A Range Management Curriculum and Participatory Planning Project for the Tohono O'odham Nation

The Tohono O'odham Nation spans 2.8 million acres of Sonoran desert habitat, encompassing much of the traditional homeland of the Tohono O'odham people. Traditionally the Tohono O'odham farmed desert washes, gathered wild foods, and hunted for subsistence. Following the introduction of cattle and horses by Spanish missionaries, cattle raising was incorporated into O'odham culture and has for several centuries been an important feature of O'odham society (Woodbury and Woodbury 1962, Bauer 1971, Fontana 1976, Kozak and Lopez 1999). Livestock husbandry on the Nation is a mixed blessing. A source of cash, subsistence, food for community feasts and ceremonies, and, historically, social status and political clout, cattle have also had devastating impacts on the Nation's desert grasslands and shrublands, and have fed conflicts over land, water, and animals, within and between communities. The health of many O'odham cattle is poor and lack of management makes selective breeding for genetic improvement virtually impossible. Consequently, when animals are sold off the reservation, producers receive the "Indian cattle" price, several cents per pound lower than the going market price. There have been a few small-scale successes in implementing rotational grazing and improved animal management, such as the Tribal Herd Ranch and several livestock associations (Bauer 1971). Recently, however, there has been a renewed commitment to rangeland management on the part of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and a growing interest in range management among many communities on the reservation.

In 2001, several events set the stage for a change in producers' and communities' attitudes towards range management, and their willingness to become active stewards of their rangelands. These events were the revival of the Tohono O'odham Nation Coordinated Resource Management Planning (CRMP) group (a multi-agency collaborative planning effort); the establishment of the Nation's Rangeland Conservation and Management Program under a 638 contract from the Bureau of Indian Affairs ; and the implementation of a pilot participatory rangeland planning project in Sif Oidak District. The pilot project attracted attention from several other districts, and led to requests for similar educational programs and technical assistance. This WSARE project was developed in response to these requests, particularly the demand for more educational programs that address the ecological principles of rangeland ecology, grazing management, rangeland monitoring, and animal health, management and marketing. To meet these needs we proposed an integrated project comprised of curriculum development and implementation through field workshops and coached rangeland planning using a participatory planning model.

Historical Background
Livestock have been present in both the physical and cultural landscape of the Tohono O’odham for more than three hundred years, beginning with the arrival of Father Eusbio Francisco Kino in 1698 (Joseph et al. 1949). Following the death of Father Kino, hunt leaders included cattle along with deer and desert bighorn sheep in their pursuit for big game. Gradually the role of hunt chief transformed into the position of roundup boss, organizing gathers of feral livestock for feasts, funerals, weddings, and pilgrimages (Xavier 1938, Fontana 1976). Because livestock have been managed in accordance with traditional O’odham value systems, a distinct livestock management strategy has emerged on the Nation. Animals are controlled locally by elected roundup bosses from each village. The roundup bosses oversee all livestock operations within the village and are expected to represent their village’s interests when multi-village roundups occur. Most O’odham rangelands are open range, with animals individually owned, grazing on common lands. In the early 1930s, the Nation was fenced into nine separate grazing districts, many of which encompass several hundred thousand acres and are absent of any significant crossfencing (Lewis 1994). This early initiative was the first attempt to formally manage rangelands on O’odham land. Although the plan was implemented at the request of O’odham stockmen, it was actualized without the consultation of local producers. Many of the district fences split traditional territories or excluded traditional users from their customary use areas, causing economic hardship, provoking resentment towards government officials and their policies, and creating animosities between neighbors. This episode solidified O’odham beliefs that government rangeland management initiatives consistently fail because of the tendency to exclude the intended beneficiaries during the planning period. Subsequently, the BIA managed the Nation's rangelands for many years, focusing on the development of wells, dams and small stockponds or charcos, and fencing small community pastures (Bauer 1971, Simpson and Young 1973). One legacy of the BIA era is a culture of dependency among livestock producers, who are accustomed to having the agency provide services without producers having to demonstrate capacity for management or share in the cost. In addition, most past policies have neglected to incorporate local methods for consensus building and allocation of shared resources such as water and grazing areas.

