Grounded desires: Grazing regime,desires,and development in a Diné community

Introduction

The Navajo Nation, Diné Bikeyah, is located in the Southwest four corners area covering Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The Navajo Nation consists of 110 local governments, known as chapter houses, that work with the central government in Window Rock. Each local government grapples with economic development projects that are fraught with tensions between the community demands for jobs and infrastructure to keep community members from leaving. Additionally, they are tasked with improving the material conditions that pressure folks to leave. The community takes into consideration their community’s needs, perceived regional and national development trajectories, and the laws that shape development. One of these communities is Shonto, Shą́ą́’tó, named after an artesian well that it surrounds.

Shonto is located in Northeastern Arizona between the tourist network of Page, AZ and Monument Valley. In 2019, it was estimated that Shonto’s population was 1695, which declined from 2124 in 2010 (Nation Division of Community Development, n.d.). Additionally, a little more than half of total of 600 Shonto households had an income between 0 and $24,999 (Navajo Nation Division of Community Development, n.d.). With little income, community members leave seeking job opportunities outside of the community and outside of the Navajo Nation sometimes leaving homes empty for long periods of time. As one participant said,

There is hardly anyone that lives here. We just need power lines and paved roads. There is someone always against all that and we don’t get a power line. A lady lives way down there. She says she does not want power line. We need to get power lines up to here. (Shonto resident, 2017).

This common every-day experience is a reflection of the historical settler project of Native elimination and political marginalization as well as community members’ visions of the future. Melanie Yazzie (2018) writes that capitalism is a crucial force for development in Diné communities. The Navajo Nation government began with capitalist extraction. The first government was established to facilitate oil extraction in the 1920s and the government would change with the shift in energy in the 1970s as well (Robbins, 1979). Scholars would characterize the Navajo Nation as a product of colonial relations that benefited settler populations as an internal colony (Robbins, 1979; Ruffing, 1979). The uneven power-relations between Natives and the settler state were largely formed by land dispossession, removal, and the marginalization of Native authority over lands (Dunbar-Ortiz, 1979; Jorgensen, 1978; Kelley, 1979; Robbins, 1978; Snipp, 1986a, 1986b).

The Shonto community members’ demands are articulated in and through the shadow of colonialism and capitalism but they seek material and political solutions to the problems of both. I draw upon Eve Tuck’s (2009) work on Native desire as a purposeful practice of informed seeking that connects the past with future, demonstrates Native collectivity and continuity, and emphasizes Native sovereignty. Diné community desires for infrastructure and job creation illuminate the connection between a shared historical land regime and complex collective visions for Diné continuity through varied individual experience bundled together by a shared longing for Native sovereignty. I argue that Diné desire provides insight or fleshes out our understanding of how Diné navigate colonial authority and capitalist pressure that manifest in their everyday lives. While Eve Tuck links desire to Native collectivity (2009) and conscious productive practice (2010), I explore Native desire within the context of political marginalization represented by a land regime imposed by the United States. Colonialism is a project that has limited and continues to marginalize Native political authority over land and water governance (Curley, 2019b). In this exploration of desire, I ground Native desires in everyday land use and relations to understand how Native people navigate settler-colonialism. This entails historicizing desire in relation to land regimes and relations. I draw upon Eve Tuck’s (2009, 2010) generative concept of desire and the critical theorization of grounded normativity (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2017) to examine the desires of a Diné community as they relate to development and land use. These desires suggest that (i) Diné desires are historically informed by land regimes and the historical consequences and (ii) Diné desires are future-oriented expressions of increased authority over land use related to, but not restricted to, infrastructure development and job creation. Shonto has two land regimes: trust and grazing regime. Trust land describes the land held in trust by the U.S. federal government thus limiting Navajo Nation authority over land use. The grazing regime limits the number of livestock on the range and authorizes permit holders as decision makers for development projects. The grazing regime is embedded in the former.

Historical capitalist extraction creates pressures that Diné community members take into consideration when moving away from their community-seeking job opportunities or access to infrastructure. By focusing on the Shonto community members’ demands, it becomes clear that Diné are not monolithic in their desires and contradict one another. Yet, these desires are bundled together by Native sovereignty and continuity. This article centers the Diné community members’ desire for development of infrastructure and jobs as an informed and conscious practice to counter the outward migration of Diné. Diné community members express anxiety and fear when talking about their relatives leaving their communities and homelands. Some felt that if too many Diné left, the loss in certain land practices like sheepherding will undermine their claim to their homeland. As a result, community members expressed visions of a future where Diné had more authority over lands that would contribute to their collective continuity. In these discussions about land use and practices, Diné community members’ everyday experiences are textured with emotions and rationales that help them navigate and critique the land regime.

