The Development of Capitalism in The Navajo Nation

The Development Of Capitalism In The Navajo Nation

A Political-Economic History 1850 - 1980

by Lawrence David Weiss, Ph.D.

Published by Kennyhill Publishing Company at Smashwords

Copyright 1984 Lawrence David Weiss

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

1. Natural Economy to 1864

Early History

Economy and Class Structure Prior to Bosque Redondo

The Navajo Weaving Industry

Expansion of the National Economy and Military Conquest

2. 1864 - 1899 Rise And Dominance Of Independently-Developed Merchant Capital

After the Return: Causes of Unequal Stock Distribution

Decline of Agricultural Production for Consumption

Elimination of Former Markets and the Creation of New Markets

Improvement of Transportation and Its Relationship to the Increased Flow of Commodities

Expansion of Merchant Capital

Capture of Domestic Production and Its Replacement with Manufactured Commodities

Use of Credit to Stimulate the Exchange of Commodities

Merchant Capital Increases Its Control Over All Aspects of Production

Home Colonization and the Preservation of Land-Extensive Domestic Commodity Production

The Wholly-Expropriated Sector of the Navajo

Development of Wage Labor Among the Wholly-Expropriated Sector

3. I900 - I929 Consolidation Of Merchant Capital and Rise Of Wage Labor

Traders and Wholesalers

Industrial Capital

The Role of the State in the Control of Merchant Capital

Over Production

Wage Labor

Home Colonization

4. 1930 - 1949 Decline of Merchant Capital and Ascendance of Wage Labor

The Government Assault on Agriculture

Former Home Colonies: Corporate Takeover

Weaving

Federal Government and Trader Protection of the Market

Silversmithing

Wage Labor

World War II

5. 1950 - 1978 Consolidation Of Capitalism

Overview

Wage Work

Stock Raising

Weaving Industry

Jewelry Production

6. Summary And Conclusions

Appendix

Commentary by Tony Kaliss

Theoretical Discussion

Acknowledgements

Notes

Glossary

Chapter 1: Natural Economy to 1864

Prior to the 1860s the Navajo economy was predominantly a natural, or communal,[1] economy characterized by a social and political organization wherein personal dependencies predominated within the various bands. The direct producers generally owned their own means of production and produced their own means of consumption, i.e., their subsistence. Land was not a commodity, but rather use was based on a system of traditional use-rights, where the ability to productively use land gave the user de facto control over it. Commodities were traded, but only in excess of those needed by the producer.

Early History

Spicer has commented on the particularly unique history of the Navajo:

Of all the tribes of the southwest, the Athapaskan-speaking people who came to be called the Navajos and Apaches by the Spaniards were the most radically changed by their contracts with European culture. The bases of change were established during the Spanish period of contact, although important processes set in motion then did not work themselves out fully until the Anglo—American period.[2]

Aberle has noted more specifically some of the historical changes in political economy and social organization that the Navajos have gone through in the last 1,000 years:

It is evident that in a period of 400 to 1,000 years the Navaho have gone from a simple hunting and gathering economy to one based on agriculture, hunting, and gathering, and from there to add livestock to their subsistence base. The last transition required less than 200 years. In the past 100 years came still other changes: increasing dependency on wages and marketing of herding surplus.

When the Apachean hunters entered the southwest some 600 to 900 years ago, their conceptions of property must have been very simple. Personality--clothes, hunting gear, etc.--must have been privately held and, to judge from contemporary customs, destroyed at death. This probably included the habitation. Hunting territories must have been controlled by bands. Game and gathered produce must have been allocated either commensally in the family, or by reciprocity or very low-level redistributive processes in the local community. Although kinship must have been the dominant mode of social relationships, organized authoritative, firmly structured kinship units must have been lacking above the family level.

The period of mixed agriculture and hunting was presumably one in which personality continued to have more or less the same content. Extended family, lineage, or small-clan monopoly of agricultural territory perhaps developed....