Prior to the establishment of the Papago Reservation in 1916, O’odham lands were heavily grazed by Anglo, Mexican, and Pima ranchers. The desert grasslands were seriously degraded, and after the expulsion of outside livestock, conditions were exacerbated by drought and heavy concentrations of cattle and horses on the few remaining waters and productive grasslands (Lewis 1994). It has now become apparent to many districts that the current ecological conditions, in part the legacy of these past abuses, are not improving under existing management approaches. Many livestock owners, the NRCS, BIA, and Nation's Natural Resources Department believe that plant communities of high forage value have disappeared from many parts of the Nation, erosion has accelerated, and mesquite densities have increased. Some are concerned about the increase in exotic species such as bufflegrass. Livestock owners have spoken out about the frustrations they encounter trying to improve their herds under the present management structure. Resting rangelands is not feasible because of the lack of coordinated management among livestock owners and the absence of necessary infrastructure (fences). Apprehension towards fencing remains strong due to the district fencing in the 1930’s. Attempts to organize livestock associations, institute formal management plans, and implement demonstration projects have met with limited success (Bauer 1971). The Nation's efforts to develop rangeland codes and ordinances have proceeded slowly. Many of these initiatives have met with passive resistance or implementations have been short lived due to the absence of local participation during the planning phase.

Related and Current Work in the Area
Rangeland Education on Indian Nations
Relatively little accessible information documents past or current range management education efforts with Indian Nations. Most available work on range management in Indian Country takes the form of ethnographic and historical accounts of grazing and livestock management on reservations (Xavier 1938, Joseph et al. 1949, Woodbury and Woodbury 1962, Getty 1963, Bauer 1971, Norvelle 1990, Lewis 1994, Kozak and Lopez 1999). The only educational materials on range management designed specifically for American Indian audiences that we know of are Bingham et al's Living from Livestock (Bingham and Lee 1984), a manual for Navajo ranchers with a "holistic resource management" orientation, and the certified rancher curriculum recently developed by the Navajo Newlands administration (Norm Lowe, personal communication). University of California Cooperative Extension has developed an ecology and natural resource management curriculum for Indian natural resource workers (Harris and Cox 1997). We identified two current multi-Tribe extension education initiatives in Arizona related to livestock production: a SARE-funded project on drought management, and a project that aims to educate producers about the benefits of increasing the productivity of individual animals while reducing overall stocking rates. This project dovetailed with each of these programs without duplicating their efforts. Neither of these projects develops a self-contained curriculum, nor do they engage producers in a hands-on planning process through which they can apply their knowledge.

Participatory Planning and Research
Participatory natural resource planning and related approaches such as participatory rural appraisal (PRA), seek to involve resource users directly in identifying goals and articulating and evaluating management alternatives (Chambers 1983, 1994). These approaches have been widely applied to international development of natural resources and agriculture (Jackson and Ingles 1998, Margolius and Salafsky 1998), but are less well known in the United States, although the burgeoning movement for collaborative planning for public land management could be viewed as participatory planning.

Participatory research is more than a research methodology; it is a philosophy of creating knowledge through dialogue and action (Hall 2001, Reason and Bradbury 2001).
Participatory research is a power-sharing process, in which the researcher acts more as a facilitator of knowledge-sharing than an ‘expert’ responsible for finding solutions to isolated problems. There are far fewer published empirical studies of participatory research in the natural resource fields than in applied social science fields, such as education and public health. By far, most of the existing participatory research literature in natural resource management comes from research conducted outside the U.S., and most of it stems from the popularity of participatory international development projects beginning in the 1980s. In Australia, England, and the U.S., participatory research has been used to develop and evaluate adaptive management models, which attempt to integrate the knowledge of a diversity of stakeholders to include different ideas of ecosystem function, monitoring, and management (Ison and Russell 1999, Pretty and Frank 2000, Pound et al. 2003). Other studies have used the participatory process to better understand the social dynamics of collaborative management, and often seek to provide practical information in support of such partnerships. This project applies the principles of participatory research and evaluates the contributions of a participatory approach to building social capital on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Social Capital
In the field of economic development, the theory of social capital explains this failure as a result of underestimating the importance of social processes in accomplishing any economic, social or political goal (Putnam 2000). A relatively broad definition of social capital is “the institutions, relationships, attitudes, and values that govern interactions among people and contribute to economic and social development” ((Grootaert and van Bastelaer 2002), 2).

