The Navajo documents: a study of the economic

The Navajo documents: a study of the economicrepresentation and construction of the Navajo

Alistair Preston *, Leslie Oakes

University of New Mexico, Graduate School of Management, Department of Accountancy, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1221, USA

Abstract

In the mid 1930s, surveyors and other agents from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the Soil Conservation

Service descended on the Navajo Reservation in the southwest USA. During their short stay, the surveyors produceddetailed reports on the extent of overgrazing and soil erosion on the reservation. The reports, which contained maps,tables of numbers, accounts, and photographs claimed to depict and represent the real. As part of social survey research,popular in the UK and US from the turn of the century until World War II, the Navajo documents, as we refer to

them, used a form of family budget or income and expenditure report to construct the Navajo economically. Indeed,Navajo families were referred to as consumption units or groups. The economic construction of the Navajo permittedthe construction of an economic solution to the Navajo problem. In e�ect it was demonstrated economically, that the

impact of stock reductions, thought necessary to prevent further soil erosion, could be o�set by increased agriculture.In contrast to the economic claims, the stock reductions were an economic and social disaster for the Navajo. Weapproach the economic construction of the Navajo in and through the notion of representation. We draw upon the

heightened discussion of this term in art theory in the 1970s and 1980s. We frame our analysis in terms of threerelationships Ð namely, the relationship between representation and depiction, the relationship between representationand the copy and the relationship between representation and the real. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In the mid 1930s, the Bureau of AgriculturalEconomics (BAE), a bureau of the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture (USDA) in conjunc-tion with the Soil Conservation Service (SCS)began a detailed survey of the Navajo Reserva-tion.1,2 The survey reports from 1935±1940, aswell as a good deal of the source materials, areheld at the University of New Mexico Library.For surveying purposes, the reservation was divi-ded into 18 land management units. The annualreport of each unit contained a sociological sur-

vey, a range management survey, a forestry sur-vey, a biology survey, a soils survey, an agronomysurvey and an engineering survey, hereafter refer-red to as ``the Navajo documents''. The results ofthese surveys were presented in the form of maps,text, photographs, numbers, graphs and, impor-tantly for this audience, accounts.

0361-3682/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Accounting, Organizations and Society 26 (2001) 39±71

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* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-505-277-7108; fax: +1-

505-277-6471.

1 The Navajo Reservation is in the Four Corners area of the

southwest USA. The reservation includes parts of Arizona,

Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. It is the largest reservation

in the USA and the Navajo is the largest tribe.2 The Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the Soil Con-

servation Service emerged during the 1920s Great Depression

era. In some respects the use of these services linked the Navajo

to wider economic issues in the US over this period.

The 1930s and the Navajo documents havereceived considerable attention in the NativeAmerican history literature. Richard White (1983)de®nes the events of this period as constituting the``roots of dependency'' of the Navajo. Historianslike White note that the Navajo faced a crisis inthe 1930s. The elements of the crisis were many,but all stemmed from the forced con®nement of anomadic pastoral tribe in a geographically de®nedand limited space. Con®nement, combined withpopulation and livestock growth, persistentdroughts, severe winters and a poorly understoodgeological process Ð later referred to as``gullying'' Ð had combined to create a pre-cipitous depletion of natural resources andextreme soil erosion on the reservation.3 Navajosheep and goat herds were decimated in someareas and many Navajo families relied on relief aidfrom the federal government and from wealthierNavajo.These problems, which had been evident since

the turn of the century, were reported to be sosevere in 1931 as to raise a question whether thereservation could support the Navajo and whetherit could recover without federal government inter-vention. Despite numerous warnings about theimpending crisis, the federal government took nosigni®cant action until events taking place some1000 miles away in California spurred the federalgovernment into action. Unbeknown to theNavajo, their reservation was geographically andhydrologically linked to the newly completedBoulder (later Hoover) Dam. Engineering studies(erroneously, as it turned out) determined thatdeposits carried by the Little Colorado and SanJuan Rivers were silting up the dam and werethreatening the largest civil engineering investmentin the world, as well as the `èconomic wellbeing''of the entire southwest. The two rivers blamed forcarrying the silt ¯anked the northern and southernboundaries of the Navajo Reservation. A compellinglogic emerged which suggested that the excessive silt

was caused by soil erosion on the reservationwhich in turn was the product of overgrazing byNavajo herds. In short, it was argued that Navajosheep were destroying the dam. The logic wasrepeated in the introductions to nearly all theNavajo documents Ð for example:

The physical and geological processes whichhave occurred within the reservation, ifunchecked must ultimately have an importante�ect on areas outside of the reservation prin-cipally through the vastly increased deposit ofsilt in the Boulder Reservoir. If erosion con-tinues unchecked, ultimately the entire allu-vial ®ll of most of the valleys in the Navajoreservation will be deposited behind the dam,thus threatening the enormous federal, state,municipal, and private investments in, ordirectly or indirectly dependent on, the main-tenance of the storage capacity of the reser-voir. (Bureau of Agricultural Economics[BAE], 1935 p. 2., emphasis in the original.)

The impetus for action, therefore, rested on thelinkage between the Navajo Reservation andCalifornia, between the Navajos' livestock rearingpractices and the silting up of the dam andbetween the Navajos' subsistence living and thesettlement and economic development of thesouthwest. It is within this con¯uence of eventsthat the Navajo documents were produced.Our argument posits that the Navajo docu-

ments, and especially the accounts contained inthem, constructed the Navajo economically. Sucha construction was integral to the development ofan economic solution to the ``Navajo problem.''The Navajo were to be saved from themselves,which in turn would save the dam by simulta-neously reducing the size of the Navajo herds andimproving the e�ciency of the Navajo's livestockrearing and farming practices. The conclusion ofthe Navajo documents was that the economicwellbeing of the Navajo could be improved byhaving smaller but more e�cient herds and bygrowing rather than importing high-value crops.Of course, in some respects it is not surprising that

BAE constructed the Navajo in terms of the eco-nomic. After all it was the Bureau of Agricultural

3 Similar problems were later experienced by nomadic pas-

toralists throughout the world. Most similar were the experi-

ences in the Sahal and Kenya in the 1960s where similar

interventions were applied with equally disastrous results.

40 A. Preston, L. Oakes /Accounting, Organizations and Society 26 (2001) 39±71

Economics who oversaw the production of theNavajo documents. However, this paper is con-cerned with exploring how the economic con-struction was accomplished by using the Navajodocuments as a vehicle to explore the process ofconstruction itself 4 rather than understandingwhy the BAE as opposed to say the Bureau ofIndian A�airs (BIA) was charged with solving theNavajo problem.5

We use the word construction with some hesita-tion. We do not wish to imply that the Navajo hadno constructed identity prior to the arrival of theBAE surveyors. The Navajo are an ancient peoplewith a deep sense of their own kinship, spiritualityand way of life. The Navajo also had four hundredyears of contact with Spanish and Anglo Eur-opeans before the surveyors arrived. What is sig-ni®cant about the Navajo documents is that thisidentity and history was deliberately ignored. Theterm construction in this paper, therefore, is con-cerned with attempts of Anglo Americans in the1930s to construct the Navajo exclusively in termsof the economic.We approach the notion of construction

through representation. The Navajo documentsdeploy a number of forms of representation; tex-tual, calculative and visual. It is in and throughthe deployment of these forms of representationthat the BAE surveyors could claim to haveestablished the ``real'' conditions of the reserva-tion and the extent of the Navajo dependency onits meager resources. Having established this claimto the real, actions already taken could be justi®edand future actions sanctioned. We argue that allclaims to the real are necessarily constructedrather than found. In the case of the Navajodocuments we shall demonstrate that laying claimto the real was a laborious process requiring

meticulous attention to detail.6 Our emphasisupon representation does not exclude, but ratherincludes other notions of construction. For exam-ple, the role of text and discourse in the construc-tion of reality has been explored by Foucault(1979) and Derrida (1976), the role of numbers byPorter (1995) and Hacking (1975), the role ofmaps by King (1996) and the role of photographyby Barthes (1981) and Burgin (1982). We proposethat the term representation may be seen as anappropriate way to explore the intersection of thearticulable, the calculable and the visual.Representation has been pulled and stretched to

cover a wide range of meanings in a variety ofdisciplines including mathematics, psychology,social theory, literature (also referred to as mim-esis in literature) and art. In fact, it has been soover-used that it has lost many of the purposefullimits it might have once had. Representation re-emerged as a central concern in postmodern andpost-structuralist social theory, literature and arttheory in the 1970s and 1980s. It is in art the-ory, however, that the term has received themost attention. The question of representationbecame particularly acute for interpreters ofabstract expressionist painting, minimalist three-dimensional art and postmodern collage and photo-graphy where it is often unclear what a work of artrepresents. The following discussion draws heavilyon this heightened discussion of representation inart theory. We concentrate on three relationships,namely; the relationship between representationand depiction, the relationship between repre-sentation and the copy, and the relationshipbetween representation and the real, to provide aframework for our analysis of the economic con-struction of the Navajo.We choose to approach our analysis from the

perspective of art theory not only because of theattention that representation has received in thisliterature, but also because of the nature of theNavajo documents. The documents are crafted arti-facts, carefully composed of columns of text, tablesof numbers, income/expenditure accounts, topo-graphical maps and documentary photographs.

