Food Sovereignty and a desert landrace

The washboards made me rattle with the truck as I was going down a dirt road to get to my friends place. She is Navajo and lives with her family and a flock of Churro sheep at Rocky Ridge chapter on the reservation. Rocky Ridge is located by Black Mesa and the Hopi dispute boundary in one of the most remote areas in the US. The dirt road was long, about 20 miles, going to a place foreign to most people in the US, devoid of any kind of modern conveniences. It is a place of solitude where there is miles between the different family groups. This flock of long legged rangy Churro sheep that live alongside her, and have created her identity since she was born, have been with her family for generations. The flock presently are descendants of a flock that had been handed down through the generations, from great grandparents, to grandparents — to her mother, to her, mostly through the maternal line.

She tells me the family hid them from the stock reductions and the consequential “long walk” during Kit Carson’s horrendous campaign to subjugate the hostiles of the southwest. Her ancestors moving them to canyonlands, where the cavalry couldn’t find them. Traditionally it was an honor to be chosen to take on the responsibility to tend the sheep flock. You were not only bestowed the wealth of the family, but the sacred ancestral roots as well.

Like her ancestors, she is a renegade, pushing unusual ideas about an old forgotten sheep, in a conservative modern culture, holding onto the old genetics when there are pressures from everyone to improve. Talking about the churros as purveyors of regenerative change, how a scrawny landrace sheep can heal a desecrated landscape…

I knew my presence was going to give a perfect excuse to slaughter a sheep. This will be an intense and refreshing three days of family, story and food. The gathering offered a moment when beauty of the beyond and beauty of the world come together as we sit around the fire and grind corn, prepare mutton and tell stories.

Butchering a churro takes a tremendous amount of labor and requires several people. I feel honored as I drive up. I know what a gift it is to be honored with a butchered churro from a traditional flock. My role in these gatherings has slowly begun to shift from white bellagonna to trusted family. I enter the space with the proper mindset. We don’t think negatively or with anxiety during the next three days. I leave all my concerns and enter the space knowing what is beautiful in the world, what is right and balanced. Even writing this blog, I feel compelled to focus on what is working rather than what is not working, because you don’t pair a friendship with negative assumptions. It is “beauty way” as my friend calls it. It is the way I wish to save this sheep. To hold onto these memories.

It is hope.

In this place, sheep represent so much more than food. To many families that have them in their roots, the sheep go back to the beginning of their family memory. But to many of the traditional families of the southwest deserts, the churro sheep represent food sovereignty. Food sovereignty itself represents the inherent right of people to choose their own ways of living. Ways of living that use age-old practices to heal oneself and an ailing planet.

“Sheep is Life” as the saying goes.

The Churros to traditional cultures offer nourishment, clothing, tools and spiritual guidance. No part of the sheep is wasted. However, to get to this harvest, you must tend to the sheep, waking up every morning early to ensure their survival. This shepherding gives way to a circle of care and attention that births a way of life. A way of life that we all have an inherent right to.

Each sheep represents life.

Each sheep represents living with nature.

This is food Sovereignty. Gathering around a table, or in this case fire for a nice sit down dinner and conversation, to tell a story. This is seen to some degree in most large cities around the world. Trendy brew pubs, gastro restaurants, sharing with the world unique ways to use indigenous ingredients to create an experience. Like the churro sheep, it’s more than food, it’s a lifestyle.

Wild carrot

After butchering, we spent the rest of the day collecting wild carrots and other edibles from the rangeland. As we walked, my friend showed me what the sheep eat readily, their Navajo name and the common anglo name for each plant. She showed me her ancestral homes as they moved seasonally with the flock. Her parents kept her out of boarding school — her life began as it will end — shepherding the sheep. The rock dwellings and paddocks for the sheep, fortressed against any attack. The interconnected rock pens and homes where the families slept alongside their churros. For her and her elders, there was no separation between animal and human.

One to another, as family.

She told me stories of her ancestors and how they shepherded their flocks. Each ancestor had their identity with a certain flock. The stories of survival. The churros as the heroes. Surviving unmistakable conditions of hardship. The little rangy sheep that could travel long distances without water and little food.

My friends hogan was where we spent my visit. An ancestral home.

As night fell the light grew dimmer as we sat around the fire and ate the fruits of our labor, from the land and the sheep’s offering. Soon, it was night, and we were still sitting out in the pitch night with only a sliver of moon for light. No sound for miles. Just us and the cosmos. Each star a story, each rock formation another — over generations. Each memory folding into a story. And each ingredient holding their own narrative folding into the next, all carrying their own. Food Sovereignty.

Stories have a unique ability to collapse time. Food does too. They can move between times, slow time, or even stop time. The sheep being part of cultural roots, stories and food operates similarly carrying metaphors, images, and memories. The Churro sheep intertwine the desert cultures, having survived the extremes that have been thrown their way, over centuries. They are the only livestock in this vast landscape that are able to navigate the past, present and future. They have survived an incredible journey with traditional cultures and can survive our new journey with a changing climate. A hotter and drier climate.

Like the ancestral desert people before me, the churros are now in my identity. Having spent most of my adult life tending to my flock, understanding my personal spiritual connection to this strange rangy desert dweller. Knowing in my heart the connection to the land and sheep. I am absorbed in the ancestral knowledge.

It goes beyond race and color or ownership.

I am hoping to continue the story of these desert sheep, the seeds in my flock. Their legacy transcends families, borders, and timelines, each carrier committing to their survival; each adding their own stories to the collected voices already ingrained in the sheep themselves. Like the native plants that nourish the flocks, the seeds are the start of a cycle: the tilling, the plowing, the planting, the watering, the tending, the harvesting, the preparing, the cooking, the nourishing, and the sharing.

After harvesting the fruits of our labor, we digest that history and allow it to nourish our bodies.

That is how food is supposed to operate, as part of story. This is how this landrace sheep is suppose to nourish an ailing world, by giving us hope that there is something beyond our control that can heal.

Sitting around the fire that evening with my friend, my family, showing me how the sheep have come to this journey of hope. The sound of worries let go, troubles melted down, and pressures unsealed. A family sitting around a fire telling stories and nourishing from them too. It was a great way to wind down from a butchering, which shouldn’t be called a butchering at all, but a gathering, a sharing, an opening. A way through. A way back, a way forward to what matters most.

Filled with memory and future.

My flock and shepherding has created my own story to tell as the many desert dwellers with their churro flocks have before me. One more voice to add to the chorus of those many nights through the millennium when you are in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. Generations heard through the wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty, coming together.

With the Churro sheep.