The history of the Shonto community features a history of uneven-development that has forced Diné to leave the community in search of jobs and a grazing regime that pits the desires of community members against one another. These histories are bound together by land thus emphasizing a shared theme of Diné authority over the land use decisions. Development in the Navajo Nation invokes discussions of land use and authority. Critiques of land uses and practices are not far from discussions of desired development projects. Thus, Diné desire and critique are often within the same breath. Diné are not satisfied with simply living with the current land regime but envision a future where they exercise larger participation in land use and planning decisions. The desires for development are part of a larger expression of Diné self-determination and continuity. Historicizing Diné desires helps illustrate how Diné experience colonial land regimes and capitalist structures and signal to a trajectory free of colonial interference. This trajectory bundles a shared sense of self-determination and continuity. In the following sections, I explore Diné desires for development drawing on Eve Tuck’s (2009, 2010) work on Native desire and break with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of desire. I ground desire in land relations and practices to historicized Native desires in relation to development. Secondly, I outline the methods and data collection. Thirdly, I offer a brief historical overview of Shonto to describe the history of Shonto from previous studies focusing on labor, development, and grazing topics (Adams, 1958; Adams and Ruffing, 1977). From my ethnographic research in 2017, I draw upon the interviews to detail how desires emerge in discussions about development land use. Diné community desires are complex, contested, and messy but are still bundled together by a desire for Diné authority over land.

Eve Tuck and grounding desire

Historically, settler-colonialism operates through legal regimes that sever, shape, and re-shape Native practices and relations with land. Native practices and relations with land are crucial to Native subjectivities and creating economies, laws, and governance (Barker and Pickerill, 2019; Curran et al., 2020; Daigle, 2016). The significance of land as a source of ethics and political action is demonstrated by the introduction of grounded normativity by Glen Coulthard (2014). Grounded normativity is place-based set of land relations and practices that link Indigenous people to human and non-humans creating an ethics of non-exploitation, reciprocal responsibility, obligations, and knowledge accumulated over generations. Grounded normativity poses as a critique of capitalist extraction, accumulation, imperialism, governmentality, heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, and transphobia (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2017). This source of authority and ethics posed a threat to the expansive settler-project. To undermine Native authority of lands, the U.S. established regimes that would sever and shape Native relations and practices to land and water (Curley, 2021; Liboiron, 2021). Legal regimes help facilitate and justify the settler-colonial project in accordance with industrial capitalist expansion while Indigenous people have used whatever legal options at hand to stop extraction (Benton-Connell and Cochrane, 2020; Ceric, 2020; Robbins, 1994; Scott, 2020; Williams, 2005). Land regimes facilitate the commodification, dispossession, and domination of Native lands based on ideas of improvement, waste, and modernity (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011; Kirsch, 1995; Massey, 2005; Radcliffe, 2020; Wood, 1999).

The main U.S. land regime in Native communities is the trust land regime where Native lands are under the authority of the U.S. Federal government. This land regime makes it difficult for Native nations to control and use their current lands even as Native nations assume more responsibility and authority. Additionally, the trust land regime includes a grazing regime that dictates Diné land practices and livestock. For Diné, traditional historical practices are shaped by an imposed grazing regime that was established with little to no concern for Diné relations to animals, land, and kin. With the grazing regime in place, Diné are in conflict with relatives over land use and animals. Moreover, Diné express a sense of disappointment with the fact that trust land restricts their authority over land. A critique of the grazing regime is a double critique of the grazing and trust land both imposed and contested. Settler land regimes often overshadow the desires and authority of Native peoples to address the settler desire for Native lands. Settler desires invoke futurity about the settler population, security, and territorial expansion that preclude the futurity of Native peoples (Hunt, 2018; Simpson, 2019). This desire even extends to the settler’s desire to become the Native through performance of Indianness (Deloria, 1998). Tuck and Yang (2012) expand on settler desires by discussing the settler strategies to relieve oneself of guilt or responsibility without addressing the project of colonialism.

I draw on Eve Tuck’s (2009, 2010) work on Native desire to show how land relations and practices are crucial for understanding the strategies for development and historical struggles for Indigenous self-determination that goes beyond the life cycle of one person and one generation. Native desires are informed and produced by the colonial project that are ongoing temporalities similar to what Christina Sharpe (2016) describes as the wake. Tuck (2009; 2010) begins her theorization of desire from the Deleuze and Foucault’s discussion of desire to connect it to settler colonialism. Eve Tuck (2010) ‘breaks up’ with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of desire while recognizing that it is generative yet unsatisfying. According to Tuck (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri describe desire as an incomplete and productive “exponentially growing assemblage” that produces unexpected outcomes (639). Desires are always becoming; they are informed by the past, then disassembled and reassembled for the future continuously.

