An Edible Landscape: Hungry for Food Sovereignty in the Navajo Nation
The drive out to Piñon, Ariz., includes a 20-mile stretch of washboard dirt road. Along the way, one may see small clusters of homes, cattle and, at one point, an auto-repair shop. But, for the most part, a single passing car may be the only sign of company for miles.
The small community, with roughly 1,000 year-long residents, is at the center of the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The town is surrounded by miles of high desert with rocky outcroppings and plateaus poking out of the monochrome dirt and grey-green greasewood. It may seem barren at first glance — during the winter, a freezing quiet settles over the valley. In the summer, the hot sun pummels the earth. But here, in this unforgiving landscape, is where the Diné and Hopi people have built their lives for hundreds of years.In Piñon today, there is one gas station, a Conoco that occasionally loses electricity, but is surrounded by drivers waiting for a pump to open, and a single grocery store, a Bashas, right next door to the Conoco.
Roberto Nutlouis was raised in Piñon and hasn’t left, except to attend college in Flagstaff, Ariz. Nutlouis, now in his 30s, sees his upbringing in the town as an integral part of his work today.
“It’s a really unique, sacred place for me,” said Nutlouis. “A lot of cultural knowledge and lifeways are still strong in that area and region because it’s deep in the rez. Growing up in that environment has really helped me to understand our traditional values and traditional lifeways. I think that has really grounded me in the work I do today.”
Nutlouis has helmed the Green Economy program overseen by the Black Mesa Water Coalition, which he also helped to found. He is soft-spoken, friendly and easily laughs. While it takes him a moment to trust a stranger, he eventually opens up and shares a wealth of knowledge, both passed down from his elders and from his own experiences.
He also has a talent for bringing people together for a cause; this is apparent with his lengthy background in community organizing.
The Black Mesa Water Coalition is a group of young activists formed in the early 2000s, whose goals were to address the many environmental and social issues facing the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The area now deemed reservation lands have long been a site for resource extraction, including that of coal, uranium and water. While the plentiful resources on the land would logically make it one of the wealthiest regions in the U.S., there is instead a high rate of poverty. An estimated 43 percent of Navajo people live below the federal poverty line.
The coalition’s website states: “BMWC is dedicated to preserving and protecting Mother Earth and the integrity of Indigenous Peoples’ cultures, with the vision of building sustainable and healthy communities. We strive to empower young people and spark collaboration with surrounding communities and organizations to address the problems we collectively face.”
According to Nutlouis, Peabody Coal Company — one of the largest coal companies at the time — exploited the longstanding conflict known as the Navajo Hopi Land Dispute. The dispute dates back to the late 19th century, when the area that was typically shared by both tribes, was bisected with fences and borders imposed by Westernized government forces. Because of a number of complications involving mining companies claiming rights to various sections of the land, the tensions grew between the two tribes.
However, instead of giving into the divisive rhetoric, Nutlouis explains how the Black Mesa Water Coalition represented a unified force against the corporation.
“So as young organizers at the time and understanding this political baggage — it was both a Navajo and Hopi-led organization,” Nutlouis says. “We really tried to ground ourselves in our traditional teachings and really made that conscious decision in our engagement in this work has to come from our own understanding of who were are as human beings, our relationship to each other, the land and all of the life forces that we are told are sacred.”
Much of the coalition’s work has been encouraging the Navajo Nation to embrace more sustainable practices and vocally opposing extractive industries. It has not always been an easy endeavor, as the Navajo Nation depends on much of the revenue from these environmentally unfriendly industries, such as coal mining.
“We’re trying to do our part to get the Nation to … begin a serious transition to a more sustainable, culturally appropriate development, [one that] really that honors the sacred relationship we have with the environment and to each other,” Nutlouis said. “We are really looking to our traditional teachings for guidance on that.”
“Peabody Coal Company … created this atmosphere of anything renewable, clean energy, for them meant anti-coal. Unfortunately our tribal leaders bought that rhetoric.” -Roberto Nutlouis
The exploitation of the land goes hand-in-hand with the exploitation of Navajo bodies — many towns across the reservation lack a grocery store or source of fresh food. On the way to Piñon, the most common source of food seen along the highway are small convenience stores. They may sell items like trail mix, sweets and coffee. But any sort of fresh food — fruits or vegetables — is harder to come by.