Hard on agriculture and hunting followed herding, agriculture, and hunting, a development which occurred within a maximum span of 200 years. In essence, the rules of personalty were extended to stock--even to the tendency to destroy much stock at a man’s death. But herds and the fortunes of herding made it possible for some individuals to amass large quantities of goods and left others leading a marginal existence. Tendencies toward corporate units based on land were weakened--if, as I infer, they existed--and finally destroyed, as livestock became more important.[3]

Economy and Class Structure Prior to Bosque Redondo

By the 1850s the Navajo were generally a well-to-do tribe, or collection of loosely related bands totaling about 9,500 altogether.[4] Their historically recent acquisition of immense herds had resulted in a highly stratified social organization.[5] The pobres (Spanish for poor ones) had few if any stock, while those who had accumulated vast herds of perhaps 5,000 small stock were the wealthy.[6] Most households probably fell somewhere in between (see table 1). Such differences in stock herds probably were in large part a result of the highly variable and unpredictable weather of the region[7] as well as fortunes of war, health, etc.

In addition to this stratification among the free Navajo of the period, there was also a substantial slave class.[8] Slaves were used primarily as domestic servants and laborers by better-off Navajos previous to about 1800. After that time, however, as the slave trade with the Spanish increased, and as Spanish raids on the Navajo to acquire slaves increased, Navajos captured slaves to an increasing extent primarily for trade.[9] By the early 1800s there were hundreds of enslaved Navajos throughout the territory working for the Spanish on haciendas and probably in workshops. During the 1860s there may have been thousands of enslaved Navajos working for the Spanish in the region.[10] Navajos traded their slaves for Spanish horses.[11] The slave trade, both of captured and enslaved Navajos, and of slaves captured by Navajos and traded to the Spanish, was quite possibly the major cause of the incessant raids among the Navajo, Spanish, and various Pueblos, Utes, and Apaches during the decades prior to Bosque Redondo, i.e., I864.[12]

Slaves that served the Navajo served in domestic and manual labor for their masters. Nevertheless, their children were considered free, and even formed the historical nucleus of a Navajo clan.[13] It is possible that a tendency toward the more extensive use of slaves by Navajos for production was retarded by the obligations of wealthier Navajo to provide subsistence, often in exchange for work, to poorer members of the community and/or clan. In summary, slaving activities by the Navajo were primarily directed toward the trade in slaves after 1800, and slaves seem to have played a fairly significant part in the production of a surplus for trade. It has been suggested that the free children of slaves may have formed the core of the destitute members of the community.[14]

Wealthy Navajo were under obligation to support the poorer and destitute members in their communities and in their clans. This probably took the form of trading the herding labor of the destitute family for some stock, or at least meat from the herd of a wealthy family.[15] There were also during this period eighteen or more Navajo ironsmiths who had been trained, at least in part, by an agency superintendent. It is unknown, however, in what manner, i.e., under what social relations, these smiths bartered or sold their products or labor.

Raiding was a significant way of accumulating wealth in the form of stock. Generally speaking it was the poorer strata of the community that raided, often despite the exhortation of the wealthier, who did not want to provoke reprisals whereby they might lose their stock.[16] A highly reciprocal, but redistributive network of gift-giving tended to redistribute subsistence from the wealthy to the poorer segments of the community, and also of the clan both within and without the community.[17] Grazing use-rights, normally reserved for a stock owner who utilized a particular pasture year after year, might be shared with other community and/or clan members in times of drought, war, etc.[18] Such forms of acquiring subsistence generally did not facilitate accumulation (except for raiding), but rather operated to insure at least minimal subsistence for all in the community and the kinship system. There is also some evidence that Navajos who were not able to permanently procure enough land for their herds or farms would expand by military force, if necessary, at the expense of their non-Navajo neighbors.[19]

The major productive unit was not the individual, but rather the family, or a group of related families. Here Spicer is speaking in general of Indians of the southwest, but the description applies:

The nuclear family produced whatever it could for its own economic support, but other nuclear families had an equal right to the use of its products.... The grouping of people for purposes of the work of food gathering was in fact always in terms of several nuclear families, just as the group that consumed always consisted of several.... In all, the economic unit was a group of kindred whose work and whose produce were shared on the basis of the kinship relations....

