American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The wolf was long an important factor in Navajo life. With the destruction of the wild wolf in the American Southwest, a vital link to the past-and perhaps the future-has been lost to the Navajo people. In recent years, however, an effort has been made to restore wolves to their native habitat. If the wolf recovery program is successful,what effect will it have on the Navajo people? Will the return of the wolf help restore the balance and harmony that once existed? THE WOLF IN THE SOUTHWEST AND NAVAJO COUNTRY Sometime shortly after his arrival into the Southwest in 1917, US Forest Service biologist Aldo Leopold participated in the killing of a wolf somewhere in the White Mountains, which stretch across the borderlands of south-central Arizona and New Mexico. Leopold and a number of companions were eating lunch on a high rimrock position overlooking a river when they spotted a female wolf and her six grown pups playing in an open area below. Immediately, the men pulled out their rifles and “with more excitement than accuracy,” began blasting away at the family. When the rifles were empty and the shooting stopped, only the female wolf was down and one pup was seen dragging its leg into a rockslide. Leopold, who would go on to become perhaps the most famous conservationist in American history, described the death of this wolf-and his own personal transformation-in one of the most quoted passages in the literature of wildlife conservation: We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.