wiped out as the federal and later tribal government adopted a schema of individual leases and permits. That change, which allows only for permits or leases issued with individual names, effectively precluded the Navajo from resuming a way of life once central to their culture.
At 83 years old, Emerson’s lifetime of experiences reflects not only her appreciation for her ancestral land, but her commitment to the well-being of the Navajo in general. The daughter of a government surveyor, Emerson originally pursued a career in social work, eventually earning a degree from Harvard University. Throughout her career, Emerson has spearheaded a variety of projects aimed at benefitting the Navajo, including efforts to teach the Diné language in schools and by combating racism through her role with the DNA-People’s Legal Service.
At 50, Emerson decided to “forget it all” to become an artist, enrolling as a freshman at the Institute of American Indian Arts to channel her love for the land through artistic expression.
“As a freshman in art school, the younger students didn’t trust me. One of them told me later that they thought I was a spy for the administration,” says Emerson of her classmates, who each shared her passion for community and forward-thinking social action despite their differences in age. “It was a real passionate time for me, to mingle with others who had really strong beliefs about community action.”
Gloria returned to Tse Daa K’aan in 2000 to care for the ailing elders of her family. After running a coffee shop for a time, Emerson now lives alone on her father’s parcel of land. The river, though a source of great joy, also serves as a sad reminder to Emerson that the resources and management necessary to properly care for waterway seemingly falls outside of the tribal government’s power. For Emerson, the common sight of refrigerators and abandoned appliances choking the banks of the San Juan River serves as a reminder of just how far the Navajo’s appreciation for the environment has fallen since her father’s time.
“This intense passion for land and for the river, we inherited that sensibility,” says Emerson of her inherited sense of appreciation for the land. “It’s really hard for me to watch how we degrade our river as Navajo.”
In recent years, a movement among tribal governments to incorporate conservationism into their Integrated Resource Management Plan has grown tremendously as tribes seek out new and creative ways to preserve the ecological health of ancestral land. In Northern California, the Yurok Tribe undertook a carbon offset project to combat climate change on newly acquired tribal land. In Montana, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have begun managing the National Bison Range in place of the federal government, employing indigenous methods and tradition in order to more sustainably manage the land. For Navajo tribal government leaders seeking to affect lasting environmental change, the first must begin with the tribal government’s IRMP.
Despite the pollution, Emerson’s love for the land persists. In solitary moments and in unfamiliar ways, that love finds expression in acts as simple as getting lost on her ancestral land, at once both familiar and simultaneously mysterious.
“When I used to drive a lot, I’d go off hidden roads and just got lost. I was passionate about finding out what was around the corner,” says Emerson. “I just had to see how the shadows were in other parts of the country.”
Two Grey Hills
Conflict bred by competing land priorities through grazing permits is an ever-present issue.
As June turns to July and the New Mexico heat begins to rise, the wool on the backs of the Navajo-Churro, a hardy variety of sheep preferred amongst Navajo shepherds, must begin to feel like a heavy burden in the blazing sun.
Thankfully for the Churro, Irene Bennalley is there to answer their prayers.
A traditional Dine sheep herder and native of the Two Grey Hills Chapter of the Navajo Nation, for Bennalley, the arrival of summer marks the beginning of the long, laborious process of separating her sheep from their heavy wool coats. After grooming, shearing, drying, packing, and organizing the wool by color, Bennalley is left with bags upon bags of wool, a reward duly paid for in the sweat and sore muscles synonymous with a herder’s way of life.
“It’s a rough and hard life style. You’ve got to get up early, and it’s a 24/7 deal,” says Bennalley. One of the few remaining Navajo herders to practice traditional transhumance, or sheep migration, Bennalley annually treks from her winter home in Two Grey Hills to her customary use area within the Chuska mountains. There, separated from the heat and surrounded by the ponderosas, aspen, and oak trees prevalent in the mountains, Bennalley’s migration and hard work serves to preserve an essential aspect of Dine culture.