4 What happened to the Navajo in the l930s is part of a lar-

ger tragedy of the taking and controlling of Native American

land: a tragedy in which accounting had a surprisingly large

part to play. This however, is the subject of another paper.5 This does, however, raise an important question. Although

we tangentially address why an economic representation

emerged in the section on representation and the copy, a more

detailed discussion of the con¯uence of accounting economics,

sociology and public policy for constructing knowledge and

action through representation is required.

6 See Hopwood (1987) for another example of a laborious

process of construction using accounting numbers.

A. Preston, L. Oakes /Accounting, Organizations and Society 26 (2001) 39±71 41

Although far from being works of art, they never-theless lend themselves to a mode of analysis thatexplores how and why they took the form theydid, and how they were invested with meaning andlegitimacy. In basing our analysis on the Navajodocuments as crafted artifacts, we are not excludingthe social. The authors from whom we draw ouranalysis, particularly David Bachelor, RosalindKrauss, Douglas Crimp, and John Tagg all arguefrom the perspective that art and the social areintertwined. Their work resonates and directlydraws upon social theorists such as Foucault andDerrida just as these two theorists draw upon art.(See Derrida,1987; Foucault 1974, 1979) We sug-gest that art theory o�ers a mode of analysis thatbrings fresh insights to the construction of the realthrough representation.

2. Representation and depiction

David Bachelor (1991), in a paper entitledAbstraction, Modernism, Representation arguesthat there is a tendency to confuse ``representa-tion'' with ``depiction,'' or to `àssume that theformer is necessarily dependent upon or derivedfrom the latter'' (p.52). He o�ers us the followingsequence: ``Step 1; what does X depict? Step 2;what does X represent?'' According to this principle,in order to treat a work of art as representingsomething it must ®rst be shown to depict something. Art critics often apply this conventionalparing of depiction and representation. Forexample, Anna Chave (1990) applies this ``screw-up-your-eyes-until-you-can-see-it'' approach, andis able to read highly schematized depictions suchas phalluses or military emblems into even themost abstract minimalist art. Thus, she claims toreveal the hidden iconography at work. Thesedepictions are then taken to represent the ``face ofCapital, the face of authority and the face of thefather'' (Bachelor, 1991, p. 49). This depictiondependency, although in an entirely oppositemanner, is also discernable in Donald Judd'scomments on his own minimalist sculptures. Heinsists that `ìnsofar as nothing is depicted in hissculptures Ð as he does not use one material (saystone) to represent another (say ¯esh) Ð his work,

therefore, does not represent anything.'' (Bache-lor, 1991, p. 52.)We suggest that the Navajo documents are pre-

mised on a depiction-dependent logic of repre-sentation. What we wish to argue, however, is fora reversal in the relationship between depictionand representation o�ered by Bachelor. Thesequence we are proposing would be as follows.Step 1; what is it we are going to represent? Step 2;how are we going to depict it?A careful chronological reading of events in the

1930s shows quite clearly that representations ofthe Navajo problem and its solution were ®rmlyestablished before the ®rst of the Navajo docu-ments were produced under the BAE in 1935. Asnoted above, the Navajo problem Ð namely thatof soil erosion Ð was represented as being causedby overgrazing. It was also established that live-stock reductions represented the solution. Themeticulous mapping, painstaking quanti®cation,voluminous photographic evidence and detailed®nancial accounts of human dependency con-tained in the Navajo documents were explicitlyintended to depict the extent of the topsoil erosion,the depletion of natural resources, the growingpoverty of the Navajo and the inability of the landto support the number of livestock. On the basisof this representation, livestock reduction becamethe `ìnevitable'' and `òbvious'' solution, indeed itwas claimed to be the `ònly'' solution.Overgrazing was represented as having been the

cause of theNavajo problem for some 30 years beforethe ®rst Navajo document was produced in 1935.However, it was a report on the reservation by aBureau of Indian A�airs (BIA) forester called Wil-liam Zeh in 1931 which ``made what was until thenthe starkest and most detailed report on overgrazingin the Navajo reservation''7 (White, 1983, p. 252emphasis added). Zeh (1931) determined that:

After deducting the barren and waste landson this reservation less than twelve millionacres remain on which cattle, horses, sheep

7 What was di�erent in this report from the Navajo docu-

ments produced under the BAE was the absence of economics,

the use of secondary data and the reliance upon general obser-

vations rather than scienti®c studies.


and goats can be grazed. Taking the sheep andgoat population of 1,300,000 head alone only 9to 10 surface acres per head are available forgrazing. In addition there are the horses andcattle who must also ®nd feed to exist. Withonly 9 surface A. to the head without takinginto consideration the large numbers of cattleand horses using the range, the seriousness ofover-stocking and overgrazing on the NavajoReservation as a whole, is readily visualized.Under the present condition of the range it isestimated that for the Navajo Reservation asa whole 20 to 30 surface Acres are required toproperly take care of one sheep (pp. 3±4).

While overgrazing represented the Navajo pro-blem, stock reductions were represented as thesolution. John Collier, the head of the BIA duringthis period, attached an array of relief and devel-opment programs to the soil erosion initiative;however, stock reduction was at the core of theprogram. The ®rst stock reductions took place in1933 and 1934. Both were economically andsocially disastrous for the Navajo, especially forthe owners of small herds. The second reduction,in the summer and fall of 1934, was particularlytraumatic, as it included the elimination of150,000 goats, or half of the Navajo holdings aswell as 50,000 sheep. The program also called forthe castration of all remaining male goats. O�-cials regarded the goats as an ecological nightmareand as economically worthless. Goats were criti-cized for having ``no market value except amongthe Indians'' (Zeh, 1931, pp.6±7 and pp.16±17).For the Navajo, however, the goats were notmeant to be marketed. They provided meat andmilk for Navajo families and, being hardier thansheep, were a survival food in times of droughtand severe winters. White (1983) stresses that`èmotional identi®cation with the herd ran deepin Navajo Society'' and that these `èmotionallinks were as strong as ®nancial ones.'' (p.240).White goes on to note that the initial stock reduc-tions threatened the Navajo ``families in a deepand profound way'' (p.240).There is strong evidence, therefore, that the way

in which the Navajo problem and its solutioncame to be represented predated the detailed

depiction of the Navajo Reservation beginning in1935. The representations, however, were never-theless depiction-dependent. Meticulous andpainstaking depiction of the condition of thereservation was essential to support the o�cialrepresentation of the problem and its solutions.This was especially true in view of the devastatingand highly visible impact that the ®rst two stockreductions had on the Navajo, particularly on thepoor who owned mostly goats. More ominous,however, were the continued calls for further stockreductions despite earlier promises that the 1934reduction would be the last. The newly proposedstock reductions were particularly emotive becausethe federal agents had bungled the previous stockreduction. During the second reduction, the live-stock came in faster than the packinghouses couldprocess them. In particular goats began to pile up.In the Navajo canyon, 3500 goats were slaughteredand left to rot. This and other mass slaughters hor-ri®ed the Navajos and opposition to further reduc-tions began to crystallize, particularly among theNavajo women who coined the phrase `ìf you takeour stock, how shall we live'' (White, 1983, p. 264).In this light, the Navajo documents took on a

strong justi®catory tone. The Navajo documentswere called upon to justify the stock reductionsthat had already taken place as well as thoseplanned for the future.

2.1. Depicting the Navajo

We now turn to the depiction itself. Beginningin 1935, each of the newly created 18 land man-agement units produced annual reports. Thesewere compiled into a single annual report for thewhole reservation. The reports from each unit,and the report on the reservation as a whole, con-tained seven surveys. These were, a sociologicalsurvey, a range management survey, a forestrysurvey, a biology survey, a soils survey, an agr-onomy survey and an engineering survey. Thesurveys across the 18 land management units werealmost identical in form.8

8 The signi®cance of this will be discussed in the section on

representation and the copy. The terms consumption unit or

consumption group will be explained shortly.


The reports contained written text, the primaryfocus of which was to describe and explain theresults of the numerous tables. The tables, againsimilar across the 18 units, included tabulations ofvarious kinds of ¯ora, fauna, stock water, othernatural resources and monthly precipitation andtemperature recording. Even levels of prairie dogand kangaroo rat infestation were tabulated. Par-ticular attention was given to measuring soil ero-sion and grazing conditions and to counting thenumber of sheep, goats, cattle and horses. A systemof equivalency was established to equate one horsewith 5 (equivalent) sheep units. Rangeland wasexpressed in acres of forage that would support onesheep-unit-year-long. This became a common termand was expressed in abbreviated form as S.U.Y.L.(See Appendix A for a sample of the tables).Each land management unit produced a total of 18

hand-colored maps. These maps were closely linkedto the tables, o�ering, as it were, a spatial represent-ation of the numbers. The features that were mappedincluded land status, population concentrations andtrading posts, vegetation types, water, rangelands,poisonous plants, relative carrying capacities, forestconditions, prairie dog control records, biology, sheeterosion, grazing land classes, agriculture land classes,and agronomy and engineering projects (BAE,Annual Report, 1935, p. 5). Considerable emphasiswas placed on the need for maps of the reserva-tion. In 1931, Zeh made the following appeal.

