The Land Owns Us

When James Skeet thinks and talks about farming, he starts with the basics. Before he ponders soil, climate, or seeds, he ponders cosmology. What is the nature of the universe, he asks? The answers infuse his agricultural practice.  

One of the missions he’s undertaken on Spirit Farm, which he and his wife Joyce operate in Vanderwagen, New Mexico, as a demonstration and healing farm, is to raise churro sheep, also known as Navajo-Churro sheep. In raising these sheep, known for their nutritious, low-fat meat, he couldn’t be further from the current industrial livestock model. He does it not for profit or efficiency, but to nurture the symbiotic relationship between the sheep and the land. According to Skeet’s anecdotal research, they’re the best hoofed animal for regenerating the land. The churros are woven into the history of the Navajo-Diné people, from which Skeet descends, and were nearly eliminated by Kit Carson’s army in the late 1800s as part of the war on Navajos and forcible removal from their homelands.  

Skeet’s agricultural practice is grounded in a cosmology that rejects the predominant, Western ideas about property and land stewardship. “We don’t own the land, the land owns us,” he says. To him, the concept of private property is silly. The idea of land ownership is rooted in settler agriculture, which stems from a colonizer mindset that the Europeans brought to the New World hundreds of years ago. With that colonization came disconnection and detachment—from the earth, from food, and from each other. To settlers, land, water, and food were commodities. It follows that a natural extension of that is to think of people as commodities, too (hello, capitalism.). For Skeet and his ancestors, land, food, people, water, plants, sun—they’re all small, sacred pieces that make up the larger cosmology. Perhaps like waves in an ocean: distinct, but not separate.  

European colonization and educational systems reduce us to cogs in the machinery, he says. Even when we try to designate a forest, for example, as a resource to be protected, or conserve a piece of land, we’re treating it as a thing separate from everything else. It might be a nice step, but it still comes from a colonizer mindset. Instead, we might want to listen to the land, ask the land what it’s telling us. 

One way to reconnect is to use what he calls “indigenous regenerative intelligence.” By “indigenous,” he refers to using local materials and thinking locally. By “regenerative,” he means that sometimes we start with nothing, land so desecrated that we feel like we’re starting from ground zero. And by “intelligence,” he wants us to listen more and talk less, learn from the land, see patterns in nature, connect with the land and use our intuition. Respect is critical, especially since we’ve inflicted so many wounds upon the earth already. 

“And that's part of the indigenous cosmology, is honoring on all levels and working within that cycle to celebrate in ceremony this energy that flows back and forth, down to our feet, beyond our feet and up into the sky, which creates the atmosphere and the biotic pump and the water cycle,” he says. 

I like how Skeet’s humility makes it necessary for him to note that he’s more of a facilitator than a grower. A creator grows. His role, by contrast, is one of nurturing and supporting what the cosmos is already trying to do. At Spirit Farm, he and his wife are doing their best to integrate traditional Navajo biocosmology with what we think of as regenerative farming techniques. Here’s hoping that they have great success as they try to create (or recreate) a thriving ecosystem with healthy soil, nutrient-rich foods, and humans who live in connection with both.