Thus, outcomes are unexpected and almost revolutionary. Tuck finds this conception of desire useful for its exponential and productive characteristics rather than a sense of lacking and absence. Damage accounts of native communities emphasize native loss of culture, land, and opportunities that construct them as deficit. These accounts foreclose serious discussions about the Native self-determination, authority, and gain. Despite damage-centered research being attuned to social and historical issues in their analysis, such research furnishes native communities as damaged, defeated, and in need of intervention characterization by colonial paternalism(Tuck, 2009).

This approach can provide political and material gains for native communities but is confined to a limited representation of Native peoples. Yet, Tuck argues that Deleuze is still unsatisfactory because Deleuze relegates desire to the unconscious (Tuck, 2010).

Unlike Deleuze, Tuck (2010) argues that desire is conscious, smart, wise, and strategic. Tuck is less interested in theories of false consciousness of capitalism and oppression but emphasizes conscious intergenerational practices and relations. She (2010) writes that desire accumulates wisdom over generations, inherited from Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, while being enriched by ideas of the future. The past and future inform the desires of Native people in the present that is couched in Native epistemology, experience, and material conditions. Desires are formed from everyday experiences, material conditions, land relations and practice, and the intergenerational struggles for self-determination. Centering the everyday land practices and relations illustrates how Native desires are messy and divergent critiques of colonial paternalism and visions of Native self-determination. Tuck draws desire from the “Indigenous understanding of collectivity and the interdependence of the collective and the person rather than on the Western focus on the individual” (2009: 420). The Native collective is rife with contradiction, far from monolithic, and messy. This denies essentialist rhetoric that paints Native community as a single monolith of opinion, desire, and practices. One portion of a Native community can practice and support capitalist relations while another critiques it and actively dismantle it. There is room for everyone and their desires. What makes desire useful is its ability to “upend commonly held assumptions of responsibility, cohesiveness, ignorance, and paralysis within dispossessed and disenfranchised communities” (Tuck, 2009: 417). The multiple, divergent, and complicated desires in a Native community are sure to dispel ideas of a monolithic group and draw attention to the histories that produce difference and similarities. The divergent and similar desires can illuminate political projects, mobilization, and alliances for certain development projects. Historical attention is crucial to understanding the many desires of community members. Lastly, Tuck argues that recognizing desire involves “recognizing our sovereignty as a core element of our being and meaning making” as crucial to informed seeking (2009: 423). These histories of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and Indigenous practices converge in the present with struggles for self-determination. Desires do not deny or downplay these histories and their consequent trauma but open discussions about Native continuity despite them (Tuck and Ree, 2013).

According to Steve Pile (2019), multiple conceptions of desire exist which are shared, do not follow expectations, and emerge in particular histories and geographies. It is these characterizations that make desire political as well as complex and contradictory depending on time and space. Desire relates the imaginary of the good life to belonging (Rouhani, 2019), transnational careers (Wang, 2013), community development as nuclear waste sites (Saraç-Lesavre, 2020) and sustainable management and control for waste (Moore et al., 2018). Benson and Fischer (2007) write about Maya farmers’ engagement in the global commodity production, emphasizing how desires of the producers are associated with a good life with improved material conditions for their families. They (2007) write that desire is “a collective phenomenon shaped at the interface of individual intentions, local worlds, and global flows” (802). Material conditions and the capitalist forces at play are key factors in the shaping of desires and attachments but there is still a vision of the good life attached to goals or objects. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant (2011) writes that objects of desire are less about the objects but the cluster of promises that people attach to objects that are framed by ideas of the good life. These objects of desires can be tiring and exhausting due to the current capitalist system being unable to fulfil people’s fantasy of a good life. Desiring is a future-oriented practice full of obstacles produced by the capitalist mode of production. This tension between visions of the good life and real-world practices and relations is generative in examining Native desires for development in relation to land. Berlant connects desires to the limits of capitalist modes of production.