In connection with this work the great needof a good map was a decided handicap. Allsuperintendents, engineers, foresters, stock-men, roadmen, and telephone men, in facteverybody connected in any way with theNavajo territory expressed himself as to inac-curacy of the available map and the greatneed of a reliable map on which to base plansfor developments and other data often calledfor by the Indian O�ce. A good map of theNavajo Country is invaluable in the making ofa complete range management plan and wouldbe useful to all the stockmen and in fact toeveryone connected with the Navajo problemsin any way whatsoever (BIA, 1931, p. 20).

The need for maps was so urgent that the newlydeveloped military technique of aerial photo-

graphy was employed. (See Appendix B forexamples of the maps.)The ®nancial accounts formed the central part of

the sociological survey. Again each landmanagementunit produced almost identical sets of accounts. Fromthe following list it can be seen that these accountsprimarily measured income and expenditure:

Table 1 Total incomeTable 2 Per capita incomeTable 3 Gross commercial incomeTable 4 Gross non commercial incomeTable 5 Relative value of crops per acreTable 6 Total consumptionTable 7 Food consumptionTable 8 Food purchased from traderTable 9 Imports of foodTable 10 Acreage required for production of

producible imports now purchased

The accounts for Land Management Unit 18 arereproduced in full in the last section, entitledRepresentation and the Real. We shall reserve afuller discussion of the accounts until then.The photographs only appeared in the annual

report of the reservation. They were almost exclu-sively concerned with documenting the deleteriousstate of the reservation and documenting the con-servation and demonstration projects of the SCSand the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)designed to improve the situation. Two types ofphotographs stand out. First, there were ``beforeand after photographs'', showing, for example,improvements in livestock after new breeds wereintroduced (Plate 1, Appendix C) Second, therewere ``cause and e�ect'' photographs showing, forexample, livestock grazing beside a badly erodedcanyon. In this particular case the caption wassimply ``cause and e�ect'' (Plate 2, Appendix C).(See Appendix C for examples of additional pho-tographs.) We now turn to what was not depictedin the Navajo documents.

2.2. The absence of the Navajo voice andestablishing the economic

What is signi®cant about the documents is theabsence of the Navajo voice. For the representation


to hold and for a convincing and unambiguousdepiction to emerge it was as if the social and reli-gious underpinnings of the Navajo had to be system-atically purged from the surveys and documents.The absence of the Navajo voice is not onlyobvious from reading the documents, but the needfor its exclusion was explicitly articulated in anaccompanying document entitled SociologicalSurvey of the Navajo Reservation: Statement ofProcedures (BAE, 1936).The Statement of Procedures made a distinction

between the social/ethnographic which was taken toinclude a catalogue `òf customs, beliefs, obser-vances, taboos and kinship structure'' (BAE, 1936,p.8), and the economic, de®ned as the ``distribu-tion of ownership and use of certain resour-ces. . .and the amount of goods and servicesderived from these resources in terms of the con-sumption unit9 dependent upon them'' (BAE,1936, p.10). The Statement of Procedures went onto state the sociological survey was not intendedto ``secure a picture of all of the Navajo liveli-hood'' or to be a traditional `èthnological study''(BAE, 1936, p.8) but rather to measure andquantify ``human dependency upon resources''(BAE, 1936, p. 6). Indeed the Statement of Proce-dures asserted that ``the term `sociological survey'was adopted with the understanding that the term`sociological' should not be taken to refer to theformal subject matter of the formal disciplineknown as `sociology''' (BAE, 1936, p.9). It alsonoted that a ``certain amount of informationusually considered ethnological will probably becollected by the Sociological survey. . .. . .[How-ever] the bulk of the subject matter of the surveywill under the current system of nomenclature beconsidered economic subject matter'' (BAE, 1936,pp.8±9).In e�ect the economic was o�ered as a universal

means of analysis, which could be applied to allcommunities despite ethnological di�erences. Asthe Statement of Procedures declared:

Ethnology is popularly supposed to havedeveloped the technique of study which isspeci®c and prerequisite to understanding ofpreliterate peoples. The Science of Ethnologyhas grown up around this conviction. But this

is by no means a proven case. The Socio-logical Survey of the Navajo Reservation ispredicated on the assumption that the beha-vior of mankind is susceptible of analysis by asingle methodology (BAE, 1936, p.8).

And that methodology was primarily economic.The above quotes not only make it clear that the

Navajo voice must be purged but they also estab-lish the primacy of the economic in the socio-logical surveys and, we shall argue, in all of theother surveys. The culmination of the sociologicalsurvey was a document produced in 1940 entitledStatistical Summary: Human Dependency Survey:Navajo Reservation.10 This document containsover 20 tables quantifying and placing a value ona wide range of economic variables includingincome and consumption of resources. (SeeAppendix D for a list of tables.) What is notableagain is the absolute lack of any narrativedescribing the lifestyle and beliefs of the Navajo.This document, as well as the annual reports ofthe Land Management Units, drew upon and dis-tilled material from the other surveys into an eco-nomic calculus. The table entitled AcreageRequired for Production of Producible ImportsNow Purchased (Table 10 below) is a good illus-tration of this process.A consistent theme of the reports was that the

Navajo could improve their economic wellbeing iffamilies were to produce rather than import cer-tain foodstu�s. The 1935 Annual report suggestedthat:

There are several methods by which theinhabitants may increase their agriculturaloutput in order to obviate expenditures forproducible foods. Additional agriculturallands may be developed, or farmland nowidle be put back into active production (BAELand Management Unit 18, 1935, p.15).

9 The terms consumption unit or consumption group will be

explained shortly.10 Note the change in title from Sociological to Human

Dependency.


To calculate the level of idle arable land necessaryto achieve this goal, the surveyors had to draw ondata from other surveys. The process is described asfollows:

Under the present farming methods a total of2,624 acres of additional land would be su�-cient to substitute home-produced for impor-ted items. Of this acreage, 2,239 would berequired for wheat which, when converted to¯our, would equal the value of $46,000.00now imported (BAE Land Management Unit18, 1935, p.15).

The point we wish to make is that the socio-logical survey, which contained the accounts andthe economic arguments for action, constitutedthe primary focus of Navajo documents. Placingthe accounting in such a central position might beseen to re¯ect our own predisposition towardssuch material. However, as the above and sub-sequent quotes will demonstrate, the sociologicalsurvey was in a sense a distillation of the materialfrom the other six surveys, into the economic. Afurther example of the force of the economic washow the surveyors de®ned the Navajo. Ratherthan referring to the Navajo as families or clans,the surveyors chose the title of ``consumptiongroups or units''. The o�cial de®nition was asfollows:

A consumption group is de®ned as a group ofpeople who constantly and habitually fundand share all forms of income, including pro-ducts of agriculture, products of livestock, andgoods purchased from traders. The consump-tion group is not identical to the biologicalfamily. It is found to be composed sometimesof the biological family, sometimes of severalrelated biological families, and occasionallyof unrelated biological families or individuals.(BAE, LandManagement Report 11, 1935, p. 3)

With this de®nition the intent to representand, we would add, construct the Navajo ineconomic terms is obvious. It was the appearanceof an explicit economic analysis that dis-tinguished the Navajo documents from earlier

reports. This is not to suggest that the Navajo hadbeen una�ected by, or insulated from, the eco-nomic development of the West. Indeed by 1863when Kit Carson ®nally subdued the Navajo theyhad been at war with Spanish andAnglo Europeans,who sought to take traditional Navajo lands, forover half a century. The campaign and forcedremoval of the Navajo by Kit Carson was to pro-tect the economic interests of the settlers. Thesubsequent repatriation of the Navajo to theirtraditional lands was in part because of the higheconomic cost of supporting them on the reserva-tion created for them in Bosque Redondo insoutheastern New Mexico. In addition, the verylinking of the Boulder Dam investment to theNavajo Reservation was an economic framing ofthe problem. However, it is in the Navajo docu-ments that we see the ®rst accounting and repre-sentation of the Navajo themselves in terms of theeconomic and the ®rst time we see an articulationof the ``Navajo problem'' in terms of an expliciteconomic calculus.Despite the centrality of the economic, it could

not stand on its own. It required the apparatus ofthe other surveys to support it. On the one hand,the other six surveys provided the basic quantitiesof crops, livestock, arable and grazing acreage,woven rugs, jewelry and goods traded to and fromthe trading posts, on which to construct economicmarket values. On the other hand, the other sur-veys lent credibility to the economic arguments.There was a sense in which the economic had to beshored up by the other surveys. The surveys,including the sociological survey were referred toas branches of science. This arborescent metaphorgives the sense that in combination they formed atree of knowledge, each supporting the other. It isinteresting that only the sociological branch ofscience had a Statement of Procedures. This cur-iously defensive document stressed a need forrigor and objectivity which the other branches ofscience could apparently take for granted. Theeconomic depiction though central, was appar-ently also fragile.To summarize this section: the Navajo docu-

ments may be interpreted as a means of depictingthe conditions of the Navajo reservation and theextent of the `òver'' dependency of the livestock


upon it. This depiction supported the o�cialrepresentation of the Navajo problem Ð namelyovergrazing Ð and the o�cially sanctioned andpartially enacted solution, namely, stock reduction.The line of argument in the Navajo documentsultimately crystallizes in the sociological surveyinto an economic depiction whereby the physicalquantities generated in the other surveys areassigned a market value. However, to establish theeconomic, two things had to simultaneously happen.The voice of the Navajo had to be purged and atthe same time the voice of science had to be calledupon for support. In the next section we shall interalia explore the appeal to the voice of science.

