'WE CAN'T LET THESE SHEEP GO'

A NEW DEAL-ERA PROGRAM NEARLY ERADICATED THE SACRED NAVAJO-CHURRO SHEEP—AND STILL REVERBERATES THROUGH THE NAVAJO NATION TODAY.

- FIONA HARRIGAN

THE COURSE OF Lyle McNeal’s life changed in 1972. Then a professor in California Polytechnic State University’s Animal Science Department, McNeal led the college’s Boots and Spurs club on a week-long trip to the state’s agricultural Salinas Valley.

The group visited a ranch whose owners, a father and son duo, provided horses to Hollywood productions. A few sheep who were there to graze the land caught McNeal’s eye.

They turned out to be Navajo-Churro sheep. The descendants of animals brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1540s, Navajo-Churro sheep are of deep importance to the Navajo—and of great use to their keepers. Their fine wool comes in many colors and can be spun for use in weaving and other crafts, and they produce desirable meat and milk. They also make “dang good mothers,” in McNeal’s words, lambing twice a year and often yielding twins.

After the trip, McNeal began to look into the breed. He learned that they were sacred to the Navajo people—and he learned that fewer than 450 of the animals were left. “I said, ‘This sacred sheep is similar and almost equivalent to what the bison was,” he recalls.

“I thought, ‘I can’t let this happen,’” recounts McNeal. “A few years later, after I got some land on campus to graze, it was in 1977, I asked the rancher up there in Salinas if he would be willing to either donate or sell some ewes and some rams to me to start a nucleus flock to start bringing them back.”

The rancher agreed, letting McNeal pick six breeding ewes and two rams. With the help of some students, McNeal spruced up an old poultry facility for the sheep on campus. “That’s kind of how it got started,” he says—that is, the Navajo Sheep Project, a decadeslong, ongoing effort to breed Navajo-Churro sheep and return them to the Navajo Nation.

Some estimates say that Navajo-Churros numbered in the millions at their height. How did this breed dwindle to just a few hundred in the space of a few decades?