Following Alejandro Camargo and Diana Ojeda (2017) that desire is a historical and geographical object of study, I argue that Diné desires are tied a land regime and a future of Diné continuity and self-determination. Grounding desires bridges Diné desires to development in order to understand conscious Diné strategies for self-determination and continuity. Land, with its histories of dispossession, proletarianization, and marginalization, is where Diné desires emerge and flourish leading to messy outcomes and directions. These desires are grounded in place-based land relations and practices within Native homelands. Grounding desires helps historicize and explore how land and its everyday practices are crucial to understanding contested desires for development and continuity without the expectations placed upon Diné peoples. Diné people are not simply noble savages who exude ecological ethics or nomads who overgrazed the lands to their detriment. Their desires are located between their visions of a good life emphasizing self-determination and collective continuity and their everyday practices and experiences. Grounding desires opens up discussions about Native land use that are capitalist and extractive outside of the expectation of an anti-capitalist grounded normativity posed by Coulthard (2014). Grounded desires illuminate how everyday practices can produce visions of land use that are both capitalist and anti-capitalist. It demonstrates how grazing regimes can produce Diné desires for private property and self-determination. In the context of the Navajo Nation, the land regime produces messy desires that are not monolithic or without contradictions where they are bundled together by a future without colonial paternalism. The focus on community desires invokes critiques of grazing land technologies limit Diné authority over their land while providing a glimpse of the future absent of such regimes. It acknowledges the history and suffering that established the grazing regime but draws attention to the “textured acumen and hope” of desires for development (Tuck, 2010: 644). Desires are not monolithic but generative for a future where Native self-determination and continuity are taken seriously. Community members make do with the current land, land regime, and uneven development to forge futures, and their comments illustrate a desire for the absence of colonial paternalism left in the wake of settler-colonialism (Dawney, 2021). These desires counter narratives of finality, deterioration, and crisis that are usually attached to the representation of Native peoples in a settler-colonial state (Whyte, 2018).

Methods

In 2017, I participated in a research project that would survey the Shonto community with members of Diné Policy Institute. I was one of many Diné researchers who were fortunate enough to return to their homelands to conduct research at a tribal college. Based on my experience living in and around the Navajo Nation, I grew attuned to the many desires of Diné people and the ways they were expressed in similar and divergent ways. While I did not read Eve Tuck’s (2009) critique of damaged centered research, I was not fond of research painting our community as deficient and broken. I desired to see research that contextualized the wants and complaints about the grazing and the subsequent conflicts over land use and development projects. The 2017 research project was an inspired by research studies conducted in 1955 (Adams, 1958) and 1972 (Adams and Ruffing, 1977) to trace the social and economic changes over time. The 2017 research would add additional data to produce a 60-year longitudinal study of the Shonto community with an emphasis on development and land use change. I attempted to obtain the original survey and locations of participants from the original but the authors did not have it. Survey questions were crafted questions based on the data collected from the previous studies. Maps in the studies help in the selection of households in an attempt to survey the original survey participants or their descendants. The interviews occurred in the participants’ home, porch, or in their dirt driveway. I asked participants if their elders remembered taking part in the 1955 and 1978 surveys but many said they did not know. A total of two weeks was spent driving in the community interviewing households about the grazing regimes, issues, and solutions. I knocked on doors, took wrong turns, stopped at dead ends, and asked for directions seeking any community member in the selected areas interested in participating. The opening questions of the survey captured demographics of the community while the latter portion of the survey was open-ended questions. The open-ended questions would provide the participants an opportunity to communicate what they saw as obstacles, goals, and issues in their community. I analyze 48 interviews in the Diné community, Shonto. I initially coded for emergent themes in the first round and then focused on coding for themes based on my experience living in the Navajo Nation particularly regarding grazing practices, development projects, and land conflicts. Taking Tuck’s (2010) argument that desire is purposeful and conscious, I focused on participants’ explicit expressions for wants, needs, and longings to identify community participants’ desire. Critiques of the current status quo often followed these explicit expressions of desires. Using the data from the previous Shonto studies, I historicized their desires and critiques in relation to the community and the Navajo Nation. This article attempts to be a current grounded longitudinal study of the community’s desires as well as land use and change.

Shonto: A conjuncture of grazing and development

A Diné Shonto community member reveals the complex relation between their desire, development via the daily practices of engaging with local government, doing laundry, travelling long distances for goods. The comment demonstrates the intergenerational time span it takes for development to occur in the community. Diné community members either pass away before development or they leave. Due to material conditions in the Navajo Nation, community members leave seeking opportunities for work or education. The quote and the statistics contribute to the narrative that people are leaving the Navajo Nation seeking better opportunities while development is slow. Hidden beneath this narrative is a grazing regime that is left intact despite its effect on the community member’s everyday lives. The grazing regime manages the number of livestock in the Navajo Nation based on carrying capacity and was ultimately a conservation technology produced by a draconian policy of livestock reduction (Weisiger, 2007). The grazing regime informs decisions about land use, infrastructure, housing, and business development.

