Navajo Nation Sees Farming Renaissance During Coronavirus Pandemic
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Farming is making a comeback in the Navajo Nation. As tribal leaders have ordered people to stay home to flatten the coronavirus curve, more are returning to their fields. Laurel Morales of member station KJZZ reports.
LAUREL MORALES, BYLINE: Historically, Navajos have lived off the land, but decades of assimilation, forced relocation and dependence on federal food distribution programs changed that. Navajo farmer Tyrone Thompson is on a mission to help people return to their roots. He's even taken to social media to teach the masses farming techniques.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
TYRONE THOMPSON: This method that we're going to be demonstrating today is called the lasagna bed. And it's basically layers of ground beef and cheese - no, just kidding. It's organic matter.
MORALES: The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls the Navajo Nation a food desert. People travel up to 40 miles to get their groceries. But Thompson says they don't have to.
THOMPSON: As we've seen the shelves empty, no food and toilet paper, we kind of reconnect to our roots and some of the tools that were given by our elders and our ancestors, our planting stick and our steering sticks, those are our weapons against hunger and poverty and sickness.
MORALES: The Navajo Nation has gone from having the highest coronavirus infection rate in the country to a steady decline in cases. Now tribal leaders don't want members to travel to surrounding states where numbers are spiking. Researcher Brandon Francis says more people are staying home and farming.
BRANDON FRANCIS: There has been a surge in interest. Seeds were hard to come by. They flew off the shelves just as fast as toilet paper did.
MORALES: This renewed interest in agriculture comes five years after many people on the reservation abandoned farming. They quit when an EPA crew investigating a mine in Colorado accidentally unleashed 3 million gallons of metal-contaminated waste into the southwest river system. Photos of the yellow river went viral.
FRANCIS: And it's shocking, and it's shocked people worldwide.
MORALES: The town of Shiprock is named for a giant rock formation that appears to be sailing across the dusty desert. Many people there don't have running water, so when the Gold King Mine dumped into its main water source, Shiprock Chapter President Duane "Chili" Yazzie says people were devastated.
DUANE YAZZIE: The mine spill certainly had a very significant impact on our lives, our mental, emotional, spiritual health.
MORALES: Water plays a critical role in Navajo ceremonies. So when people saw the yellow sludge flow past their farms, Yazzie says they weren't sure what would become of their prayers, their livelihoods, their families.
YAZZIE: We, as Indigenous people, continue to recognize that the spiritual and the physical aspects of our life are one and the same.
MORALES: Including farming. Upstream in Colorado, dozens of historic mines are still leaking, and many of them could surge, once again endangering farming on the Navajo Nation. It's an area called Bonita Peak, which includes the Gold King Mine. Peter Butler is the chairman of an advisory group that's working with the EPA to prevent another spill, like a nearby mine that's had two major blowouts in recent years.
PETER BUTLER: Nobody wants to go in there and find out what's going on because, you know, who knows? The water may be backed up again. You're going back in there and if, of course, it releases, it's a death threat.
MORALES: So now Butler says the question becomes...
BUTLER: How much are you willing to spend to try to reduce the risk of unplanned surges when there may or may not happen?
MORALES: Downstream, the Navajo are now counting on clean water to irrigate their crops and become a self-sustaining nation during a pandemic.
For NPR News, I'm Laurel Morales in Flagstaff.
Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.