“My arms, my elbows, my shoulders are sore, but you know, I’m ok. I’m no stranger to hard work … That’s part of what I enjoy doing.”
Like so much else on the Navajo Nation, herding and livestock management is tightly controlled through the lease and permit structure maintained by the tribal government. For Bennalley, her opportunity to herd came in 1995 when she inherited her father’s grazing permit, a transfer of rights legally recognized by the Navajo Tribal Government. Though she’s thankful for the opportunity she inherited, she notes that for many young people hoping to adopt a similar lifestyle, the necessity of obtaining a grazing permit, let alone the difficult process of obtaining one, is not always foremost on their mind.
“A lot of people, young people are starting to just raise animals, assuming that it’s ok,” says Bennalley of the lack of ubiquity surrounding grazing permits. “That’s usually my first question: ‘do you have a permit to use?’”
The permit problem, however, extends far beyond simply knowing how to apply. For those members of the Navajo Nation who possess grazing permits, the concept of ownership that accompanies it often serves to stymie and interfere with other development and land use that might otherwise serve to improve life on the reservation.
In his Connecticut Law Review Article “Reclaiming the Navajo Range: Resolving the Conflict Between Grazing Rights and Development,” Ezra Rosser (whose father lives some miles north in the Chuskas) outlined the cycle of conflict these single use permits create among Navajo reservation residents.
“Formally, grazing rights involve merely the right of permittees to graze their animals on tribal trust land, permittees typically understand their grazing rights as providing them an ownership interest in the underlying land,” writes Rosser.
“What this means in practice is that development proposals that threaten, or seem to threaten, the rights of permittees often die on the drawing board. Even though a particular project, say a new school or store, might use only a small amount of land relative to the reservation’s seemingly endless open land, grazing permittees as a class often thwart such projects.”
In Bennalley’s own experience, the conflict bred by competing land priorities through grazing permits is an ever-present issue, even near her home at the foothills of the Chuska Mountains. Anecdotally, Bennalley says that for some permit holders on neighboring lands, even the presence of a chain link fence along a local highway is met with a veto, despite the fact such a fence might otherwise prevent wild animals from striking oncoming vehicles.
“There’s a good and bad to [the permit]. The good part is that you’re raising animals, legally, on the reservation. The bad part is that people think they have the right of way to run the land,” says Bennalley.
“Having that permit, yes it gives you the authority to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but in certain areas, everyone should agree. When one person says ‘no,’ they shut the whole thing down.”
Grazing permit or not, Bennalley recognizes that the traditional herding lifestyle, once central to Diné culture, may in some ways be fading from view. Though Bennalley’s ancestral mountain camp within the Chuska Mountains still teems with life several months out of every year, it is also surrounded by the desolate, abandoned camps of herders who no longer make the journey.
“It’s sad. It’s sad not see them around,” says Bennalley, noting that many members of her own family, once familiar fixtures on the mountain, have ceased to make the trek. As old visitors of the mountain fade from memory, Bennalley says their sense of land kinship is in some ways fading too.
“You’ve got to respect the land [where] your customary land use is,” says Bennalley. “It’s supposed to be the same way here, where you kind of know where certain families are, certain planned families are, and you kind of just stay away from them. You respect that. That’s not clear anymore.”
“That too is diminishing.”
Though change is inevitable, for Bennalley, such change need not be strictly negative. Amidst the mountains, whose foliage and wildlife can sometimes seem eternal, Bennalley feels that while some traditions may be altered, so long as the stories that enrich Dine customary land use continue on, that part of Navajo culture will never truly be lost.
“I don’t like to use certain words like ‘lost,’” says Bennalley of Navajo herding traditions. “It might not be the way it is, like with certain people, I’ve seen them trailer their animals up rather than doing the hike. They’re still doing it in their own little way.”
“The one main thing that I believe is the teachings. The teachings of getting up early, the teachings of praying in the morning, taking the sheep out, all of that. I got that from my grandma, my mother and my father.”