Darrell Marks is a community educator and activist. He grew up in Tonalea, another town on the Navajo Reservation, about an hour and a half drive from Piñon. Tonalea is smaller than Piñon, with only 600 residents. Marks’ family lived five miles off the main road when he was growing up.
Marks described the immense distance between grocery stores on the reservation.
“Because the Navajo Nation is such a large nation, you only find large stores like Bashas within between 80 to 100 miles of one another,” said Marks. “When I was growing up, I knew in Page, a border town community, they would have a Bashas and a Safeway. The closest Bashas to that one would be in Tuba City, which is 80 miles away straight across. It’s 100 miles on certain routes and then the nearest one to Tuba City would be Kayenta, the nearest one to that would be Chinle, which is, again, almost an hour-and-a-half away. Then there’s Shiprock, which is another two hours away, and the closest one to Chinle would be Piñon which is an hour away or Window Rock — two to two-and-a-half hours away.”
He remembers some rural families travelling 50 miles one way to reach the store. His own family would travel 60 miles round-trip to buy groceries.
“Now it’s a little harder for families who don’t have modern conveniences like refrigeration, electricity or running water to be able to cool and maintain the temperature to carry food over for a longer shelf life,” Marks said.
The Bashas in Piñon towers above a crowded parking lot, with a neon red sign. Immediately upon stepping inside, shoppers are greeted by an immense display of cakes, bread and soda. At the front of every aisle, there is often a display of canned goods — SPAM, fruit cocktail — or snacks. While the produce section displays leafy greens and gleaming fruit, it pales in comparison to the enormous amount of sugary, processed items, which take up the majority of the store. The checkout lines are flanked by towers of seasonal candy and more boxes of soda.
A dozen eggs from a generic, non-organic brand, hover around six dollars.
“A carton of eggs that you might be able to buy at a border town stores that ranges between the prices of a dollar to two dollars for a carton of 12 eggs, you would go to Navajo and find it at the cost of 3 to 5 to 6 dollars for an identical product,” Marks said. “Gallons of milk, bread … all of those … if you could find it in a bordertown community, expect it to be two to three times more [expensive] in these Navajo stores.”
While many grocery stores carry their fair share of unhealthy food, this Bashas, with the addition of the small Conoco gas station, are pretty much the only options for the residents of Piñon to shop. Furthermore, as Marks described, prices are often higher than what one would find in border towns like Flagstaff or Page.
The lack of fresh food and the introduction of processed, non-traditional foods have had a serious health impact on the Diné people.
“With this new sedentary lifestyle, depending on food systems from corporations, were are seeing a high rate of food-related disease in our communities,” Nutlouis said. “It’s projected within the next five to seven years our population, 90 percent, will be diabetic. And a majority of that will be among young people — juvenile diabetes is just going through the roof.”
A mountain of canned meat and SPAM is on display at the Bashas’ in Piñon.
Partners in Health, an organization providing health services to low income areas around the world, noted the prevalence of diabetes on the reservation.
The organization’s findings included, “Historically, almost no Navajo suffered from [diabetes]. But now, thanks in part to the scarcity of wholesome groceries available within the Navajo Nation, one in three Navajo are diabetic or pre-diabetic. In some regions, health care workers report diagnosing diabetes in every other patient.”
The deterioration of the food system on the Navajo Reservation goes back to the first relocation of indigenous families onto the land. It is compounded symbolically and literally with the “scorched earth” tactic employed the U.S. army during colonization of the west: the complete elimination of any means of survival by burning crops and slaughtering people and livestock. This essentially led the Diné people to surrender their land to the colonizing forces due to starvation and desperation.
“Food systems, of course, is the foundation of the relationship to our environment and our homelands.” -Roberto Nutlouis
Diné College published a report in 2014 exploring the current state of food sovereignty in the Navajo Nation. It also provides valuable insight to the histories which have played a role in the present-day issues. The study explains how the Treaty of 1868 gave the United States regulatory authority of agricultural land use within the newly designated reservation area.
