Like many of the Diné people who frequent Lowe’s Market in Window Rock on the Navajo Nation, I have seen Milton Snow’s photographs showing Diné agricultural lifeways during the first half of the 20th century. The black-and-white images on the supermarket walls create a nostalgic environment for people seeking groceries in the heart of a food desert. Yet I never made any connection between my shopping trips and the man behind the lens. And I certainly never connected those images to the U.S. government-sponsored Livestock Reduction Program of the 1930s and 1940s, which killed more than 250,000 reservation animals.
Back then, U.S. Indian Commissioner John Collier sought to replace the callousness of previous forced assimilationist approaches with the silkier “Indian New Deal.” Collier, who wanted to preserve material culture as well as improve living conditions and poverty levels, hired anthropologists to document languages and brought in photographers to capture lifeways.
One such photographer was Milton “Jack” Snow. Born in Alabama in 1905 and raised in California, Snow worked as archaeological field photographer for the then-Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art and later as a staff photographer at the Museum of Northern Arizona. During his 20-year tenure with the Navajo Service, he documented the relationship between the U.S. government and Navajo Tribe, including the impacts of the Livestock Reduction Program, which sought to combat land erosion, first by removing horses and goats, then killing sheep.
The black-and-white images on the supermarket walls create a nostalgic environment for people seeking groceries in the heart of a food desert.
For Diné people, sheep are a blessing with responsibilities that link us to the Diyin Dine’é (Holy People). But to the U.S. government, they were an ecological proxy to “The Navajo Problem,” as Gen. James Henry Carleton dubbed the brutal 1863 clashes between the Navajo people and the U.S. government over land, resources and assimilation. On the surface, Collier’s approach to solving the “Navajo Problem” was more reasonable — culling Diné livestock simply to “rehabilitate” the land. But sheep removal would also push the people toward assimilation, and it was promoted despite the Treaty of 1868, which had not only returned Diné people to our homelands following incarceration at Fort Sumner, but also returned sheep to our stewardship.
During the reduction, many sheep and goats were trailered to meat-processing facilities, while others were shot or driven off cliffs. The most vivid accounts document how live sheep were doused with coal oil and set ablaze. This did more than scorch the Diné sheep economic system; it released an unrelenting sorrow, leaving Diné people and sheep to sift through the ashes of Dibé éí Diné be’ iiná (the “Sheep Is Life” philosophy) as they rebuilt their relationships with the U.S. government and with each other.
Many of Snow’s images of this period were housed at the archives of the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum and the Navajo Nation Museum. After a 2024 exhibit at the Maxwell entitled “Nothing Left for Me: Federal Policy and the Photography of Milton Snow in Diné Bikéyah,” the Navajo Nation Museum arranged to exhibit its collection under the co-curatorship of its curator, Clarenda Begay (Diné), and the University of New Mexico’s American Studies Department chair, Jennifer Denetdale (Diné).
In June 2024, I was invited to the museum to aid Denetdale and the project coordinator, museum anthropologist Lillia McEnaney, with image cataloging. I braced myself, expecting to see animal deaths in the same format as the images that captured the massive buffalo slaughters of the 1800s. To my surprise, there were no images of dead or dying sheep. I did not know if I was disappointed or relieved.
For Diné people, sheep are a blessing with responsibilities that link us to the Diyin Dine’é (Holy People).
I considered the photos’ purpose: to document the success of the U.S. government’s assimilationist agenda. Corralled in Snow’s lens were immense numbers of sheep, sometimes in the thousand, often in confined areas awaiting judging, sales, shearing and dips. They evoked my grandmother’s stories, making my own flock of 20 sheep seem trite. But Snow’s photos also demonstrated why the government saw a need to reduce. They dissolved family memories that recall the violence of the time and replaced them with Diné people successfully using Western irrigation techniques, canning practices, community fairs, English-based schooling and medicinal practices. At the end of the camera was security. The only cost: the sheep.
Although the photos fail to capture the violence of this cost, through visual sovereignty Diné exhibit organizers are reaching into Snow’s images and sourcing hidden stories of our past, present and future relationships with sheep. Many Native and non-Native people who attend this exhibit — “Nihinaaldlooshii doo nídínééshgóó k’ee’ąą yilzhish dooleeł (Our Livestock Will Never Diminish): The Photography of Milton Snow and the Legacies of Livestock Reduction (1935-1959)” — will learn about this animal genocide for the first time. Others will find it anticlimactic; many are already aware through community. The deliberate absence of sheep death in the images does not change their stories.
Regardless of their initial impact, Snow’s images call us to pause and consider the significance of sheep in our individual lives today.
All photos: Digital reproductions of gelatin silver prints. Milton Snow Photography Collection, Navajo Nation Museum, Window Rock, Arizona. Digitization courtesy of Ramona Emerson (Diné), Reel Indian Pictures, LLC.
The exhibit opens Aug. 8 at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the August 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Presence of Sheep.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