Shiprock
The earth is a living entity that has a spirit. Everything we try to do is to help people understand.
Walk beside the rows of new corn sprouts stretching across Duane “Chili” Yazzie’s farm, and you’ll likely come upon a piles of corn kernels; a conspicuously placed treat left for the prairie dogs who call the New Mexico desert home. A burrowing rodent common to the grasslands of North America, to the farmers trying to make a living in the Navajo Nation’s arid climate, prairie dogs can be a source of constant annoyance or even ruin given their tendency to burrow around and consuming sprouting row crops like corn. Whereas some farmers poison or shoot prairie dogs on sight, Chili’s quiet, conciliatory corn kernel offering encapsulates not only his unique approach to farming, but also the Dine philosophy relating to the land. “I’d rather have them eat the corn I leave them than the corn seeds I’m trying to grow”, Yazzie explained.
“Our perspective is that we are one with the land, the earth,” said Yazzie of the traditional Navajo approach to the land. “There’s no distinction as to us having a life separate from the earth, because we are not separate and everything we need for our own existence comes from the earth. It’s not just a romantic notion that we regard the earth as our Earth Mother.”
For Yazzie, the separation of a mere “romantic notion” and the reality of living traditionally with the land lies mostly in his detailed approach to farming. From dawn until dusk, Yazzie farms in rural Shiprock, working to grow corn, squash, and melons beneath the hot New Mexico sun. An advocate both of environmentalism and regenerative farming, Yazzie’s approach to his own farm encompasses numerous, time-consuming techniques in line with his traditional Dine worldview.
Averse to plowing deep into the earth, Yazzie is careful only to agitate the top layer of the soil so as not to disturb the microbial life just beneath the surface. To combat the desert sun, Yazzie is testing the process of drip irrigation, a farming method that would both conserves vast amounts of water yet takes equally vast amounts of time. When planting future rows of corn, Yazzie measures each plot with twine in intersecting lots so as to combat weed growth so he can corrugate the weeds in both directions between the rows of young corn. “This is very time consuming at the outset but worth it in the long term”, he explained. Eventually, the goal is to produce enough food to provide significant amounts to his own people, a means of providing food to Navajo, grown by Navajo in a manner consistent with Navajo customs.
“That’s just how our whole world, our whole existence is predicated, on our relationship not only with the earth, but the water, the air, the sun, the basic elements of life,” says Yazzie of his approach to living with, rather than simply upon on the land. “The land is not thought of as a commodity. It’s thought of as a living entity. The earth was created for us to have that relationship and that capacity to take care of each other.”
That Chili has turned to traditional farming in his retirement should come as no surprise to those who have followed his nearly 50-year saga of activism and public service. A champion of indigenous liberties in his own right, Yazzie’s grandfather Little Singer is renowned in Navajo culture history for his role in the Beautiful Mountain Uprising of 1913. In the face of threats and intimidation from the federal government, Little Singer and several other Navajo men resisted federal attempts to enforce its laws to eradicate polygamy on the reservation, the last recorded use of United States military against Native people since 1890. Despite being outmanned and outgunned by over 500 uniformed troops, after three days of confrontation, Little Singer and the 12 members of his party submitted to arrest, though Chili’s grandfather kept his three wives with no further comment from the Federal government.
For Yazzie himself, his fight for equality can be traced back to the 1970’s, where in his 20’s he played percussion with Native American rock band XIT, whose lyrics tackled issues of indigenous inequality. No stranger to the harmful realities of prejudice, Yazzie lost his right arm in 1978 after being shot in a possible hate crime incident. Later, he served as chairman of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, formed in 2008 following a police shooting of unarmed Navajo man Clint John.