The extended family was the link between each individual life and the wider community of land or village.... The unity in terms of village or land which had been achieved by southwestern Indians rested solidly first on the strength of the extended families and secondly on the traditional forms of cooperation between these groups. Leadership did not exist on any permanent basis except as it grew out of the extended families.[20]

Land for grazing and growing crops was not a commodity to be bought and sold. It was used by a family, to be used by others on the basis of reciprocal use agreements in times of visiting or stress, or it could be permanently used by another if the original owner permanently abandoned it for some reason.[21] Stock was owned by individuals. Generally women tended to own the sheep, while men tended to own the horses.[22] In periods of peace there was probably a substantial trade between direct producers in such items as blankets, food, baskets, hides, and for standard trade items such as shells, coral, horses; manufactured items such as guns and tin buckets, often stolen from or traded with the Spanish or American Anglos. The government, in the form of the band headman, was very democratic. Rule was primarily by exhortation and consensus.[23]

The Navajo Weaving Industry

Prior to the last two or three decades of the eighteenth century, Navajo weavers utilized no yarns, and little if any dye, imported by the Spanish. The women weavers made their own looms, clipped the wool from their own herds, processed the wool into yarn, dyed it with home-made dyes (if it were dyed at all), and wove the article themselves. In other words, the Navajo weaver owned the means of production as well as all the raw materials and was in complete control of the production process. Production was primarily for consumption by the family, i.e., production for use. Nevertheless, a considerable surplus was produced and exchanged:

[By 1799] Navajo weaving is set forth as not merely a tribal craft, but an industry which is becoming an economic factor in the province. Don Jose Cortez, an officer of the Spanish Royal Engineers, when stationed in that region, wrote then that the Navajos have manufactures of serge, blankets, and other coarse cloths, which more than suffice for the consumption of their own people; and they go to the province of New Mexico with the surplus, and there exchange their goods for such others as they have not, or for the implements they need.[24]

The Spanish brought indigo dye and cochineal-dyed cloth into the southwest perhaps as early as before the nineteenth century.[25] These commodities, however, were very expensive because they were imported under conditions of monopoly-controlled trade at the time. Nevertheless, possibly before the nineteenth century, native-blue vegetable-based dye was often replaced by indigo imported by the Spanish and freighted up from Mexico.[26] During the same period the Spanish-imported bayeta was primarily utilized as a trade item with the Pueblo Indians. This bayeta was a rich cochineal red dyed flannel manufactured in England. From England it was exported to Spain, where it was exported to Mexico, and then freighted north up the Rio Grande to be traded mainly with the Pueblos, and finally exchanged in trade with the Navajo.[27] It was rarely used as whole cloth by Navajo weavers. Generally it was shredded, retwisted, and rewoven. Imported bayeta was therefore used for aesthetic reasons, and not for increasing production. Around the 1830s thousands of yards of bayeta were sold to Indians of the southwest by traders for a price fluctuating around $6 per yard. Bayeta was used extensively up to the time of the Civil War.[28]

Later in the nineteenth century, possibly as early as the 1850s, German manufactured yarn, vegetal dyed like bayeta cloth, but ready for the loom without the tedious process of raveling and retwisting, began to appear on the market.[29] The increasing trade over the Santa Fe Trail, and the expanding markets of the U.S. traders began to hasten the downfall of the less convenient and more expensive English bayeta product imported by the Spanish. The new trade yarn was a German import called Saxony. Its appearance on the southwest markets was part and parcel of the expansion of capitalist development in Europe:

