Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country PDF full book. Access full book title Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country by Marsha Weisiger. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Marsha Weisiger
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295803193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423
Get Book Here
Book Description
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands. Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals, hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers, tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grazing lands were showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened, weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses, until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today.
Author: Marsha Weisiger
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295803193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423
Get Book Here
Book Description
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands. Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals, hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers, tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grazing lands were showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened, weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses, until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today.
Author: Steve Pavlik
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN: 1938486668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Get Book Here
Book Description
This text examines the traditional Navajo relationship to the natural world. Specifically, how the tribe once related to the Animal People, and particularly a category of animals, which they collectively referred to as the naatl' eetsoh - the "ones who hunt." These animals, like Native Americans, were once viewed as impediments to progress requiring extermination.
Author: Peter Iverson
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826327154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Get Book Here
Book Description
The most complete and current history of the largest American Indian nation in the U.S., based on extensive new archival research, traditional histories, interviews, and personal observation.
Author: James F. Downs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Domestic animals
Languages : en
Pages : 788
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Richard White
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Richard White's study of the collapse into 'dependency' of three Native American subsistence economies represents the best kind of interdisciplinary effort. Here ideas and approaches from several fields--mainly anthropology, history, and ecology--are fruitfully combined in one inquiring mind closely focused on a related set of large, salient problems. . . . A very sophisticated study, a 'best read' in Indian history."--American Historical Review "The book is original, enlightening, and rewarding. It points the way to a holistic manner in which tribal histories and studies of Indian-white relations should be written in the future. It can be recommended to anyone interested in Indian affairs, particularly in the question of the present-day dependency plight of the tribes."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Western Historical Quarterly "The Roots of Dependency is a model study. With a provocative thesis tightly argued, it is extensively researched and well written. The nonreductionist, interdisciplinary approach provides insight heretofore beyond the range of traditional methodologies. . . . To the historiography of the American Indian this book is an important addition."--W. David Baird, American Indian Quarterly Richard White is a professor of history at the University of Washington. He is the winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Asso-ciation, the James A. Rawley Prize presented by the Organization of Ameri-can Historians and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. His books include The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West and The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Archives
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Gerald Betty
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603446079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
Betty details the kinship patterns that underlay all social organization and social behavior among the Comanches and uses the insights gained to explain the way Comanches lived and the way they interacted with the Europeans who recorded their encounters."--Jacket.
Author: Scott Rushforth
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816551332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Bearlake Athapaskan-speaking Indians of Canada's Northwest Territories have valued industriousness, generosity, individual autonomy, and emotional restraint for many generations. They also highly esteem "control" in human thought and behavior. The latter value integrates the others in a coherent framework of moral responsibility that persists as a central feature of Bearlake culture. Rushforth here provides an ethnographic description and analysis of these beliefs and values, which considers their relationship to examples of Bearlake social behavior.
Author: Ted L. Gragson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820321288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scholars studying the ecology of specific areas often fail to take into account the presence of humans in those environments. People not only are fundamental components of an ecosystem but possess a unique understanding of its nature. This book examines subjects ranging from pastoralism to the use of medicinal plants to show that understanding the knowledge system of any people is essential to understanding their relation to their environment. Using cases from the American Southwest and Pacific Northwest, the Highland Maya Region of Central America, and the Lowland and Andean regions of South America, the contributors examine the relation of humans and environment within the context of each local system’s beliefs, values, and knowledge. All emphasize the practical and cultural significance of indigenous knowledge of the environment and the importance of comparing this knowledge to scientific understanding prior to initiating development or conservation programs. They also contribute to a theoretical approach that allows findings to be applied across studies, regardless of ethnographic differences.
Author: Paul A. Olson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803235557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Get Book Here
Book Description
At an 1887 council when his people were told to learn farming in the semidesert region east of the Wind River Mountains, the Shosone chief Washakie exploded with "God damn a potato!" His instincts were all against the cultivation of semiarid land. The relationship between the buffalo hunter and the potato eater?between indigenous peoples and industrial empire?is the basic theme of the studies in The Struggle for the Land. As the editor, Paul A. Olson, points out in his introduction, the theme is as old as the biblical battle between the descendents of Nimrod, the city dweller, and of Abraham, the pastoralist. But the environmental cost of developing the world's semiarid regions is a new and urgent concern. Soil erosion, the loss of lands to dams, the pollution of once productive regions through mining, and the destruction of native food plants have everywhere decreased the quality of life for indigenous peoples, who have been forced to adopt the Western agricultural practices, property concepts, and economic institutions that created the environmental crisis. The eleven chapters in this collection look at the industrial and indigenous relationships in the lands of the North American Plains Indians, the Australian Aborigines, the Kazakhs in the USSR, the Maasai in Kenya, and several groups in southern Africa, and Alaskan and Lapp (Saami) native peoples. Representing a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, ecology, and agricultural science, the contributors are John W. Bennett, Anatoly Khazanov, Russel L. Barsh, Gary C. Anders, Robson Silitshena, Peter Iverson, Patrick Morris, Annette Hamilton, J. Baird Callicott, O. Douglas Schwarz, and Solomon Bekure and Ishmael Ole Pasha. They recommend realistic solutions for the problems facing people who have essentially been disenfranchised by Western-style developmentof their native semiarid lands.