In the field of public service, Yazzie served at various times as a Shiprock Chapter officer and on the Navajo Nation Council. In that time, Chili advocated on behalf of the Navajo people on a variety of fronts, whether in fighting against federal pollution of Navajo land, tackling racial discrimination in the border-town communities, or combating racial violence, the legacy of which is still felt throughout New Mexico and in the nearby community of Farmington particularly.
Though born in Arizona, Yazzie claims Shiprock as home. With a career of activism and public service now ostensibly behind him, Yazzie’s perspective of the future is defined not only by his relationship to the land, but by the ways in which he and other members of the Navajo Nation can live as an example to the outside world.
“Our efforts to take care of the land and use the land in a way that it was intended to be, we’re living up to our responsibilities,” says Yazzie. “We do have that obligation to help people understand that may not have that complete understanding about this relationship that we have [to the land].”
As Yazzie and other members of the Navajo Nation tackle the issues surrounding traditional land use and the governmental barriers to their cultural way of life, Chili cannot help but view those issues through the prism of his decades long fight for indigenous rights. During a 2008 trip to Geneva, Switzerland to participate in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Yazzie recalls the striking image of indigenous persons gathered from across the world, represented by persons of all colors, creeds, and cultures. Indigeneity, as Yazzie came to understand, has less to do with the color of one’s skin, than one’s relationship with the land.
“Indigenous mainly means that the connection to the land remains. You are still connected to the land, to your ancestral land,” says Yazzie. “With that connection, we maintained our understanding of who we are and what our place is.”
“It’s very hard for people to comprehend that physical relationship with the earth, the spiritual connection. People have a hard time comprehending that the earth is actually a living entity and that it has a spirit. Everything we try to do is to help people understand.”
Reporter/Law Intern’s Notes
I had spent some years working as a newspaper journalist in the Appalachia region. While such interviews can only share so much, the elders wanted to speak with an individual who is a journalist also schooled in the law, in order to see how a multi-focused individual would interpret them, since I understood that traditionally, stories are law. Below are my notes.
From border to border, the land of the Navajo Nation stretches over 27,000 square miles across four separate states. Marked by the boundaries of the Four Sacred Mountains, it houses sprawling mountains and arid deserts, winding rivers and jutting rock formations set against the wide, blue sky. Put simply, the land is beautiful, yet simply to call it ‘beautiful’ fails to capture the magnanimity that is the Navajo Nation. That concept of the land’s almost impossible magnificence and grandeur is understood by no one better than the Diné.
In seeking to better understand the connection between the Diné and their land, I spoke with the residents of the Navajo Nation themselves. Through five conversations with five separate residents, I heard and composed the stories of sheep herders, farmers, civil activists, artists, yet most of all, the stories of kind, genuine people in love with their homes. Though the lands of the Navajo Nation are as varied as the people who live upon it, what remains consistent across all backgrounds and occupations is the desire to utilize the land to its highest value, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a desire to live and use the land in a manner consistent with Navajo tradition and culture.
In talking with those who live upon the land, it became evident through conversations that the barriers to customary land use can sometimes be as diverse as the land itself. For the sheep herders living in the Chuska Mountains, those barriers may include burdensome herding permits, ill-defined grazing boundaries, or limits to securing the permits at all. For farmers practicing traditional agriculture, there exist difficulties not only in growing crops, but in securing the kind of government leases that would make meaningful, customary land use possible. Even for those seeking to connect with their cultural and historical roots, the schema laid out by the tribal and federal government land use management structure provides no path forward to achieve such a connection. Across all walks of life, the desire to utilize the land efficiently and traditionally is present, yet the way forward remains muddled by bureaucracy, improper management, and confusion as to whether a clear path forward exists.
Conversing with these five amazing persons, I gained a sense not only for their appreciation for the land, but their desire to utilize that land in a traditional, customary way. Though the problems posed by Navajo land use management are complex, what is far from complex is that among the Dine, there exists a yearning for a model of traditional land use governance. So long as that desire remains, the answers posed by land management cannot be far away.
Tanner Hancock, Nashville, TN
2021 law intern, American University