Grazing regimes are an example of legal regimes, bodies of law and policy, that assist with the marginalization of Native authority over lands. The grazing regime in the Navajo Nation began with the violent livestock reduction in the 1930s imposed by the federal government and eventually regulations and permits were established in the late 1930s (Weisiger, 2007, 2009).

Marsha Weisiger’s book, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (2009) explores the livestock reduction era and the further impoverishment of Diné. To facilitate livestock control, the Navajo Nation was divided into 18 distinct units, and studies were conducted to measure vegetation and land capacity (Bailey and Bailey, 1999). These grazing districts are still in effect today, which help tribal bureaucrats measure and calculate land use and capacity. Along with the creation of the land districts, grazing regulations and permits were created to cap and enable livestock grazing on land. The grazing regulations were aimed at balancing the livestock with the land-carrying capacity (Parman, 1976). These permits were produced by a 1937 study, conducted by the Soil Conservation Survey, which determined the maximum sheep units for each district (Bailey and Bailey, 1999). The grazing permits issued to livestock owners would be a fixed number of sheep units for the indefinite future; thus, the number of livestock could not be increased and would be fragmented when passed down to future generations. These rounds of calculation reflect the cold abstraction that produces land stripped of its context and multiplicity in value. The first grazing permit was issued in 1941 and became enforced by the Navajo tribe in 1949. The grazing regimes were codified by the Diné government in 1956 thus institutionalizing land districts, regulations, permits, and policies.

Shonto is layered by two types of land regimes where the main difference is in how much livestock is permitted but the operation and effects are generally the same. The grazing regime places land use authority in the hands of the permit holders. Any development plan requires the approval of grazing permit holders. In the case of the Navajo Nation, the lands are overlaid with a grazing regime that influences the desires of Diné and their future use of the land but remains largely hidden because of the difficulty in changing both trust land and grazing land regulations.

The historical studies of Shonto show how the grazing regime is uneven in enforcement which affects the daily lives of Diné people.

Scholarship on the Shonto community began in the 1950s. The brief vignettes of Shonto illustrate how Diné experience is ultimately linked to land use and practices. Despite the influx of money in the Navajo Nation, via the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act of 1950, Shonto residents were still relying on railroad work (Francisconi, 1998). The money from the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Act would create wage work for road, public school, health facilities, and development programs. K.P. Chamberlain (2000) describes the 1950s as the era when the Navajo Nation sought economic independence. During this era, the first study in 1955 by William Y. Adams is a study of the role of the trading post and trader in the Shonto community. The local government of Shonto, a chapter house, was recognized in 1939 and the first chapter building was built in 1958. In 1941, less than half of the community members had been away from the reservation (Adams, 1958: 37). In 1955, many men had temporary jobs but half of Shonto’s income came from railroad workers who went back and forth for work. Santa Fe Railway would be the main company that would provide jobs for the Diné men in the community.

William Y. Adams (1958) writes that in 1955, 80% of Shonto’s annual income was dependent on the outside (124). Due to Diné traditional subsistence practices, Diné had more control over their income as herders and farmers as opposed to the Diné workers who had left seeking jobs. During this time, Diné interacted with the Diné government via the grazing district committee comprised of three Diné community members who would host informational meetings about regulations. In 1955, there were 58 grazing permittees within the Shonto community. In the mid-20th century, grazing permits and regulations were not enforced, so many Diné livestock owners could continue growing their livestock (Rosser, 2019). Despite the large income from wage work, these jobs were “subsidiary and supplemental” (Adams, 1958: 155) and the traditional practices of farming and livestock maintained a standard of living. Many families still herded sheep, and a sixth of Shonto’s income came from livestock sales. The traditional grazing practices were still intact and Adams believes the isolation of the community helped the community avoid enforcement of the grazing regimes and regulations. Adams (1958) concludes his economic study of Shonto by writing that Diné people were able to participate in non-Diné culture and add to their culture without losing their practices or relations (122). His conclusions focus on the isolation of the Shonto community as a major factor for its preservation and addition of non-Diné culture. In 1955, the community did not have infrastructure for gas, electricity, and plumbing.

