Reindigenizing Through Animal Husbandry

By tending to our landscapes, as if they were the body that holds our fragile lives, we reclaim our undeniable responsibility to dissolve into our place in the land’s cycles. To us, upholding this responsibility is what it means to re-indigenize ourselves. To feel no separation between our love for our children, the animals we walk with, and the plants that nourish them. Reconnecting to our knowledge and lifeways is how we make strides toward this honor. Animal husbandry allows us to restore traditional relationships with land and animals, revitalize sustainable practices, and reclaim autonomy. 

Living and walking with our sheep comes from deep roots in the value of reciprocal relationship. We practice a combination of pastoralism and targeted, rotational grazing as we navigate restoring and diversifying the environments around us - especially our Thornscrub forests. 

Our traditional husbandry methods prioritize ecological balance. The soil gets aerated, fertilized and plowed by the sheep’s hooves and manure, creating an environment where we can then seed native plants, to aid the land and her beings in regeneration. Our people were land stewards, so the colonizers’ attempt in ripping us from our place in these lands was detrimental for us and her alike. Colonization’s taint through animal agriculture, settlement, and today’s modern infrastructure has all forcefully depleted our environments. To use our traditional lifeways to rewrite how animal agriculture can look on these lands is a humble and slow act of rebellion. 

Caring for our sheep reminds us of our responsibility to dedicate our lives to care of other beings. Rather than view the chores and upkeep that they demand as unnecessary or tiresome, our obligation to them and everything the choice to embark on this relation represents, actually fuels us. To wake early with the sun and tread by their side, familiarizing ourselves with our own bodies and environments, are all precious responsibilities that we welcome with gratitude. In return we experience life at a pace that recognizes the cycles of night and day, of the seasonal shifts and swoons, and the way all other beings respond to them. We get to witness and return to a place in it all that destroys the illusion that we have ever been anything separate. May the lessons taught to us by our animal relatives ripple into all other corners of life.