3. Representation and the copy

We begin this section with a quote from Faris(1996) in his book entitled Navajo and Photo-graphy: a Critical History of the Representation ofan American People.

Just what can be expected or understoodfrom photographs? I will argue that, cultu-rally, not very much can be understood aboutthe Navajo from photographs of them. Butcertainly something can be understood ofphotographers, of the various ways the Westprivileges photographs, and of the wayNavajo photographically appear to us in theWest. Photographs of Navajo mirror theWest's desire and ambition, its obsession andpathology (Faris, 1996, p.12)

In this quote Faris echoes a point made byDavid Bachelor (1991) where he suggests thatrepresentation should not be limited to the notionof depiction. The depiction dependent notion ofrepresentation encourages us to look at or into thework of art to ®nd its meaning. As Faris pointsout, in doing so we may not ®nd what we arelooking for. If we paraphrase Faris we could askjust what could be expected from the Navajodocuments? And we would have to answer: notvery much can be understood culturally about theNavajo. Bachelor suggests that we relax thedepiction-dependent logic of representation and

instead of looking inward we look outward. As hesuggests:

It seems more helpful to think of works of art(abstract or otherwise) as representing notthrough the depictions of things, but throughthe indication or intimation of more or lesscomplex relations of likeness. Foremostamongst these is the relationship that is indi-cated in any work of art between the workand other existing examples or types of art(Bachelor, 1991, p. 53).

In fact, Bachelor argues that any artist mustestablish such relationships if the work is to becomerelevant to the discourse on modern art. Thus, if wefollow Bachelor's advice, we may ®nd, againparaphrasing Faris, that the Navajo documentsmay tell us a great deal about the surveyors, theprivileging of this type of knowledge in the Westand about how the Navajo appear to us throughan economic lens.Rosalind Krauss (1984) approaches the concept

of likeness by coupling the terms originality andrepetition. She states:

I am not suggesting a negative description oftheir work. I am trying instead to focus on apair of terms Ð originality and repetition Ðand to look at their coupling unprejudicially:for within the instance we are examining,these two terms seem bound together in akind of aesthetic economy, interdependentand mutually sustaining, although the one Ðoriginality Ð is the valorized term and theother Ð repetition or copy or reduplication isdiscredited (p.19).

Her position is that even within the avant-garde,which above all lays claim to originality almost asits birthright, an artist's work is always located ina prior system of representation. All works of artare logically multiple and engaged in a ``system ofreproduction without an original''; (Krauss, 1984,p.22). She cites Foucault:

By the thin surface of the original, whichaccompanies our experience. . .is not the


immediacy of a birth; it is populated entirelyby those complex mediations formed and laiddown as a sediment in their own history oflabor, life and language. So that. . .what manis reviving without knowing it, is all theintermediaries of a time that governs himalmost to in®nity. (Foucault, 1970, pp. 330±331).

Rather than bi-polar opposites, Krauss is askingfor a fusion of originality and repetition or forreinstating the discredited notion of the copy andfor recognizing the relation between a work of artand its antecedents. Her intention is not to abandonthe notion of originality but rather to moderateavant-garde and modernist claims to the singularity,authenticity, uniqueness, originality and ultimatelythe autoreferentialty of a work of art.Challenging the notion of the singular, the

authentic and the original was one of the primaryaims of early post-modern art and photography.Douglas Crimp (1990) claims that:

A group of young artists working with pho-tography have addressed photography'sclaims to originality, showing those claimsfor the ®ction they are, showing photographyto be always a representation, always-already-seen. Their images purloined, con-®scated, appropriated: even stolen. In theirwork, the original cannot be located, isalways deferred; even the self which mighthave generated an original is shown to beitself a copy (p. 123).

The young artists he is referring to includeSherrie Levine who re-photographed the work ofother, mostly famous photographers, and CindySherman, who photographed herself in the ``guiseof feminine movie stereotypes to show that there isno real Cindy Sherman, only copies.'' (Risatti,1990, p. 123.) These works demonstrate that theimages that saturate our visual landscape are aproliferation of copies, which represent and end-lessly reproduce codes of behavior and identity. Inshort, images represent and construct rather thanre¯ect the real. This point will be taken up in the®nal section.

For Krauss, Bachelor and Crimp, then, to askwhat a work of art represents is not only to askwhat prior system of representation or likeness itbelongs to, but also what social, political or cul-tural codes it represents and reproduces.

3.1. The Navajo documents as copy

We see the tension of the original and the copyin the Navajo documents. On the one hand, thelegitimacy of the documents rests upon a uniqueand original survey of the reservation and thehuman dependency on its resources. The maps,tables and photographs speak to the authenticityof the record. The claim that the Navajo docu-ments represented the real conditions of the reser-vation and the force of the o�cial BAE argumentrested in part on this uniqueness, originality andauthenticity.But at the same time, the status and legitimacy

of the Navajo documents rested also on what theycopied. The production of the Navajo documentsdid not spontaneously emerge without antecedent.The Statement of Procedures (discussed above)actually identi®es the immediate antecedent of theNavajo documents, which was the more celebratedand earlier Tewa Basin study of Hispanic villagesand Native American pueblos of northern NewMexico. In turn, both the Tewa Basin and theNavajo studies are fairly late examples of thesocial survey movement, which spanned theAtlantic from roughly the 1880s until World WarII. There were of course other antecedents. Forexample much of the survey work would ®nd itsroots in the US Geological Survey and the soilconservation projects of the New Deal. Socialsurvey research was primarily an antecedent to theNavajo sociological survey.

3.2. Social Survey Research and the EconomicConstruction of Poverty

Social surveys emerged to study and documentthe conditions of the urban poor. Jean Converse(1987), who herself is conscious of the fallacy ofthe original, selects Charles Booth who produced


The Life and Labour of the People of Londonbetween 1889 and 1903 as an ancestor of, and theinspiration for, the social survey movement in theUS (Booth, 1903). Rowntree's work on Yorkentitled Poverty: a Study of Town Life published in1910 is another early example of studies of theurban poor (Rowntree, 1980). Converse (1987)notes that as early as 1885, Frederic Le Play, aFrench mining engineer conducted a similar typestudy of workers in France (LePlay, 1982).11

Early US social surveys were used by philan-thropists, settlement-house workers, progressivepoliticians and protestant organizations to voicemounting concerns about the e�ects of indus-trialization and urbanization. Their focus was onthe living conditions of the urban poor. The``country life'' movement adopted survey researchto document the living conditions of the ruralpoor in an attempt to stem the migration of peopleto the cities. Finally, the Great Depression andNew Deal politics of the 1930s extended the scopeand impact of social survey in formulating socialpolicy and reforms. It is in this latter period thatwe place the Navajo documents.Three dimensions of social survey research are

important to our analysis of the Navajo docu-ments. The ®rst is the emphasis on the principlesof science. The second is the reformist and inter-ventionist nature of much of survey research in theUS. The third is the importance of the familybudget or income/expenditure accounts. These areimportant for our analysis because the Navajodocuments copy and reproduce these dimensions. Indoing so they draw upon the established credibilityand legitimacy of this genre of research. What isalso important however is that in adopting a socialsurvey approach, the Navajo documents not onlyreproduce the methodology but they also repro-duce the ontological framework, which was essen-tially a form of social economics.

3.3. Principles of scienti®c research

Converse states that survey research had thefollowing features:

Fieldwork: The survey was conducted in thenatural world of events, objects, and people

rather than exclusively in the arti®cial or`àrranged'' world of the laboratory or clinicor in the statistical world of existingrecords.

Scope: The survey undertook comprehensivecoverage of some domain, providing an over-view of the whole.

Detail: The survey's overview was based onthe examination of detailed cases.

Quanti®cation: At least some of the detail wassummarized by quanti®cation.

Individual units of analysis: Data were col-lected, organized, and analyzed by individualrecords. (Converse, 1987, p. 21).

Survey research studies were monumentalachievements in enumeration and emphasized thescienti®c principles of objectivity and rigor.The sociological survey of the Navajo Reservation

conformed to the main elements of survey research.The work was conducted in the ®eld, the scopewas comprehensive, the detail was profound, andthe level of enumeration was prodigious. A furtherresemblance was the use of preformatted surveyquestionnaires to interview large numbers of theNavajo. Individual records were catalogued by thename of the family matriarch.The Navajo documents also re¯ected and

reproduced the concern of survey research withobjectivity and rigor. The Statement of Proceduresemphasized the importance of the ``search for fac-tual data'' and that the sociological survey would``concern itself with measurement Ð the quantita-tive description of human dependency uponresources'' (BAE, 1936, p. 6). There was also astated need to ``subject the sociological survey tocareful scrutiny so that the concepts involved and

11 What di�erentiates this earlier work from the Booth stu-

dies and the American social survey movement is that Le Play

used individual case studies to report his work whereas later

studies produced aggregated data based on the survey of

numerous cases.


the procedures employed might be rigorous andscienti®c.'' (BAE, 1936, p.1)The general approach of the sociological survey

and its insistence upon facts and scienti®c rigor,aligned the Navajo documents with a tradition ofresearch which had a long pedigree and respectedreputation, particularly with the federal government.