By the 1970s, the Navajo Nation was seeking royalties to support their enlarged social service network and to improve the material conditions of the Diné. One example being that Chairman Paul Jones chose to invest in electrical infrastructure, increasing public education, and local government all the while the Navajo Nation became more engaged in the global market (Chamberlain, 2000). William Y. Adams returned to the Shonto community in 1972 with Lorraine T. Ruffin. They conducted a study to track the sociological and economic changes from 1955 to 1971. They hoped to capture the changes during the 16 years of “unprecedent modernization” (Adams and Ruffing, 1977: 59). They write that Shonto has not experienced the same development as the rest of the Navajo Nation. Since 1955, a community center was built and the road was paved from Tuba City to Kayenta, both of which were the result of the mining of Black Mesa south of Shonto. The authors noted that the growing population of Shonto causes an effect of overcrowding on land. The overcrowding becomes more apparent when considering that all the Shonto land is being used for grazing. Since 1955, there has been the creation of local permanent and temporary jobs which has allowed Diné to stay closer to home. In summary, the authors described Shonto community’s transition as “change without progress” (Adams and Ruffing, 1977: 80). Michael J. Francisconi (1998) writes that by 1978, two billion dollars’ worth of crude oil had been exported from the Navajo Nation but the profit would exceed one hundred billion, with the Navajo Nation only receiving three hundred million in royalties. The 1955 and 1972 studies show how the expansion of historical capitalism was porous and uneven in its attempt to incorporate Diné and how traditional land subsistence practices were still ongoing (Bush, 2013; Lamphere, 1979). The ineffectiveness of programs to pull Diné further into wage work allowed Diné to prioritize traditional practices. The lack of enforcement of grazing regime provided a cushion for Diné people when it came to alternative incomes besides wage work. The Diné economy may have become more integrated with the national and global market but Shonto residents were still able to balance their wage work and traditional subsistence activities such as sheepherding.

In 1999, the Shonto government would become the first local Diné government to become Local Governance Act (LGA)-certified and it would lead the way for the rest of local governments. As an LGA-certified chapter, Shonto would gain the authority of planning, development, and implementing projects in the community. Additionally, the Navajo Nation would be considered an underdeveloped nation produced by uneven development (Weiss, 1984). Since 2005, the Shonto government used its powers to plan and conduct studies for development and take on business administrative authorities that were usually reserved for the central government. Shonto is located 60 miles from the Navajo Generating Station (NGS), which closed in 2018 when Salt River Project ended its agreement with the Navajo Nation, thus eliminating a lot of jobs with high incomes and benefits (Curley, 2019a). These new local government powers have helped with mitigating the loss of income that came from the closure of the NGS. Local Diné governments in the surrounding area have grappled with decline of coal jobs while trying to keep Diné within the communities. Recently, the Shonto community built a gas station and initiated a process for building a hotel to tap into the tourist economy between Lake Powell, Grand Canyon, and Monument Valley. In an official memo from the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice-President, Diné President Jonathan Nez remarked on the hotel development as a “vision to empower” local leaders and a means “to create a local economy to sustain jobs and revenue for our people” (Office of the President and Vice President, 2021). The Navajo Nation and the local governments recognize the material conditions and continually seek development projects for infrastructures and job creation as a means to counter the Diné migration towards border towns and away from their communities and relatives. There was no mention of altering the grazing regime in the Navajo President memo but it reveals how land regulations remain a third rail of politics.

Land disputes: Discourse nexus of development, grazing, and continuity

The 2017 interviews revealed a nexus of themes of development, grazing, and continuity bundled together by daily experiences and sovereignty. Land disputes between Shonto community members invoke critiques of the grazing regime, desires for development, and the goal of continuity and sovereignty. Eve Tuck’s (2010) description of desire as messy, complex, wise, intergenerational, and ever changing becomes more visible when Shonto community members discuss land disputes and the discontent that arises from it. Community land disputes arise over the contested authority to control land use as summed up by a Shonto resident (2017):

Livestock, they think they own the land. They said, “we’ll be the one who chase you out of here. We want you to move”, they told me. I said, “only if you pay me how much it costs to live here”.

When Diné talk about grazing regimes, the desires of grazing permit holders are perceived to be antagonistic to those who desire infrastructure and development. These permit holders shape the geography of infrastructure and energy based on authority granted to them. These permit holders can approve or deny necessary infrastructure for community members. Infrastructure is understood as objects and projects that are necessary for community wellbeing. Despite the association of infrastructure and wellbeing, there are community members who do not approve of gas, waters, or electrical infrastructure because it may interfere with their livestock grazing routine. The grazing regimes cause conflict between family members, and neighbors to the point where guns are being fired, livestock is harmed, and occasionally violent episodes.

