The federal government’s Navajo Livestock Reduction program in the 1930s drove the Navajo-Churro sheep to near-extinction, devastated the livelihoods of the Diné, and altered their economy and the governance of a matriarchal society in which livestock had traditionally belonged to women . Some historians refer to the livestock massacre as the second Navajo Long Walk. Others, like the Navajo Sheep Project led by Lyle G. “Doc” McNeal, Ph.D, call it an “animal holocaust.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, anthropologist Solon Toothaker Kimball interviewed members of several Diné communities about the slaughter. The reduction initiative — imposed on the Diné by John Collier, commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration — was on a trajectory to kill more than half of the Diné livestock at the time, some 300,000 to 400,000 animals.

The official reason: to avoid further land erosion caused by overgrazing. The targets: goats, horses, and the Navajo-Churro sheep, the latter of which served as the base of Diné sustenance and traditional wool production and weaving.