The study states: “This process disregarded the existing Navajo views of agricultural land management, promoted individualist and non-communal land use, undermined the matrilineal tradition in Navajo society, as well as put land disputes under the jurisdiction of the United States rather than families and communities.”
The U.S. management of reservation land disregarded cultural norms, traditions and social structures within Navajo communities. The impacts of this forced relocation continue to resonate today.
“All those resources came from our land, and we got nothing. We got the bare bones,” Nutlouis says. “To this day, we just get the bare bones. The poverty you see in our communities, the ecological degradation you see, are really the result of these policies that were intentionally created to benefit the ‘haves’ … and we were the ‘have nots.’ And that’s how it continues to play out today.”
The 1934 Taylor Grazing Act also played a role in the continued deterioration of the Diné food systems. The law, aimed at reducing desertification by limiting livestock to a designated area, actually exacerbated the already dry conditions in Arizona.
The Diné farmers would traditionally move their livestock based on the grazing conditions between the four sacred mountains — Hesperus Peak to the north, Blanca Peak to the East, the San Francisco Peaks to the west and Mt. Taylor to the south.
After the Act was passed, Diné farmers were kept to an allotted area, resulting in overgrazing and severe erosion.
Around Piñon, there are several washes that, during the monsoon season, turn into rushing rivers. These rivers wash away the already fragile topsoil, and oftentimes seeds or small crops in fields. The rain, while needed, can be a destructive force.
These issues compounded with the influence of boarding schools, which served non-traditional foods, resulted in a loss of food sovereignty on the Navajo Reservation. This is something Nutlouis hopes to re-establish in his community.
Nutlouis, as a coordinator of the Green Economy, sees importance in improving the food system for the Diné people. But, for him, improvement doesn’t necessarily mean bringing more grocery stores or corporate options to his hometown, but providing education and resources to be self-sustaining.
“Food systems, of course, are the foundation of our relationship to our environment and our homelands,” Nutlouis says. “So that’s where my work has come in — looking at food sovereignty and it also has a lot of complex issues and policies, most rooted in colonization and how these policies dictate what can and cannot happen on our lands and where we find ourselves today socially and ecologically deteriorated.”
Part of Nutlouis’ goal is restore many of the agricultural fields and landscapes around Piñon. Before he began his work, fences were falling into disrepair and the washes funnelling torrential rains continued to get wider and more hazardous. Growing anything on the land was increasingly difficult.
“Once we come to some consensus as a community, use that as a platform to redefine these policies that have restricted us from fully developing and maintaining our agricultural system.” -Roberto Nutlouis
The Diné people are traditionally organized matrilineally and by a clan system. Nutlouis, who belongs to the Bitterwater clan, has many relatives in Piñon and in an area called the Burnt Corn Watershed, which surrounds the community to the southwest. The revitalization of the Burnt Corn Watershed has served as an example for future restoration projects.
“Our strategy in the revitalization of the food system, I guess the current word that I’ve come across, is agroecology,” Nutlouis says. “What it means to me, is creating a food system that is in sync with the ecological processes to which you’re putting your food system into.”
Some of the tactics used to improve the growing conditions include rainwater catchment systems — mechanisms to slow the water down and soak into the soil, thus revitalizing groundwater. The tactics are simple and don’t require many materials. Examples include retaining walls within the washes and what Nutlouis calls “brush dams,” barriers built out of branches and bark to slow and disperse water on the fields. He describes how during the rainy season, the fields will look like a shallow lake while the water sinks in.
Nutlouis also mentions most of the work done in the watershed is technically illegal — neither he nor the Black Mesa Water Coalition have received agricultural permits from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is because, as Nutlouis explained, the permit system for Native American Reservations has been inactive since the 1970s. Therefore, farmers and ranchers on reservation land cannot qualify for any subsidized agricultural programs. Even so, Nutlouis is willing to face these obstacles if it means a healthier future.
“We’re actively asserting our right to food systems, to water and to land,” Nutlouis says.
Nutlouis is not alone in the fight for sovereignty.
Native Seeds/SEARCH is a non-profit organization based out of Tucson, Ariz. The organization’s primary goals include the preservation of seeds native to the Southwest. They work closely with Arizona-based gardens and agricultural projects; the organization’s beginnings in the late 1980s are intertwined with aiding the Tohono O’odham Nation in establishing community gardens for sustainable food production.
