The Great Livestock Massacre: Mid-1930s
- The chapter opens with Chester at home on his summer break in Chichiltah. He's mending a fence for the sheep corral. He's thirteen or fourteen by this point.
- Suddenly, as he's working, he hears the rumble of heavy equipment. Men from the Bureau of Indian Affairs arrive with a bulldozer. They dig a huge trench through Grandmother's land and on the land of their neighbors.
- The BIA men tell Grandfather and Grandmother to herd about 700 of their 1,000 sheep and goats into the trench. What are these Bureau of Indian Affairs guys up to? It's not looking good.
- Once the animals are rounded up into the trench, the BIA men (gasp!) set fire to them.
- The poor sheep and goats make horrible noises and bleat and scream as they're burned alive. Couldn't those BIA men have done this in a more humane way? We know PETA would be seriously displeased.
- The whole family is devastated by the killing of their livestock.
- Poor Chester's in tears that night, because he knows that this is a huge blow to the family. Livestock is wealth among the Navajo, and they've just lost, oh, 70% of theirs.
- As it turns out, it's not just Chester's family that's been so badly affected.
- Every Navajo family in the area with more than 100 animals had been forced to "reduce" their flocks.
- It takes time for Chester's family to figure out why the government's ordered this "reduction." At the time of the Livestock Massacre, the country is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the government is worried about Navajo herds overgrazing and using up good land.
- So the government decided to just kill off most of the Navajos' animals. In return, the government promises that the Navajo will be granted a land expansion.
- But once the livestock reduction takes place, the Navajos aren't granted the promised land expansion.
- Chester tells us that some historians think the livestock reduction program was aimed at making Navajos more powerless and more dependent on the government.
- The extermination program went on for years. The Navajo sheep population is reduced from 1.6 million in 1932 to 400,000 in 1944. That is a lot of dead sheep.
- Chester tells us that the Livestock Massacre tears apart the Navajo community.
- Everyone is much poorer as a result of losing their herds, and so neighbors aren't as willing to cooperate with one another and help each other out after the massacre—they can't afford to.
- What's more, the massacre also undermines the strong Navajo work ethic.
- What's the point of working hard, growing herds and wealth, when it can all be taken away in the blink of an eye? They feel powerless.
- According to Chester, the Livestock Massacre is the second big tragedy in Navajo history, after the Long Walk.
- For the rest of the summer, and for the summers after that, Chester continues to help with herding the few remaining animals on Grandmother's land.
- But at the end of each summer he dreads going back to school.
- Chester's sister gets sick with tuberculosis and stops going to school. She stays behind in Chichiltah instead.
- Coolidge finishes school. With his sister and brother gone, poor Chester is left to make the trek back to Fort Defiance all alone at the end of each summer.
- He still hates school, but he's a responsible kid, and he wants to make his family proud.