Native Roots
Yolanda Benally
Originally published in Resilience, Issue #45 – Searching for Home Ground
Rolling hay bales to clear the way for the tractor to make another pass is my earliest memory of working on the farm with my older sister; my father taught us how to operate a tractor by age ten. I rode on the tire well of the tractor as my sister drove. The tractor rocked back and forth as the hay was shaped into rectangular blocks.
Our childhood was about irrigating, cutting, raking, and baling hay in the summertime. We would help my mother with planting seeds, followed by hoeing weeds among the corn and melon field. My dad would pick, stack, and sell hay with his siblings twice a season. Once the money came into our hands from the alfalfa sale, we bought fuel, spark plugs, and oil for our motorcycles. When we weren’t in school or farming, we played and rode our motorcycles along the route that the sheep made on their daily venture to graze and drink water six miles away.
The Four Corners Power Plant on the Navajo Nation was in our backyard, providing power for Arizona and California. Navajo Mine was the place my father worked during the week, while after hours he was farming. The power plant pumped river water to a man-made lake where the community took their livestock to drink water straight from the river. Although the power plant and mine were in our backyard providing jobs, economic security, and water for our livestock, farming was my father’s passion. His passion for farming was our work as his children.
After a separation between my parents, I left our farmlands to live with a Mormon family that helped me during a rough part of my life as a teenager. Living among them taught me about canning, family responsibilities, and the importance of being part of a community that had a different perspective.
Once I finished high school, I joined the Marine Corps. I never felt safer than when I was surrounded by Marines. They helped me survive the marches. I was the smallest and shortest on most marches, and keeping up was a struggle; my unit helped me survive them. During those times of struggle, I gained confidence by staying in the march, not quitting. But it was not boot camp that made me who I am; following and listening to my elders — whether it was my father, grandmother, or my clan sister — gave me the mental survival skills that surfaced during the marches. After an honorable discharge, I went back to school, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the environmental field. During that time, I didn’t get to farm much because by then, the farm and house where I grew up was being farmed by my sister.
These experiences of leaving home at an early age, learning to be independent and finishing my goals, were part of what shaped me to who I am today as a farmer. The discipline, sacrifices, and perseverance are the traits I have to rely on to survive.
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While I was in college, I filled out all the required papers to get a homesite lease to live near the area where I grew up. I was granted a 65-year lease to live on an acre plot across from the ditch of my childhood stone home. I knew one day I would return to the place, the land between the four sacred mountains that the Creator set aside for us to live out our lives as Navajos, the place where our language, songs, and ceremonies were practiced.
Around the same time, my dad offered me a permit for one of his two farms. I felt like a 40-acre farm was too big for me and even though I was hoping for an opportunity to have a permit for a smaller lot (10 acres) that he also held the permit to, he wasn’t ready to give it up. I transferred my one-acre homesite lease to my little sister; she moved onto her newly-acquired lease to live adjacent to our childhood home with my father.
I moved forward by finding work outside the reservation. I traveled the country, living outside of the Navajo reservations while working in the environmental field for other tribes and the federal government.
Many years later, my father transferred the permit for the 10 acres to me to entice me to come home. I had to reapply for a homesite lease in order to live close to where I could farm. As a Navajo farmer and a part of a tribe collectively, one truth is constant in my mind: the land that I live on, the land that I farm on and where I raise my family, will never belong to me for the purpose of building equity or a sense of the American dream that some Americans maintain. Many foreigners risk their lives to make their American dream come true, but I knew it would never be part of my dream if I continued to stay on the reservation. As a collective unit, we, the Navajo, belong to Earth instead of the Earth belonging to us.
After achieving my goal of getting my education, serving my country and my tribe as an enlisted member and as an officer in the commissioned corps, I moved home to fulfill my commitment to my father by accepting the permit to continue our family’s legacy of farming on our homelands.
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Farming is hard, expensive, and time consuming. My success hinges on my hope and prayers that my crop will one day feed my family and have enough left over to share or sell. There are so many facets and obstacles to getting water to the plot. I pray that we get enough water to keep our crops alive long enough to get the best harvest.
One of the biggest challenges, though, for Native American farmers is federal Indian policy. While most presidential administrations believe Native Americans have the right to self-determination (the idea that each tribe gets to choose how it governs itself), the U.S. Supreme Court interprets treaties and policies from our origin, which can reduce the ability of tribes to figure out their own path to that self-determination. For 500 years, over generations of administrations, this pendulum swings back and forth; a Supreme Court ruling impacting the Navajo Nation will also have repercussions on tribes down in Florida, even if it doesn’t have direct relation to what that tribe needs. A struggle to maintain our language, our ceremonies, our way of life, and our homeland that is held in trust for the benefit of people is a constant reminder of the price our ancestors paid for us to return to our ancestral lands.
Our ability to farm on the reservation is impacted more than other farmers in the United States. Navajo farmers do not have the equity to finance projects on the reservation because the land is held in trust, a land status where the government holds the land and reserves it for the tribe. Farmers cannot get most outside funding that is available to farmers off the reservation because of the land status and lack of federal agencies available to provide technical assistance locally. Trust lands cannot be repossessed or given away because it is reserved, and cannot be bought, sold or used as collateral; therefore, most funding from banks is not possible.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ trust responsibility to assist Navajo farmers is part of its broader mandate to support tribal self-governance, sovereignty, and economic development. However, the delegation of responsibilities between the bureau and the tribe for the administration of land use permits is not clear. When Navajo farmers ask for assistance to maintain the infrastructure that conveys the water for which the tribe holds water rights to, farmers often don’t feel like the bureau is held accountable for fulfilling their obligation after centuries of oversight. Lack of records and the inability to transfer permits in a timely manner creates challenges and obstacles, which discourages new farmers from taking responsibility of plots that lay fallow.
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When my children were born, I prayed while I planted their umbilical cords soon after they were born on the farm. A sprinkle of corn pollen and a prayer asking the Creator that my child would grow roots from the womb of our Mother Earth to be the best person they can be. I planted their umbilical cord where they would always be connected to home. My children grew up playing in the dirt, eating the dirt, and eventually, they planted their favorite sweet fruit or vegetable in the dirt. Soon, I will teach them how to operate the tractor to continue the legacy of farming.
I pray they will have the ability to farm for the next seven generations in the same place they are connected to Mother Earth. Sometimes I wonder how Congress will stand up for us, if they will honor the treaties, and remember that they put us on reservations to keep the peace. I wonder if the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who assigned us permits will fulfill the trust responsibilities and obligation to provide oversight and assistance to allow farmers to continue to sustain Navajo families, Navajo communities, and feed Navajo livestock with the rights given to each permit holder. Our farming way of life hinges on ensuring the infrastructure is maintained and operated so that each permit holder is able to get water, something that is determined by Congress and supposed to be fulfilled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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Coming home and farming has been a blessing. Many aspects of farming are determined by each farm permit holder and their ability to continue farming. Farmers struggle in my community because the funding that is allocated by the tribe and the federal government hardly ever reaches the farthest points of where the water flows onto each farm. I struggle to figure out where my efforts would best help my family, my community, and my people.
Once I get on the farm, my struggle, my disappointment in the federal system that hinders us as small farmers on the reservation, dissipates while I plant my seeds of hope, resilience, and courage to continue this way of life.