Native Seeds/SEARCH has remained dedicated to its original vision and continues to offer a resource for those interested in sustainable agriculture. Their seed bank includes over 2,000 local seeds, most of which are adapted to the arid southwestern climate, use less water and many are rare or endangered. The organization promote the proliferation of these crops by sharing them with communities across the state.
Free and discounted seeds are also offered to Native American gardeners and farmers. Those who obtain the seeds are encouraged to save them after harvest to strengthen and continue a sustainable food cycle.
The organization’s website states: “As seed security is at the heart of food security, we encourage recipients to save seeds from the plants they grow. Doing so ultimately increases the resilience of our food system, and sharing them with others ensures that these culturally relevant arid-adapted seeds will be accessible to future generations.”
Chad Borseth manages the Native Seeds/SEARCH retail store in Tucson, where locals can come to buy seeds and attend educational events. He recently attended a symposium at the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico surrounding food sovereignty. This year he also led a youth program for children between the ages of seven and 13 on the Apache Reservation.
“It was really a cool, engaging process to talk with them about food and what food they’re interested in growing,” said Borseth. “A lot of the things they were interested in growing were not considered traditional foods — like strawberries and carrots — because that’s what they’re used to getting now. [It was] a way of reintroducing them to more traditional foods.”
Borseth believes there has been an increase in people seeking local, sustainable food products, both on and off the reservations.
“There has been an increase in awareness in food security and re-gravitating toward the farming lifestyle,” Borseth said. “In Navajo and Hopi I think there’s a strong sense of tradition that they have held on to. Outside of that, there are a lot of people trying to navigate back to that tradition and maybe they’re looking for access to seeds.”
Borseth also noted an increase in demand from typically high-volume places like California and Texas. He attributes this to farmers seeking hearty seeds that can withstand heat and less rainfall. He believes the role of Native Seeds/SEARCH will only continue to increase as climate change models predict a drier and hotter southwest.
Adapting to these changing traditions sometimes requires looking to ancient knowledge on how to survive in the unforgiving climate of the region. The organization also hires young Native American interns.
“We currently have three [indigenous] interns,” Borseth said. “It’s a program we do every year to bring young people in their 20s to get some farm experience, but also so we can learn from them. We are always engaging with them and learning about their family’s traditions. The cultural side is important too — honoring the culture that has stewarded [the land] before us.”
Nutlouis, Marks and Borseth realize the continuation of their endeavors lie in the hands of younger generations.
Younger people, such as Nutlouis’ nephew is often seen helping with projects, such as rebuilding fences around the Bitterwater clan fields. Nutlouis explained how he often enlists young people to help, so they can learn skills to carry on and teach to others.
Food security is not an issue facing just the current generation, but also future children and grandchildren. The world is shifting with a quickly changing climate; it is up to individual communities to decide how to respond.
Nutlouis hopes his hometown will respond in a way that is sustainable and culturally appropriate, but in a way that can also alleviate the negative effects of colonization. He wants to see young people embracing some valuable aspects of traditional Navajo life.
“We may not fully see how climate change is going to reshape humanity, especially Americans,” Nutlouis says. “How are we going to participate in the reshaping that is so critical? Part of the work with the pilot project is … how do we begin to educate our communities about how the work is not just for us, but for future generations?”
The fields Nutlouis has worked to rehabilitate are lit up, golden, by the setting December sun. They’re surrounded by fruit tree saplings that will eventually grow and provide shade and another measure against erosion. The fields hug the edge of Nutlouis’ mother’s home, which he built himself. He proudly points out the thick walls, which efficiently maintain cooler temperatures during the summer, and keep in the heat during the winter. Dogs sniff around, while horses snort and swat flies.
During late spring, Nutlouis describes how his mother, aunts and other female relatives will plant seeds for blue and white corn in the fields. He fondly remembers watching the women ceremoniously collecting corn pollen last year.
Even though nothing grows this time of year, the work doesn’t end. Nutlouis and a few younger men are working to strip juniper logs for fence posts and a new corral. A pile of bark grows. The hatchet’s noise — chop, chop, chop — fills the freezing air.