I mean people … they’re going to say, “oh that’s ours”, a lot of complaints. Land dispute actually, that’s the biggest problem, land dispute … they’ll say this is where I use and all that. Infrastructures like they’re going to build a house or some store there, these [grazing permit holder] are the one in the way. They say this is where I graze and all that. That’s when everything kind of stops, that’s part of it. (Shonto Resident, 2017)

The land regimes have caused some Shonto community members to position the grazing permit holders as antagonistic to development:

… my opinion they need to do away with it. Cause it infers with a lot of infrastructure and ever since I remember could have been a lot of things could’ve been built and it just takes too long just for one person. (Shonto participant, 2017)

Grazing permit holders did not see themselves as obstacles to development for other community members. In some ways, they put forth an alternative land authority that belongs to the Diné as expressed in the previous quote. Others view their livestock practices and authority as a continuing form of sovereignty against land dispossession: “What I heard from the politician is that the livestock holds the land and to the people. The white man will take the land, they’re going for the natural resource, if you don’t have livestock.” (Shonto Resident, 2017). They see themselves as obstacles to federal government paternalism and capitalist extraction and in some ways defenders and users of the land. These quotes demonstrate the messiness produced by a grazing regime established by the Diné government. The colonial entanglement (Dennison, 2012) of the land regime produces messy and contradictory desires of Indigenous people that can lead to conflict and violence among Indigenous community members. They see themselves as continuing traditional practices that sustain a traditional and necessary relationship with the land and livestock. Those who are more critical of grazing see the land use as outdated or unnecessary due to the change in how Diné support themselves with wage work. There are others who want grazing to continue but advocate for updates to policy that allow for both grazing and development to occur simultaneously.

When community members speak of the need for more jobs, they reference the every-day experience of Diné migration away from their homelands. Rarely do they connect it to the dominant land regime in their community that sets the grounds for certain development projects that would be tied to job creation. Their desire for development is shown to be a placed-based phenomenon tied to a sense of homeland and the grazing regime which limits certain development. The participants mentioned that they lived off the reservation as a result of seeking jobs and education. Development of infrastructure, public services, and job opportunities is intimately connected to the idea of staying within traditional homelands. One participant comment, “Some of the people move out because there is no job. They move out and seek jobs” (Shonto Participant, 2017). Even with increased education, Diné participants demonstrate a desire to return to their community permanently so they can maintain relations and practices with relatives and the surrounding land. These included the desire to make herding and farming their main means of incomes. In general, these responsibilities do not disappear when Native peoples leave their homelands (Daigle, 2016; Hunt, 2018). When community members reflected on their time away, they felt a responsibility to return for themselves, their relatives still living in the Shonto, and their descendants.

The desire for job creation is articulated by the hope for the younger generation staying and living in the community. Community development is intimately connected to a desire for the youth to stay in the community:

If it would provide jobs for the younger kids that would be great, because we got a lot of kids that are just staying at home and doing nothing during the summer, I would prefer them to do their own job and trying to learn like skills for the future. (Shonto Participant, 2017)

Many of the respondents said they would support the land withdrawal of land if it meant that it would provide jobs, public services, stores, and infrastructure. The shared agreement illustrates the importance of Diné continuity and futurity as a collective. Many of the participants identified the youth and the elders as the beneficiaries of these developments. “We need something that benefits the youth. YMCA, kids working for the chapter house. The kids were walking up the road picking up the trash. Building ramps for people, renovations, and stuff like that would help the elderly” (Shonto Participant, 2017). The participants articulated their desire for development such as jobs and infrastructure with forethought that the development allows workers to stay within their homelands. The participants linked the care of the older community members to the work of the younger generation. The link also demonstrates a cultural responsibility of Diné to take care of the older generation, showing how Diné value systems were eliminated by individualism (Lloyd, 2013). Participants repeatedly mention the creation of care work opportunities and care workers for the elders in the community seeing it as an opportunity to link different generations based on responsibility and continuity of identity, ethics, and relations.

Continuity is ruptured when material conditions pressure younger Diné to leave their communities. A common experience in Diné communities is the younger generation leaving their homelands in search of jobs and opportunities as mentioned by a participant who responded to the question of job creations: “It’s probably good for young people. When they need a summer time job. When I was growing up there was none. It would be nice to work close to home” (Shonto Participant, 2017). Shonto community members expressed a desire for job creation so that Diné would stay in their community. Some residents viewed wage work as a means of keeping the youth in the community but this did not entail the continuance of livestock care. One resident (2017) said,

Do away with grazing permit, ten years from now were not going to have grazing permit. Some of us we don’t care it’s just a piece of paper. All it means have more animal running around that’s all it means. They need to do away with it and starts building something, if it’s going to benefit the community my god build it.