3.4. Social surveys and the reformist movement

Social surveys were reformist in nature. Studiesin England and the US around the turn of thecentury were designed to draw attention to theliving conditions of the poor and to lobby, in thecase of the US, a Progressive-era government totake action. As Converse notes, Booth undertookhis study with ``policy and in¯uence in mind''(Converse, 1987, p. 130). She goes on to note thatin the US there was mounting concern at the turnof the century about ``the e�ects of industrializa-tion and urbanization''. This concern was heigh-tened by ``the great immigrations from abroad andby the streams of migrants to the city from theAmerican farm'' (Converse, 1987, p. 22). As anoutcome of this concern there was `àgitation forameliorative legislation and regulation''. To sup-port these calls for legislation and regulation,``reformers and social scientists set out to applyBooth's methods to document the facts of Amer-ican poverty'' (Converse, 1987, p. 22).Studies were quickly conducted in Chicago,

Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bu�alo and other majormetropolitan areas by the settlement house move-ment, private foundations such as the Russell SageFoundation, the Protestant Church and indus-trialists.The country life movement was responsible for

applying surveys to the rural poor. The move-ment's objectives were to improve the lives of therural poor and thereby stem the ¯ow from thefarm to the city. The techniques developed in theserural surveys became the cornerstone for thegrowth of government-sponsored surveys duringthe Great Depression, including the Navajo Pro-ject.Industrialists took advantage of social surveys

to market their merchandise and in the celebratedcase of Henry Ford used survey research to exercise

social control over the workforce in order tomaintain order and improve e�ciency on the factory¯oor (Meyer, 1981); Bhimani (1994) illustrates afar earlier use of social survey data by a Frenchindustrialist for similar purposes.From the outset, the Navajo documents were

intended to reform the Navajo way of life. Indeed,John Collier, as head of the BIA viewed his pro-gram for Indian Tribes across the US as havingthree objectives. These were the `èconomic reha-bilitation of the Indians, principally on the land,organization of the Indian Tribes for managingtheir own a�airs, and civil and cultural freedomand opportunity for the Indians'' (White, 1983, p.255). However, to e�ect these reforms on theNavajo Reservation, the Navajo ®rst must besaved from themselves. In a return to the pater-nalistic stance which characterized earlier Indianpolicy (Prucha, 1994), in 1933 John Collierannounced to the Navajo council that:

If erosion is continued at the present rate,within ®fteen or twenty years the Navajoswould be homeless, a people stranded help-lessly in a desert. The Indian bureau hasdecided to save your soil and thereby saveyour life.

The Navajo project, like the social surveymovement more generally, was essentially refor-mist. As we shall see in the next section, there wasa strong emphasis in the Navajo documents onproviding interventionist strategies, not only toaddress the problem of overgrazing and soil ero-sion but also to improve the economic conditionsof Navajo life on the reservation. In order to e�ecteconomic improvement the current economicconditions had to be surveyed.

3.5. Survey research and family budgets

As stated above, survey research was concernedwith enumerating and articulating the living con-ditions of the urban and/or working poor.Although Booth's study of the London poor andRowntree's study of the poor of York, as well asLe Play's study in France, collected data on occu-pation, health, religion, conventions and family


history, there was also a considerable preoccupa-tion with the economic condition of the poor.These and later US social surveyors producedaccounts of the income and expenditure of poorurban families. These accounts were variouslycalled ``family budgets,'' ``household budgets,''`ìncome-outgo records,'' or `ìncome-expenditurerecords.'' Signi®cantly, these early accounts bear astriking resemblance to the accounts in the Navajodocuments (see Le Play, 1982, pp.195±201;Rowntree, 1980, pp. 222±294 and Appendix Ebelow).The importance of these accounts to the social

survey research is quite explicit. Indeed, as Con-verse (1987) notes ``Le Play aspired to granddesign in studying and understanding all of societythrough the income and outgoes of the individualfamily economy'' (Converse, 1987, p.19). In short,society and the lives of workers could be repre-sented and constructed in and through familybudgets. Booth used family budgets to `ìnvent''the notion of the ``poverty line'' which is used tothis day as a means of de®ning and constructingthat segment of the population o�cially de®ned aspoor. Booth produced a ``poverty map'' of London,color-coding the city into eight economic levels.Later, Rowntree re®ned the de®nition of the pov-erty line as ``the level of income insu�cient to buythe necessary food, shelter, and supplies to main-tain physical e�ciency'' (Converse 1987, p. 17).Interestingly, Rowntree used standards of nutritionproduced by the USDA to measure income againstconsumption. In e�ect these early studies wereinvolved in the economic construction of poverty.Family budgets were not only an integral part of

social survey research but they were also widelyused in the United States in government statisticsincluding the construction of cost-of-living indices(Converse, 1987, p. 19).We have already discussed the economic pre-

occupation of the Navajo documents. What issigni®cant here is that this preoccupation repre-sented a long tradition concerned with the eco-nomic construction of the urban and rural poor inboth the US and the UK. Any interpretation webring to the accounts and economic analysis con-tained in the Navajo documents should recognizethis connection with its antecedents. We suggest

that the Navajo documents did not only copy theform and content of accounts or family budgetsfrom previous social surveys, but that they alsoreproduced the means to represent and constructthe social in terms of the economic. The membersof the sociological branch on the Navajo Reserva-tion used the title of ``Social Economist,'' re¯ectingboth a training in and a predisposition towardsthe representation and we would add constructionof the social in terms of the economic.As noted above, the most marked di�erences

between the Navajo documents and earlier reportson the ``grazing conditions of the reservation''(e.g. Zeh, 1931) is the appearance of the economic.While the economic represented the orientation ofsocial survey research, it also represented a shift inthe representation of the Navajo problem. By 1935,the problem of overgrazing and the need for stockreductions were overwhelmingly established. Largelybecause of the disastrous impact of the ®rst twostock reductions, the challenge became how tomeasure and then ameliorate the economic impactof future stock reductions. In short, the socialeconomist has to ®rst represent the Navajo eco-nomically and then construct a solution thatwould leave the Navajo economically unharmedby the stock reductions.To summarize this section: the Navajo docu-

ments were both originals and copies. They wereoriginals in the sense that they were authentic stu-dies of the Navajo reservation in the 1930s. Theywere copies in the sense that they reproduced andrepresented social survey research. By copying thesocial survey approach, the Navajo documentstook on the aura, and with this aura, the cred-ibility and legitimacy associated with science.However, the social survey approach was notvalue neutral. It established what elements ofthe ``social'' were to be surveyed and imposedupon the data a mode of analysis that was atthe same time reformist in intent and economicin orientation.

4. Representation and the real

John Tagg (1993), referencing Roland Barthes(1981), suggests that despite attempts to discredit


the notion, the realist position tenaciously persistsin photography:

A camera is an instrument of evidence.Beyond any encoding of the photograph,there is an essential connection between ``thenecessarily real thing which has been placedbefore the lens'' and the photographic image:`èvery photograph is somehow co-naturalwith its referent.'' What the photographasserts is the overwhelming truth that ``thething has been there'': this was the realitywhich once existed, though it is a realityone can no longer touch (Tagg, 1993, p. 1.Portion in quotes from Barthes, 1981).

In short, the photograph, although inevitably aform of representation which itself can be endlesslyreproduced, has nevertheless been invested withthe ability to establish the presence of the real. It isthe mechanical reproduction of the image that hasbestowed this evidential force on the photograph,a force that is unique amongst the visual arts.The photographs in the Navajo documents

exhibited this evidential force. They documentedthe real improvement in the quality of the live-stock after the introduction of new breeds (seePlate 1, Appendix C). They also documented thecause of the Navajo problem, with the evidence ofsheep grazing above a severely eroded canyon (seePlate 2, Appendix C).Maps produce a similar evidentiary force, parti-

cularly those maps produced by aerial photo-graphy. The maps coordinate with or correspondto real features of the land. This evidentiary forceof maps persists despite their obvious representa-tional form. Numbers also possess an evidentiaryforce. However, in their case, a far more compli-cated apparatus is needed to support the claim totruth in numbers Ð namely, the edi®ce of mathe-matics and science. In its reliance on the calcula-tive, economics almost by association claims to beable to represent the truth. Economics does notpossess the photographic ability to instanta-neously capture reality. Rather, it must reveal itpiece by piece, slowly uncovering the underlyingframework of truth. In a curiously contradictoryway photographs, maps and numbers although all

representational are said to be able to capture orreveal the truth of the real.In each of these disciplines this claim to the

truth has been seriously challenged. In the case ofphotography, Tagg (1993) suggests that:

The indexical nature of the photograph Ð thecausative link between the prephotographedreferent and its sign Ð is. . .highly complex,irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at thelevel of meaning.

He goes on to argue that:

What makes the link is a discriminatorytechnical, cultural and historical process inwhich particular optical and chemical devicesare set to work to organize experience anddesire and produce a new reality Ð a paperimage which, through yet further processes,may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.(Tagg, 1993, p.3).

King (1996) makes the following points withrespect to the constructive potential of carto-graphy:

[M]aps are subject to strict conventions. Whatis represented and how depends on a numberof contingencies as does the meaning attrib-uted to the map. The map continues to owe asmuch to particular understandings of a terri-tory as to the territory itself, if not more.There is and can be not such thing as a purelyobjective map, one that simply reproduces apre-existing reality. Choices always have to bemade about what to represent and how andwhat to leave out. It is here that cartographicmeaning is created. To be included on themap is to be granted the status of reality orimportance. To be left o� is to be denied. Thereality that is given on a map is in¯uenced bytechnical limitations and also by the deliber-ate strategies of the cartographer. More sig-ni®cant perhaps are the bounds set by theworld-views of particular cultures, views thatare themselves constructed and reinforced onthe map (King, 1996 p. 18).


