How climate change threatens the way of life of Navajo ranchers

Two decades after a severe drought on the Navajo Reservation, the open area around Maybelle Sloan’s sheep farm is a brown expanse of earth and mugwort.

A dry wind blows dust over the high desert plateau, smoke from forest fires in Arizona and California obscures the nearby rim of the Grand Canyon.

The summer monsoon rain has failed again and the storage ponds, in which rainwater is to be collected for the hot summer months, are dry.

Joshua Manuelito, 10, waters his garden at home

(Reuters)

A cattle trough that was built to contain the rain

(Reuters)

Recommended

Maybelle, 59, has no groundwater for her animals and fills an animal trough with water from a 1,200 gallon white plastic tank. She and her husband Leonard, 64, will have to pay up to $ 300 (£ 220) to fill the tank if their pickup truck breaks down. When it works, she fetches her own water every other day and spends $ 80 a week on fuel.

The cost of water transportation has made their ranch unprofitable.

The Navajo nation, which spans 27,000 square miles between the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, competes for water supplies with growing cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The Navajo rancher Leonard Sloan and his wife Maybelle in their sheep camp

(Reuters)

65-year-old Glen John catches water from a natural spring

(Reuters)

And as climate change dries up the western US, this offer becomes more and more precarious.

In the past few decades, “it rained every year in June, July and August,” says Leonard. The rancher pointed to the dry ponds in the ground near a local hill [flat-topped hill] called Missing Tooth Rock. “If we had this storm there would be water and they would be full. And now, due to global warming, we don’t get any rain, just a little. “

The sheep in Maybelle Sloan’s stable are released in the morning

(Reuters)

Leonard Sloan prays for rain while holding a horned toad

(Reuters)

But Maybelle is reluctant to give up the sheep farming her mother and grandmother had learned before her. Her mother, father and sister all died of coronavirus in April last year.

Independent culture newsletter

The best of film, music, television and radio delivered straight to your inbox every week

Independent culture newsletter

The best of film, music, television and radio delivered straight to your inbox every week

Sarah Begay, 85, is walking on her family property in a remote area

(Reuters)

“I’m doing it for my parents,” Maybelle says, wiping her tears as she sat on the metal railing of a horse while her cattle licked blocks of salt and drank water.

“I go out every day to take care of my sheep. There are coyotes out there and sometimes people steal them so I have to be there. Sometimes I have to do something like go into town to do my laundry and then I can’t go out, but the next day I go out super early because I’m worried about her. “

The Sloans remember grass that grew as high as a horse’s belly back in the 1980s, but drought conditions on the reserve have largely become inexorable since the mid-1990s.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average annual temperatures in the reservation’s Navajo County area rose 1.4 ° F in the 100 years to 2019.

Bertha Secody, 57, harvests sage in a remote area above the Grand Canyon

(Reuters)

23-year-old Summer Weeks, who is pregnant, shields her eyes from the sun

(Reuters)

June through August last year were the driest three months recorded in the region. This is based on drought monitoring data studied by climate researcher David Simeral from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. Three of the five driest rainy seasons in the region from July to August have occurred since the late 1990s.

The warming trend has led to desertification. Sand dunes now cover about a third of the reserve, according to the US Geological Survey.

All but one of the rivers on the reservation stop running year round, said Margaret Redsteer, a researcher at the University of Washington at Bothell.

Maybelle and Leonard Sloan give water to their cattle

(Reuters)

“That’s the really tricky thing about droughts, and so is climate change,” says Redsteer. “It’s a gradual disaster.”

On paper, the Navajo nation has extensive water rights based on the federal doctrine of “reserved rights” – the treaty-based rights of Indian nations to land and resources.

In practice, the Navajos and other tribes were excluded from many of the 20th century negotiations in which the water was divided.

16-year-old Tyson Boone climbs from the back of a truck onto a fence between two water tanks

(Reuters)

Summer Weeks bathes their daughter Ravynn, 2

(Reuters)

There is evidence that some of the next generation are maintaining the ranching traditions.

Some teenagers simply help their grandparents fetch water from the only well for cattle in the Bodaway-Gap area every day. Still others, including Maybell’s children, are sending money from their jobs on the reservation to help run their families’ ranches. “We Indians don’t give up that easily,” says Maybelle. “We are really determined people.”

Reuters. Photography by Stephanie Keith

Comments are closed.