Regardless of these differences, the community members share ideas of a future where Diné can decide what to do with the land. Shonto residents express dissatisfaction, annoyance, and exhaustion when certain government development projects are approved without their knowledge. One resident (2017) said,

Everything is already planned and all they do is say “this is what’s happening”. They don’t tell you that until it is already happening. We are not being notified in advanced about things happening in the community. Everything is pre-planned or already in progress

Participants’ answers demonstrated why the land question in any Diné community is a very touchy subject. The land is fraught with different meanings, uses, and practices that multiple desires shoot out from it like uncoordinated fireworks. The desires of the community members need to be contextualized within the background history of colonial uneven-development and the grazing regime. These histories manifest in the daily lives of community members when they express desires for infrastructure, businesses, grazing rights, land accessibility, and job creation. Infrastructure development was less about correct modernization path but a means to have clean drinking water, electricity for their tv or fridge that housed their life-saving medicine, or paved roads for ambulances and fire trucks. Grazing permit holders saw infrastructure development as a disruption to their traditional practices or an infringement on their property. Community members wanted job creation to keep families in their homelands. Some wanted to continue grazing practices and the permit system because they saw it as an expression of land claims and sovereignty. These desires clashed and complemented one another but offer insight into the limitations of the current grazing regime as it is. Community members would compromise if it meant they had more participation and decision making in development especially with land being used for alternative purposes besides grazing. These contested desires over land use, grazing and development are expressions of a larger political project of Native sovereignty and futurity. These conflicted and complementary desires are held together by the notion of freedom from colonial paternalism that is produced by the grazing regime.

Conclusion

Diné land, combined with the grazing regime and uneven-development, serves as a platform for desires to emerge especially in discussions about land use and control at the community scale. Grounded desires do not place expectations on Native peoples but explore how Native people understand their situation and take seriously their experiences, critiques, and solutions. Some desire more mining while others are critical of mining but nonetheless these desires illustrate the contested land uses and futures. Grounding desires help expand our understanding of the settler-colonial project of dispossession, proletarianization, and marginalization of Native peoples in specific places and histories. Exploring the desires of Native people is an entry point into critiques of colonialism despite the acceptance of current colonial land regimes. Their recognition and experiences of tension between community members reveal the limitations of the grazing regime. The grazing regime does more than it was originally created to do; it causes community members to contest infrastructural development that could improve the material conditions of community members.

Diné desires are historically informed by the land regime and its consequences and the previous mode of being including the traditional land relations and practices. Histories of colonial uneven development shape how desires emerge as well as the desires that are expressed by Diné community members. These messy desires are bundled together in messy arrangements by a sense of futurity and continuity. They are future-oriented expressions of self-determination grounded in land use. Discussions of land usually produce moods like anxiety, anger, despair, disappointment, and pessimism usually from daily experiences of community members. When asking community members about goals and solutions about alternative land regimes, they get excited and express desires for certain development projects they associate with a good life.

Some became angry when discussing the bureaucracy of land development and expressed their frustration with the Diné government. Their frustration turned to pessimism when asked about solutions, with some saying that things would not change. Others were surprised that Diné researchers were driving house to house asking people about their opinions and spending up to three hours listening to them. In these discussions, Diné desire is linked to continuity with relatives and the homelands. By providing opportunities for Diné to stay in the Navajo Nation, a collective identity is retained as well as crucial relations for Diné continuity. Implied in these discussions of land use and control is a Native desire for a future without colonial interference.

Colonial interference manifests in regimes and technologies that shape Native practices and relations but do not obliterate previous ones.

Considering how land is a historical object of desire for the settler state, Native desires are crucial for understanding how Native peoples navigate the settler colonial technologies while understanding Native subjectivity. Diné desires are intimately tied to land, expressed in discussions of development, that need to be sorted out and contextualized by histories and everyday lives. Native desires help understand the meanings attached to land, land relations, and land use/practices. Attention to how technologies shape Native desires, emotions, attitudes are crucial to countering narratives of finality, crisis, and apocalypse that are associated with Native peoples. Similarly, focusing Native desire helps understand why Native peoples desire extractive development projects, how they may rationalize the desire, and finally how they mobilize. The desires that emerge are not monolithic but are messy and contradictory between peoples, families, friends, and neighbors. Desires illuminate the limitations of colonial paternalism in the form of imposed land technologies and provide insight into a future absent of such things. Like uncoordinated fireworks, desires trace potential trajectories for Native peoples in a settler colonial project. These desires reveal a political expression directed towards a collected sense of identity and continuity. Though desires may not explicitly be labelled radical or decolonial, they are orientated towards a decolonial project in which decolonization means that Native peoples have full authority over their homelands if not the return of lands to the rightful people.