During the Great Depression, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs imposed a conservation program on the Navajo Reservation, which eliminated half of the Navajos’ livestock herds in an effort to halt erosion. This controversial program failed, and reflected differences in their values and their understandings about the way nature works. The conservationists employed scientific theories to depict the Navajo range as seriously overgrazed. Navajos by contrast, drew on their cosmology and their long experience grazing the southern Colorado Plateau, and they concluded that the problem was temporary drought. Each group offered a conception of the world that the other found incomprehensible. That was not necessarily an unbridgeable divide, for they shared common ground – the desire to maintain some sort of “balance of nature.” Presented by Marsha Weisiger, the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History at the University of Oregon, where she is an associate professor of history and environmental studies.

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