Saxony by 1848 had become a sheep-fold, with twenty-five million sheep feeding a textile industry employing twenty-five thousand workers. It was at about this period that the Westphalian traders recently came to Santa Fe from Germany brought into the southwest the first manufactured yarns. Soft, lustrous, beautifully colored with the finest vegetal dyes of the period, they were sought as eagerly as Bayeta, woven alongside the silkiest of the Navaho fleeces into some of the choice blankets of the fifties and sixties.[30]

The introduction of consistently fine, taut machined yarns forced Navajo weavers to fabricate a yarn of a quality never since equaled in the history of Navajo weaving.[31] The use of imported, and in some cases machine-manufactured dyes, yarns, and cloth (for respun yarn) during this period did not cheapen the commodities involved. In fact, it made them more expensive. Bayeta pieces of a fine weave, intricate design, and utilizing the finest portion of the fleece, were expensive and rare items, made probably for trade to Mexican settlers, or for wealthy tribesmen.[32] The majority of Navajos wore coarser woven items of natural colors and dyes, or with a minimum of the dyes and yarns discussed above.

While the first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the changes in materials and dyes discussed above, overall the changes were minimal in terms of the quantity or quality of woven goods produced during this period:

The beginning date for the [classic] period, 1850, simply marks the year when records and actual examples of Navaho weaving became adequate for study. Actually, if we had loom products in quantity from the preceding years--at least as far back 1800--we should probably find the same kinds of yarn and dyes; the same excellence of spinning and weaving; the same types of woven articles....These years, in other words, mark the climax of well-established native traditions, which were soon to be so strongly modified by contacts with an alien culture.[33]

While weaving was still on a basis of production primarily for consumption, the Navajo trade in blankets and other woven articles continued to be of significant proportion. In the mid-1840s one trader who worked the Santa Fe Trail noted that the Cheyenne women in particular were frequently in possession of Navajo blankets.[34] Another trader working the Santa Fe Trail during the same period noted that Navajo blankets were being sold to Mexicans for fifty to sixty dollars.[35] The majority of trade at this time was, however, simple barter.[36] Nevertheless, "The man’s shoulder blanket or Chief’s blanket....was once so widely bartered and so popular that it might be seen over the shoulders of influential Indians from the northern Great Plains to the Mexican border.[37]

Prior to 1848, the year of the formal political conquest of New Mexico (and Arizona) territory, the commodities of the Anglo trader were busy conquering the markets of the Southwest. The United States military followed, creating the political hegemony necessary to expand and consolidate those markets:

The Santa Fe Trail had become the principal trade route of the territory even before this change of political sovereignty [in 1848];and the caravan trade with Mexico via Chihuahua...was in proportionate decline. But American rule hastened the process, and American goods rapidly drove out those of Mexico and Spain.[38]

By the middle of the nineteenth century traders in small groups, and sometimes singly, roamed through much of the Navajo lands.[39] At about the same time military posts began to be established at several locations along the southern fringes of the Navajo lands.[40] Most trade between the army-post sutlers (suppliers) and the Navajo remained straight barter. In the absence of circulating gold and silver, various kinds of scrip or tokens were used by the sutlers for general trade and for specific rations claims (e.g., as part of various treaty agreements).

Expansion of the National Economy and Military Conquest

Regardless of any particular actions of the Navajos, in the late 1850s and early 1860s the expanding economy of the United States and the corresponding policy of political and military conquest and control would have crushed the Navajo sooner or later. Spicer locates the effects of this expansion at that point in history and presents a historical context for the looming conquest over the Navajos in the early 1860s:

Events between 1850 and 1875 rapidly shaped Anglo policy into something more closely resembling the considered programs of the Spaniards and Mexicans....Expansion into the territory west of the Mississippi River brought Anglos into immediate and sharp conflict with the various bison-hunting tribes. The conquest of those tribes required intensive military action. Although it was possible after conquest to transport a few of them to the Indian Territory, the majority could not be contained there, and so the