Porter (1995) makes similar observations aboutthe facticity of numbers. He argues that becausenumbers are produced `àccording to a highly dis-ciplined discourse it creates a mechanical objec-tivity through which a multitude of complexresults and transactions may be convenientlysummarized to produce knowledge supposedlyindependent of the particular people who make it.(Porter, 1995 p.5).John Tagg suggests that the photograph `ìs not

a magical `èmanation'' [of the real] but [is] amaterial product of a mechanical process set towork in speci®c contexts by speci®c forces, formore or less de®ned purposes'' (Tagg, 1993. p.3). Inshort, reality and meaning is always constructed.Implicit in the way in which the Navajo docu-

ments were presented, was the presumption ofbeing able to factually capture and re¯ect the real.The material in the Navajo documents was pre-sented as a window to their world, or as a mirrorre¯ecting the real living conditions of the Navajoand their land. The surveys were presented as fac-tual, as opaque and non representational, and asindependent of their producers. The Navajodocuments, as is the case with other social surveys,pulled together multiple forms of representation toconstruct the real. Maps, numbers, photographsand economics were assembled in an almost unas-sailable representation of the real conditions of thereservation. Much like the con¯uence of eventsdiscussed earlier that provided the impetus foraction on the Navajo problem, the Navajo docu-ments may be seen as the pulling together of datafragments in order to create the ``complete pic-ture.'' And it is upon this complete picture thataction is premised and justi®ed. Despite thismonumental e�ort to present the truth and thewhole truth, the Navajo documents were never-theless an elaborate construction.The import of the Navajo documents rested on

an economic representation and construction of theNavajo. Only when this was established, could thesolution to the livestock reduction program be con-vincingly proposed. It was the income and consump-tion accounts that gave shape to, and illustrated theworkings of, a rational Navajo economy. Fromthese accounts and from material produced in theother surveys, it was possible to demonstrate that

Navajo economic self-su�ciency could be preservedand indeed improved, once the traditional livestockeconomy was dismantled by the reductions.12

We now turn to a detailed examination of theaccounts in the Navajo documents. We use as anexample those reproduced in the Land Manage-ment Unit 18 report of 1935.

4.1. Accounting for the Navajo

The text accompanying Tables 1 and 2, showingthe Total income and Per capita income of Unit 18

Table 1

Total income Ð 1935

Commercial Non-commercial Total percent

Wages $217,947.00 $217,947.00 37

Livestock 105,813.00 $44,100.00 149,913.00 25

Agriculture 5,513.00 138,994.00 144,507.00 25

Rugs 43,035.00 43,035.00 7

Miscellaneous 33,883.00 33,883.00 6

Total $406,191.00 $183,094.00 $589,285.00 100

Table 2

Per capita income Unit 18 Ð 1935

Wages $70.00

Livestock 48.00

Agriculture 47.00

Rugs 14.00

Jewelry (misc.) 11.00

Total $190.00

12 Understanding the imperative to create a complete picture

and to provide the unassailable truth of conditions on the

Navajo reservation becomes clearer if one considers the reper-

cussions of the impact the initial stock reductions had on the

Navajo. John Collier the head of the BIA had to defend the

stock reduction strategy in US Senate hearings. It is also sig-

ni®cant that the Navajo documents were intertwined with

broader changes in US Indian policy in the 1930s. In this

respect the Navajo documents were part of a far broader dis-

cursive ®eld or network of other texts and factors. A full dis-

cussion of the consequences of the stock reductions on the

Navajo and the inter-textuality of the Navajo documents are

beyond the scope of this paper and are the topic of a

subsequent paper.


respectively, explained in detail each of the com-ponents of income, noting that:

Wages made the greatest contribution tocommercial income. The total reached$218,000.00. The sale of livestock and theirproducts provided another one-quarter(twenty-six percent) and was second to wagesin importance. Rugs with seven percent of thetotal and jewelry with eight percent followedin importance. Income from the sale of agri-cultural products was only one percent andincome from the sale of wood was negligible(BAE LandManagement Unit 18, 1935, p. 15).

Almost immediately, the thrust of the economiclogic was revealed. The report stated that:

There are several methods by which theinhabitants may increase their agriculturaloutput in order to obviate expenditures forproducible foods. Additional agriculturallands may be developed, or farm land nowidle be put into active production. Underpresent farming methods a total of 2,624acres of additional land would be su�cient tosubstitute home-produced for imported items.Of this acreage, 2,239 acres would be requiredfor wheat which, when converted to ¯our,would equal the value of the $46,000.00 of

¯our now imported (BAE Land ManagementUnit 18, 1935, p. 15).

The remainder of the accounts elaborated onthis position, providing the details from which thiscalculation was derived.

Table 4

Gross non-commercial income Unit 18 Ð 1935

No. of acres Total pounds Total value

Agricultural products $144,507

Corn 2759 2,781,072 $61,184

Alfalfa 321 1,284,000 14,380

Beans 874 218,500 5900

Potatoes 15 60,000 1830

Squash and melons 69 276,000 9660

Oats 830 4,150,000 31,125

Wheat 48 38,400 768

Grass 1244 2,488,000 18,660

Vegetables 10

Less value of products sold to trader 5,513 $138,994

Livestock products 44,100

Sheep and goats 14,700 head $44,100

Total $183,094

Table 3

Gross commercial income unit 18 Ð 1935

Livestock products $105,813.00 26%

Sheep, goats, and lambs $ 60,073.00

Wool & mohair 37,794.00

Cattle 1,063.00

Pelts 4,887.00

Meat 1,996.00

Agricultural products 5,513.00 1%

Corn 3,222.00

Hay 886.00

Beans 1,274.00

Potatoes 87.00

Melons and peaches 44.00

Rugs 43,035.00 11%

Wage work 217,947.00 54%

Government 178,400.00

Traders 8,801.00

Private 30,746.00

Miscellaneous 33,883.00 8%

Jewelry 32,516.00

Wood 1,367.00

Total $406,191.00 100%


Table 3 Gross commercial income and Table 4Gross non commercial income, provide a detailedbreakdown of the types of income. Table 4 isinteresting in a number of ways. Whereas themonetary value of gross commercial income couldbe taken from the records of ®nancial transactionsbetween the Navajo and the marketplace, mostoften represented by the trading posts, the value ofgross non-commercial income had to be derived.Economic values had to be placed upon somemeasure of the physical quantities produced andconsumed by Navajo families. In Table 4 we beginto see how mapping (measuring the land in acres),counting (the pounds of crops produced), andaccounting (assigning and recording value)become integrated. These calculations in turnmade possible the calculation of the relative valueof crops per acre in Table 5, Relative value of cropsper acre.

Simply dividing the total value of the produceby the number of acres derives these numbers.Thus for Squash and Melons, $9660 total valuewas divided by the 69 acres used for this crop,giving a value of $140.00 per acre.What is signi®cant here is how the application

of the economic created a new ranking of thecrops. Corn, for example, was by far the largestcrop at 2759 acres, but was ranked much lower ineconomic value at only $24 per acre. Beans,ranked third in acreage, or second if one excludesgrass, at 874 acres, was ranked last at only $6.75per acre in the economic analysis. Whateversocial or agricultural value the number of acresdevoted to a crop re¯ected, it did not coincidewith the economic. The text explicitly addressedthe relative value of crops per acre as calculatedin Table 5.

Although the total value of corn crop was thegreatest single item of agricultural income [seeTable 4], the per acre value was $24.00, or®fty cents greater than the average per acreincome. . . .Fourteen percent of the farm landwas given to beans, but their commercialvalue was the lowest of any other crop,amounting to only $6.75 per acre (BAE LandManagement Unit 18, 1935, p. 18).

Table 6 begins the series of accounts measuringthe consumption by Navajo families. The textimmediately registers ``the relatively greater percapita income in Unit 18 was matched by ahigher per capita consumption'' (BAE LandManagement Unit 18, 1936 p. 18). Here thesurveyors were contrasting the income and con-sumption of Land Management Unit 18, whichwas the most ``prosperous'' unit, with the otherunits. For example, Land Management Unit 5 hada per capita income of $127.00 as compared to the$190.00 per capita in Unit 18. Land ManagementUnit I was the poorest Unit: its per capita incomewas $79.00. Land Management Unit 11, in adeparture from the standard set of accounts, cal-culated per capita income by income group. Thisreport noted that:

Study of a 7% sample of the total populationof the district working on the basis of owner-ship of livestock resources, indicates that percapita income ranges from about $20 per yearfor the lowest income group to about $330per year for the highest (BAE Land Manage-ment Unit 11, 1936, p. 12).

