Although people living in the reservation border towns of Flagstaff or Winslow have taken steps to cope with climate crisis by converting their yard to desert landscaping and installing air conditioning, Mendez and many other Navajo families are in a full-on struggle to protect their livelihoods and traditional connections to their homeland.ĭuring Covid, the Navajo reservation made headlines for its lack of indoor plumbing and how non-profit organizations and government agencies were coming to the nation’s aid. Over the last three decades, the Navajo Nation – the largest Indigenous nation in the US – has felt the impacts of a warming planet much earlier and more dramatically than other communities in the south-west that have well-developed municipal infrastructure and abundant financial resources. And they have been hauling it ever since. In the mid-1990s, the family resorted to hauling water for their animals from far-away community wells. And vast rolling grasslands that had long sustained the livestock turned into sand dunes. A windmill that pumped groundwater stopped working. A rain-fed lake that watered the sheep and horses disappeared. “The land could no longer provide for us.”Īs drought took hold in the high desert of north-eastern Arizona, natural water sources dried up, making non-irrigated farming impossible. “All of sudden we were eating canned food,” said Mendez. But then in the early 1990s, things changed. It was a self-sufficient lifestyle that had been much the same for centuries. They ate corn, beans, squash and freshly butchered mutton. Mendez’s grandmother raised sheep on the family’s ancestral land and her grandfather farmed along moist, fertile gulleys.
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