The record, read closely · issue articles

One ranch and one farm

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D · Draft — not verified   Every quote is verbatim from a candidate’s own turn, and is their claim, not this site’s finding. Statements about the Code cite the section read. How we verify →

Companion page: where the candidates stand on this, one by one →

Ranches and agriculture reach substantive discussion in 36 of the 42 interviews. Twenty-one of the 42 candidates speak about them specifically. Nearly all of them grew up with livestock, or still keep some. And when Cal Nez asks what the Nation’s ranches are for, the answers do not line up.

Why Washington counted the whole Nation as one farm

FINDING

Arvin Trujillo tells a story that explains a great deal. The Navajo Nation was barely participating in the U.S. Farm Bill, he says, because it had no agricultural census. Without a census, “the federal government came in and they counted the Navajo Nation as one ranch and one farm. And so because of that, when allocations came out, we were considered just one ranch and one farm, and the allocations went out accordingly.” He says the ag census was then done, and the Nation gained Farm Bill funding — and adds, honestly, that he has not followed up to see where it stands now.

Sit with that. Thousands of Diné families running livestock across twenty-seven thousand square miles were, on the federal ledger, one ranch. Not because anyone denied their existence. Because nobody had counted them, and the money followed the count.

This is the site’s central finding in agricultural clothes. What is not measured is not funded. The remedy was not a lawsuit or a march. It was a census — a document. The pattern repeats everywhere.

The ranches the Nation bought — and who uses them

The Navajo Nation owns ranches, several off the reservation. Melinda Arviso Ciocco explains the promise made when they were purchased: they “were presented, proposed, and approved for the people,” and the justification was that Diné people would “be able to lease acreage and be able to utilize ranch resources… and have that revenue come back to the nation.” Then the honest coda: “I’m not purview to any amount or necessarily the exact process of how that revenue from the ranches come back to the nation.”

Andrienna Lister asks the question directly. She knows of Big Boquillas Ranch, and believes there are two in Colorado. “But I do know that our Native ranchers aren’t using them.” She believes the Nation leases them out, and asks: “Why? Why not extend those services to the people of the Navajo Nation, the ranchers of the Navajo Nation?” She says this while describing a drought, and ranchers with no grass.

Laurelle Sheppard proposes the method rather than the verdict: go “back to the legislation that it was purchased under and figuring out what can and can’t be” done with the land. Her assessment of the present: the ranches “were purchased as to be used for others to bring in income, but that’s not happening either.” She wants “a good analysis of what is going on with the ranches” and, perhaps, a preference system for Diné people who want to use the land.

FINDING Three candidates, three positions — and all three describe the same void: nobody in the record can say how much revenue the Nation’s ranches produce, who leases them, or how many Diné ranchers use them. That information would resolve the disagreement in an afternoon. It is not published. Neither are the enterprises’ financials.

The Title that was never printed

OFFICIAL SOURCE

Charlie Smith Jr. lists the machinery a rancher lives inside: “grazing permit management, title three, agriculture, livestock.” He adds that it is “usually controlled by the federal code 25 CFR 167” — a federal grazing regulation — and asks the practical questions: what to do about feral horses, illegal dumping, and “how do we improve the grazing officers positions?”

He is the only candidate in the record to name the Title. And Title 3 — agriculture and livestock — is one of the five Titles that appear in the published Navajo Nation Code’s own table of contents and were never printed in it.

FINDING A Diné rancher is governed by a Navajo Title they cannot read, layered over a federal regulation, administered by a grazing official whose position several candidates say needs improving. That is not a metaphor for the seam. It is the seam, with livestock in it. And it explains why land and grazing is the record’s thinnest subject — substantive in only 10 of 42 interviews. It is hard to debate a law nobody can open.

The boards nobody funds

Johnny Russell Jr. describes serving on the land board: no gas card from the Department of Agriculture, meetings people learn about late. “So we’re kind of being left out in the cold on the land board and the farm board and the grazing official.” These are the local bodies that decide who grazes where. They are, on this account, unpaid, unequipped, and uninformed.

What the candidates would do

Charlie Smith Jr. would make agriculture a priority: “investing in farming, livestock management, responsible stewardship of wildlife… maybe getting back to farming, producing our own fruits and veggies.” Debbie Nez-Manuel would connect NAPI to restaurant owners and grow food for nearby cities — making the Nation a vendor rather than a customer. Andy Nez describes obtaining a grant for farming equipment and classes. Marcella Yazzie is drilling a water well for livestock and domestic use. Eula Yazzie raises the ranches tied to relocation from Hopi partitioned land, and who is using that range now.

What nobody said

FINDING

No candidate said how many ranches the Nation owns, what they earn, or how many Diné families hold grazing permits. Nobody named the office that publishes any of it, because this project could not find one. The one candidate who named the governing Title named a Title that cannot be read.

The Nation once could not count its own farms, and lost federal money for it. It still cannot count its own ranchers, and nobody has said what that costs.

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