There were, therefore, large disparities inincome, not only across the di�erent land man-agement units but also within land managementunits. Despite these di�erences the same economic

Table 5

Relative value of crops per acre Unit 18 Ð 1935

Squash and melons $140.00

Potatoes 122.00

Alfalfa 44.80

Corn 24.00

Wheat 16.00

Beans 6.75

Table 6

Total consumption Unit 18 Ð 1935

Commercial $319,000.00 64%

Non-commercial 183,000.00 36%

Total $502,000.00 100%


solution was applied across all of the Navajofamilies, often disproportionately harming thepoor and most vulnerable. By using gross avera-ges, the economic was imbued with a sense ofequality despite the di�erent impacts it had onpeople and families.Returning to Land Management Unit 18, the

text of the report focuses squarely on the fact thatincome exceeded consumption. It stated:

The total value of goods consumed was$88,500.00 less than the total income. Of thisamount we can account for $46,000.00 whichwas spent by the inhabitants of the districtduring the past year for motor cars from thedealership in Gallup. This still leaves a totalof $42,000.00 income unaccounted for inexpenditures, a very considerable portion ofwhich was probably spent in retail shops inGallup (BAE Land Management Unit 18,1936, p. 18).

In other land management units the surplus wassmaller than in Unit 18. In Unit 11 gross incometotaled $156,100 and total consumption was$158,300, in e�ect an accounting de®cit.Table 7 Food consumption and Table 8 Food

purchased from trader provided yet another part ofthe economic logic by measuring and valuing theamount of food produced rather than purchased.These tables indicated that the Navajo were

dependent on trade for at least one third of theirbasic food.Table 9 Imports of food, calculated the value of

food imported into Land Management Unit 18.The ®nal component for the economic solution

was a measure of the amount of food importedinto the reservation. In Table 10, The acreagerequired for production of producible imports nowpurchased, the logic of Tables 4 and 5, whichmeasured the relative value of crops grown andthe output per acre, was reversed. Here the samevalues and quantities were used to calculate thenumber of acres necessary to grow su�cientadditional crops to avoid paying for importedfood.

Table 8

Food purchased from trader Unit 18 Ð 1935

Produced in district

Sold to and re-purchased from trader $4,201.00 2%

Imported into district $216,960.00 98%

Total $221,161.00 100%

Table 7

Food consumption Unit 18 Ð 1935

Home produced and consumed $183,094.00 45%

Purchased from trader 221,161.00 55%

Total $404,255.00 100%

Table 10

Acreage required for production of producible imports now

purchased Unit 18

Pounds Dollars Yield

(pounds)

Acres

Corn 74,000 $1,863.00 1008 73

Oats 91,192 2,324.00 1000 91

Hay 503,349 5,916.00 4000 126

Beans 2,542 102.00 250 10

Potatoes 174,233 5,569.00 4000 44

Melons 88,548 3,017.00 4000 22

Onions 36,313 1,659.00 3000 12

Peaches 4,766 274.00 12,000 1

Apples 60,055 3,324.00 10,000 6

Total (raw agric. products) $24,048.00 385

Wheat 1,791,538 46,584.00 800 2239

Total $70,632.00 2624

Table 9

Imports of food Unit 18 Ð 1935

Not producible in district $146,327.00 67%

Producible in district 70,632.00 33%

Raw agricultural productsa $24,048.00

Flour 46,584.00

Total $216,959.00 100%

a Includes corn, oats, hay, beans, potatoes, melons, onions,

peaches, and apples.


Pausing for a moment before going onto theeconomic solution, it is notable that the accountswere not (nor of course could ever be) merelyrecords of ®nancial transactions or economicfacts. Rather, these accounts were the key elementin the construction of an economic solution. Theeconomic logic of the solution was incorporated inthe accounts. The notion of repetition manifesteditself within the Navajo documents. As notedabove, each land management unit reproducedroughly the same maps, tables, and accounts.What is signi®cant is that the units also repeatedthe same economic solution to the problem.Because of this repetition, we argue that theeconomic solution was constructed prior to theproduction of reports and indeed before the gath-ering of the data necessary to construct the eco-nomic solution.

4.2. Replacing livestock with crops

The solution to the economic problem of theNavajo was to replace the lost income caused bythe livestock reduction programs by growing morecrops and thus avoiding expensive imports.In Land Management Unit 18, the argument

was particularly concise. The title of this section ofthe report was Stock Adjustment in Relation toIncome, thus linking the stock reduction program(euphemistically referred to as stock adjust-ment)with the economic concept of income. Wequote at some length from this section of thereport.First, the report calculates the extent of stock

reductions necessary.

The total stocking in Unit 18 amounts to70,591 sheep units. The carrying capacityequals some 48,614 sheep units which meansthat the equalization of stocking with carry-ing capacity necessitates a reduction of 21,977sheep units. The present stocking includes10,700 sheep units in horses which can bereduced by 2,860 sheep units if we ®gure anaverage ownership of four horses per con-sumption group. This would make necessarya reduction of 19,117 sheep units in sheep,

goats, and cattle (BAE Land ManagementUnit 18, 1953, p. 22).

The report then calculates the loss of incomeassociated with the reduction of sheep units.

The average sheep unit income on sheep,goats, and cattle for 1935 amounted to $2.60.The necessary reduction would mean adecrease in livestock income to the extent of$49,704.00. With the elimination of unpro-ductive livestock ®rst, the improvement of therange through lessened competition for for-age and improved methods of handling, it isnot certain that the income loss would be sogreat, and it is probable and can beassumed that this ®gure represents a max-imum (BAE Land Management Unit 18,1935, p. 22).

Contained in this quote is not only a calculationof lost income but also the implication ofimproved e�ciency. Finally the solution to theloss in income is articulated.

The substitution of home-produced foods forthose which are now bought through thetrader would increase agricultural income by$70,600.00. The necessary acreage is avail-able and was idle last year so that there needbe no development of additional land tosupplement income loss through sheepreduction (BAE Land Management Unit 18,1835, p. 22).

Quite simply, the solution to the stock reductionproblem rested on increasing agricultural productionof foodstu�s. The Navajo families would therebyavoid needing to purchase these foodstu�s. In turnthe savings would compensate for the loss of live-stock. In addition however, the reduction in livestockand improved livestock handling methods wouldbring its own rewards and e�ciencies in terms ofthe restoration of the rangeland and higher averageproductivity per sheep unit.All of the land management units made the

same kind of argument. Unit 11 produced a morere®ned argument. This report concluded that:


Approximately 55 acres of new agriculturalland would be required to produce the rawagricultural products imported into the dis-trict at a cost of $2,400. On the basis of thesesame estimates, approximately 550 acres ofnew agricultural land would be required toraise the amount of wheat from which couldbe produced the 230,000 pounds of ¯ourimported into the district during 1935 at acost to the Navajos of $11,900. A total, thenof approximately 600 acres of new agri-cultural land would be required to produce atotal of $14,300 worth of commoditiesimported but producible within the district.The principal source of commercial income islivestock from which was derived in 1935about $3.10 per sheep unit, exclusive ofhorses, as indicated above in the section onIncome. Thus, 4,600 ship units, the numbernecessary to produce $14,300 of commercialincome, could be eliminated from the total of18,500 sheep now in the district without anychange in the district consumption if 600acres were provided (BAE Land ManagementUnit 11, 1935, p. 21±22).

Land Management Unit 11's analysis reversesthe logic of Unit 18 by deriving ®rst the amount ofacres necessary to replace imported foodstu�s andthen calculating the sheep reductions this repre-sented in terms of income. However, the basicargument remained unchanged.In Land Management Unit 10, an additional

1,304 acres of land would be needed to produce$28,000 worth of food then imported. Again, byfar the largest part, $19,800 be generated bygrowing wheat. (BAE Land Management Unit 10,p. 12) The livestock reductions in Unit 10 were7701 sheep units (p. 14) Ð after deducting nonproductive sheep units, a reduction of 5990 pro-ductive sheep units Ð at an average of $2.35 perhead would amount to a loss of $14,091, againbelow the $28,000 of avoided imports.Unit 17 needed 3100 acres to replace imported

foodstu�s, the largest amount required of anyunit. In this unit, however, there were thought tobe only 1911 acres of idle and potential new landavailable for agriculture. Fortunately, however, no

stock reductions were called for in Unit 17. ``Thepresent stocking is approximately 77,000 sheepunits, the carrying capacity is approximately75,000 sheep units.'' (BAE Land ManagementUnit 17, 1936, p. 22). Eliminating non-productivesheep units could easily reduce the two-thousand-unit di�erence.To summarize this ®nal section: the stock

reductions of 1933 and 34 were justi®ed solely interms of grazing conditions, carrying capacitiesand, of course, the Dam. The reductions were asocial and economic disaster for the Navajo,especially the poor. Although the representationof the Navajo problem in the 1935 documentsremained that of overgrazing, the solution took onan added economic complexity. The economicsolution became that of demonstrating how addi-tional stock reductions could be made withoutfurther economic harm to the Navajo. For this totake place, the Navajo had to be represented interms of the economic via an elaborate set ofincome and consumption accounts. Theseaccounts were not simply economic records, butrather contained the logic of the economic solu-tion. The economic losses caused by future stockreductions were to be o�set by increased produc-tion of high-value crops Ð mostly wheat. Byincreasing agricultural production, Navajo familiescould avoid purchasing expensive imported food-stu�s. Within this economic solution was thesynthesis of various forms of representation fromthe seven surveys. The economic solution repre-sented the intersection of the cartographic (acresof arable land) the calculative (crop productionand yields per acre) and the economic (value ofcrops per acre).