In this study, we rely on Woolcock’s (1998) qualitative framework, which describes four forms of social capital based on levels of Autonomy and Embeddedness each at the micro (individual) and macro (organizational) levels. Linkage is an individual’s autonomy from his/her community based on relationships with people outside that community. Organizational Integrity is an organization’s autonomy from other organizations and communities based on organizational competence, coherence, and capacity among individuals within that organization. Integration is an individual’s embeddedness within his/her community based on relationships with people within the community. Synergy is an organization’s or community’s embeddedness in society as a result of institutional relationships among communities and organizations. According to this theory, a balance of the four forms of social capital is important for optimal realization of any economic, political, or social endeavor, and thus this framework can be used to identify the relative strengths of the four forms of social capital in a particular setting in order to determine where development efforts would be most effective (Woolcock 1998).

We chose a social capital framework to analyze the social impact of participatory research rather than a framework specific to communal resource systems, such as Ostrom’s (Ostrom 1990) design principles for enduring common property regimes, because evidence from the literature suggests that Ostrom’s principles of bounded space and well-defined community groups are too constraining to fit the dynamic realities of communally managed rangeland systems (Sithole 2003). In contrast, the concept of social capital focuses on the relationships that enable “mobility, flexibility, and reciprocity—features that have characterized sustainable pastoral management institutions for centuries” (Fernandez-Gimenez 2002, 74).

Ecology & Management of Nonequilibrium Rangelands
The past decade has witnessed a significant shift in thinking about the dynamics of plant-herbivore interactions in arid and highly variable rangelands (Westoby et al. 1989, Behnke et al. 1993, Ellis 1994). The emergence of so-called non-equilibrium theories of rangeland dynamics has had a profound influence on policy debates around pastoral development in the international arena (Scoones 1994), but has had less direct impact on rangeland policy and management in the USA. Similarly, most of the research seeking to test non-equilibrium theory has been conducted in Africa and Central Asia, not in North America. In this project, we examine the applicability of equilibrium and non-equilibrium models of rangeland vegetation dynamics to Sonoran desert uplands on the Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona, USA, a site whose socio-ecological context has much in common with arid pastoral ecosystems of the developing world.

The conventional equilibrium model of rangeland vegetation dynamics was developed in temperate regions where climate is relatively predictable (Clements 1916). Under this model, plant-herbivore interactions are recognized as important drivers of the system and can be manipulated to manage forage production. When grazing intensity increases, there is a corresponding decrease in vegetation and the resulting competition for limited food resources negatively influences livestock populations. Conversely, reducing herbivory increases the production of plant biomass and decreases food competition among herbivores (Stoddart et al. 1975, Holecheck et al. 2001). Species composition in a given plant community is affected by the duration and timing of grazing and the number and class of livestock in an area (Sampson 1919, 1923).

Over the past twenty years researchers working primarily in Africa and Australia have developed new models for understanding vegetation dynamics in arid and semi-arid rangelands (Ellis and Swift 1988, Westoby et al. 1989). One alternative view recognizes that in environments characterized by highly variable and unpredictable periods of precipitation and drought, biotic factors such as herbivory have relatively little influence on vegetation productivity or species composition. Rather, stochastic events such as sporadic rainfall and droughts have the greatest influence on vegetation, which in turn affects livestock productivity (Ellis and Swift 1988, Behnke et al. 1993, Ellis 1994). Because of the strong abiotic influences on vegetation, grazing is thought to have little impact on vegetation productivity or composition in these systems. Vegetation production is too dynamic for livestock numbers to track forage. When unmanaged by humans, livestock are regulated by the direct impacts of climate on forage availability rather than the competition for forage among grazers, and mortality rates are independent of livestock densities.

Several studies have been conducted in the past decade that attempt to test this theory, focusing primarily in pastoral regions of Africa (Behnke et al. 1993, Turner 1998, Ward et al. 1998, Fynn and O'Connor 2000, Oba et al. 2000, Ward and Ngairorue 2000, Leggett et al. 2003) and Central Asia (Cincotta et al. 1992, Fernandez-Gimenez and Allen-Diaz 1999), with one study in Bolivia (Buttolph and Coppock 2004). The results of these studies are mixed. Some clearly lend support to the notion that livestock have little impact on herbaceous biomass or species composition in highly variable, arid environments (Turner 1998, Leggett et al. 2003). Others confirm that some ecosystems exhibit a mix of equilibrium and non-equilibrium characteristics (Fernandez-Gimenez and Allen-Diaz 1999, Fynn and O'Connor 2000, Buttolph and Coppock 2004), and interpretation may depend upon the specific variables measured (Fernandez-Gimenez and Allen-Diaz 1999, Fuhlendorf and Engle 2001). In these cases the effects of grazing and rainfall on plant community composition and production are often interactive. Still others conclude that while there is little evidence of short-term and medium-term (up to 11 years) effects of grazing on production, and rainfall drives production dynamics, that it is possible that over the long-term, livestock grazing contributes to declining productivity (Ward et al. 1998, Ward and Ngairorue 2000). Even proponents of non-equilibrium theory are careful to note that ecosystems are arrayed along a continuum between the most constant (and thus equilibrium) and the most highly variable (and therefore non-equilibrium) environments, rather than proposing a stark dichotomy between the two types of systems.