5. Afterward

The livestock reductions were a disaster and theeconomic solution never materialized. Of themany critiques one could level at the Navajodocuments on their own terms we shall summarizethree.First, the Navajo documents, though noting

that the largest portion of income, 37% in Unit


18, was from wages earned from work on theNavajo Project itself, did not discuss the tempor-ary and precarious nature of this source ofincome. Funding for the Navajo Project wasseverely curtailed in 1938. In 1939 expenditures onthe project were only $500,000. This sum declinedto $12,000 for the ®scal year 1940±1941. Wagespaid to the Navajos declined by $750,000 from thepeak year of 1937, when total expenditures on theproject were $1,225,000. The impact of thesewage losses compounded the hardships theNavajos faced because of the stock reductions. Itwas only with the advent of US involvement inWorld War II, which created an unprecedenteddemand for Navajo labor and soldiers, that theconditions were ameliorated. After the war, how-ever, returning workers, veterans and their famil-ies faced a bleak future on the reservationwithout jobs or herds to support them (White,1983).Second, the asserted logic that the Navajo

could replace livestock with crops rested largelyon growing wheat and converting it into ¯our.Unit 17's report, however, asserted that growingand milling wheat into ¯our was a complicatedprocess.

The introduction of wheat as an agriculturalproduct involves certain di�culties. It is aproduct with which the Indians are not wellacquainted either in growing or harvesting.Expensive machinery is necessary and theconversion of wheat into ¯our is a compli-cated and di�cult process (BAE Land Man-agement Unit 17, 1936, p. 22).

In short, growing wheat was never a viablealternative and never materialized. In general,farming was the most precarious part of theNavajos' subsistence economy. The regulardrought cycles meant that the Navajos could notrely on agricultural production. When thedroughts struck, the Navajos traded livestock foreven greater amounts of foodstu�s. Creatinggreater reliance on agriculture at the expense oftheir herds was anathema to the Navajos and arecipe for disaster.

Finally, unlike earlier survey research, theNavajo documents failed to establish a ``povertyline'' for the Navajo. The economic solution wasdesigned to leave the Navajo economically noworse o� than 1935 levels. The additional cropswere intended to ameliorate the impact of pro-posed future livestock reductions not to compen-sate for previous ones. What was not recognizedin the Navajo documents was that by 1935 theNavajo had already endured severe droughts,winters and of course the 1933 and 1934 stockreductions. These events had already left manyNavajo destitute and dependent on welfare. Fur-ther reductions premised upon the precarious logicof increased wheat production would make con-ditions for these and other Navajo only worse.White (1983) describes the events of the 1930s inthe following terms:

The Navajo had escaped disaster before butthey were now caught in a catastrophe, lar-gely because they were a colonial appendageof American society and their interests hadbeen subordinated to those of the dominantgroup. Stock reduction was merely anothermanifestation of this basic relationship; it wasbegun to save huge federal and privateinvestments. Even though those immediatelyinvolved in running the program often camewith the best intentions and with real sym-pathy toward the [Navajo], their actions werenevertheless destructive. The tragedy was thata group that had weathered previous crisesand change with substantial ingenuity andsuccess was never given the chance to developits own programs and responses. Instead thegovernment forced the Navajos into a posi-tion of desperate and ®nally sterile opposition(White 1983, pp. 248±249).

The Navajos, according to White (1983),instead of being self-su�cient have becomedependent. In 1936, the Navajo relied on live-stock and agriculture for 54% of their income;by 1958 this ®gure had been reduced to 10%. Incontrast, wages increased from 34 to 68% andby 1958 over 16% of Navajo income wasderived from welfare.


6. Conclusions

In the view of the social science researchers, theNavajo were to be saved from themselves and themassive public and private investment in theBoulder Dam was to be protected from the Nava-jos' alluvial ®ll by replacing livestock with crops.Simple as this solution seems, its constructionrequired enormous amounts of e�ort. As Hop-wood (1987), Bhimani (1994) and Miller andO'Leary (1994) have demonstrated, the process ofeconomic construction of the real is a laboriousone.In the case of the Navajo, their land had to be

mapped and its resources had to be inventoriedand valued. A rationalized economy had to beconstructed in terms of income and consumptionand a new economic identity, namely that of con-sumption unit, had to be forged for the Navajo.We argue that the economic construction of theNavajo rested on an elaborate process of repre-sentation, which included text, numbers, maps,accounts and photographs, whereby the surveyorscould claim to have established the real condi-tions of the reservation and the extent of theover-dependency on its resources. The existingNavajo depictions of their lands, economy andrelations were displaced and devalued. In con-trast, the depiction and representation throughnumbers, text, maps, and photographs of theNavajo's through the eyes of the surveyors illus-trates the centrality of Anglo American under-standings of themselves as preeminent andsingular.The Navajo documents deployed a variety of

representational strategies to lay claim to thereal. In this respect, they represent the intersec-tion of the articulable, the calculative and thevisual. The term representation, as elaborated inart theory, brings with it a number of valencieswhich facilitates the analysis of such multimediadocuments.First, the Navajo documents may be said to

``represent'' the Navajo problem and its solution.For this to work, the documents needed to depictthe conditions on the reservation in a highlyrationalized and scienti®c manner. The voice ofthe Navajo, as well as any reference to the social

upheaval, resistance on the reservation and eco-nomic hardship caused by the stock reductions, hadto systematically be purged from the documents lestit undermined or contradicted the rational scien-ti®c depiction.Second, the Navajo documents may be said to

be ``representative'' of social survey research, atradition of research with a long pedigree and onewith considerable credibility with the US FederalGovernment. Thus, while the documents had todemonstrate originality and authenticity, theyalso had to demonstrate likeness or to intimate aconnection with their antecedents. Any under-standing of the Navajo documents must recog-nize that they were copies, which incorporatednot only the standard methodology of surveyresearch but also its reformist intent and eco-nomic orientation. The Navajo documents are,therefore, not autoreferential but represented,reproduced and repeated an established practiceof depicting, representing and constructing popu-lations (the urban and rural poor) in terms ofthe economic.Third, the Navajo documents may be said to

``represent'' the real. They o�ered, to those whoaccepted the reality of numbers, maps, accountsand photographs, a window on the world of theNavajo. They claimed to reveal, through pains-taking detail, the underlying truth of the condi-tions of the reservation and the Navajo. Yet aswith all forms of representation they were inevitablya construction. Each representational form carefullyassembled the real according to established codesand conventions that led to a rationalized world ofeconomic income and consumption. This economicconstruction linked the Navajo to their livestockand to the land in a way that was utterly alien tothe Navajos' conception of themselves and theirworld (Witherspoon, 1975). It was only the con-struction of the real in terms of the economic thatpermitted the introduction of an economic solu-tion to the problem. Despite the disastrous out-come of the Navajo project this mode of analysisbecame quite commonplace in the post-colonialthird world. For example UNESCO proscribe asimilar strategy for the Ariaal of Kenya, anotherpastoral nomadic tribe with equally disastrousresults (Fratkin, 1998).


Appendix A

Courtesy: Center for Southwest Research University of New Mexico Library.

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Appendix B



Appendix C


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Appendix D

Title of Tables from BAE Statistical Summary: Human Dependency Survey: Navajo Reservation, 1940.

I. PopulationII. Total Income, Commercial and Non-CommercialIII. Total Income by ClassIV. Total Income by Class, Exclusive of WagesV. Livestock Income, Commercial and Non-CommercialVI. Agricultural Income, Commercial and Non-CommercialVII. Commercial Income by ClassVIII. Commercial Income by Class Exclusive of WagesIX. Wages Paid by Government Agencies to Temporary EmployeesX. Permanent and Non-Government EmploymentXI. Total Wages all SourcesXII. Commercial Livestock Income by SourceXIII. Commercial Agricultural Income by SourceXIV. Miscellaneous Commercial Income by SourceXV. Non-Commercial Income by ClassXVI. Non-Commercial Agricultural Income by SourceXVII. Non-Commercial Livestock Income by SourceXVIII. Livestock Owned by ClassXIX. Total Livestock Income per Sheep Unit, by ClassXX. Commercial livestock Income per Sheep Unit by ClassXXI. Livestock Owned per CapitaXXII. Number of Sheep Sold and ConsumedXXIII. Number of Goats ConsumedXXIV. Sheep Units of Cattle Sold and ConsumedXXV. Horse Sale and ConsumptionXXVI. Total Agricultural LandXXVII. Agricultural Income per Harvested AcreXXVIII. Total Agricultural Income by SourceXXIX. Total ConsumptionXXX. Commercial Consumption by KindXXXI. Food ConsumptionXXXII. Food Purchased from TradersXXXIII. Food ImportsXXXIV. Producible ImportsXXXV. Corn Production and Consumption in PoundsXXXVI. Hay Production and Consumption in PoundsXXXVII. Bean Production and Consumption in PoundsXXXVIII. Potato Production and Consumption in PoundsXXXIX. Melon and Squash Production and Consumption in PoundsXL. Peach Production and Consumption in PoundsXLI. Wheat Production and Consumption in PoundsXLII. Miscellaneous Fruit Production and Consumption in PoundsXLIII. Miscellaneous Vegetable Production and Consumption in PoundsXLIV. Imports Basic Food CommoditiesXLV. Navajo Indebtedness to TradersXLVI. Weaving Income


Appendix E

Courtesy: B Seebohn Rowntree. Poverty: a study of town life (1910)

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Documents

The Navajo documents: a study of the economic