The Tohono O’odham Nation (TON) covers 1.2 million ha of Sonoran desert vegetation and has been grazed by domestic livestock for over 300 years. The rangelands of the TON are diverse, ranging from oak woodlands and desert grasslands to Sonoran desertscrub. However, most literature evaluating the rangelands of the TON fails to make distinctions among the various rangeland vegetation types found on the reservation (Woodbury and Woodbury 1962, U.S. Department of Commerce 1975, Fontana 1976). Historically, technical assistance has assumed that an equilibrium model of vegetation dynamics applies across the TON, leading to uniform management prescriptions that focus on rest rotation grazing and the replacement of the communal land tenure system with a more individualized tenure system that would permit the construction of fenced pastures. These prescriptions ignore the great disparity between the amount of annual rainfall received in the eastern portion of the TON, dominated by desert grasslands, compared to its northern and western regions, characterized by more arid desertscrub vegetation. They also fail to apprehend the adaptive qualities of the unfenced open range communal management system that has evolved on many parts of the TON.

In this project, we question the ecological assumptions that underlie past management recommendations for more arid areas of the TON by assessing the relationship between perennial forage grass densities and grazing intensity along historic gradients of relative grazing pressure on sandy loam upland ecological sites in the 7-10 in. rainfall zone of the Sonoran Desert. In doing so, we contribute to the scant literature on grazing management in the Sonoran desertscrub, while bringing the debate about non-equilibrium rangelands into a North American pastoral ecosystem.

Common Property
Common property regimes are institutional arrangements that define access to and use of shared resources for some user group (Bromley 1991). Leading research on the commons by Ostrom (1990) advises that the key to successful management of resources held under common property regimes is crafting institutions which define user group membership, resource boundaries, resource access and use rules, and mechanisms to enforce rules.

Despite the theory’s popularity in the academic community, Campbell et al. (Campbell et al. 2000), working on southern African rangelands, find few successful on-the-ground examples, which they attribute to the theory’s narrow focus on community institutions at the expense of considerations of social, political, and economic contexts. Sithole (Sithole 2003)and Nemarundwe (Nemarundwe 2004) argue that Ostrom’s rule-based theory of common property regimes founded on the concept of bounded space and homogenous communities is too constraining to fit the dynamic realities of communally managed systems. Fernández-Giménez (Fernandez-Gimenez 2002) working with Mongolian pastoralists recommends that instead of imposing rigid spatial and social boundaries, management of variable rangelands should “focus on the features that have characterized sustainable pastoral management institutions for centuries: mobility, flexibility, and reciprocity” (74). Inherent in this dynamic process of property rights is the act of negotiation and the maintenance of relationships among resource users.

“In general, property rights on rangelands are characterized by a confusing mix of common property, free access, and, sometimes, private property, all at once or seeming to merge and coexist at the same time” (Sithole, 2003, 1573). Although common property theories are infrequently applied to indigenous land use in the U.S. and Canada, descriptions of indigenous property rights from the literature reflect the same complex mix of overlapping property arrangements (Johnson 1998, Turner and Jones 2000). Turner & Jones (2000) review traditional patterns of territoriality and resource ownership in 14 First Nations of British Columbia. They describe various resource use patterns, institutions for resource stewardship, and mechanisms for transferring or gifting property rights, emphasizing that while all of these common property regimes have been impacted by the epidemics and acculturation policies of colonization, the social mechanisms for communal land use still underlay modern Native American culture (Turner & Jones 2000). In this project, we contribute to understanding of livestock and rangeland management regimes for the commonly held and managed rangelands of the Sif Oidak District of the Tohono O’odham Nation.