OUR STORY · TEEC NOS POS, AZ · NAVAJO NATION

This camp is an inheritance.

Kady Youth Sheep Camp was not founded — it is continued. The flock is Shimá's Navajo-Churro flock. The camps are the family's seasonal camps. The name is literal: this is where the sheep have always summered, and where the young still learn beside their elders.

Hastiin Gonna

Survivor of the Long Walk.

Kady — the renowned horseman

Roy's grandfather. In April 1944 he was issued a grazing permit at the Arizona–Utah border, running to the San Juan River. The camp carries his name.

Shimá — Mary Kady Clah

Roy's mother. A master weaver who taught generations, and kept the flock through her lifetime. She passed in 2013.

Roy Kady

Her youngest child, protégé, and caregiver. Keeper of the flock since the mid-1980s; her Navajo-Churro sheep passed to him.

Today's apprentices

Including Tyrrell Tapaha, the family's sixth-generation weaver.

THE TRAIL — A TIMELINE

1944

April: the grazing permit is issued to Kady at the Arizona–Utah border, running to the San Juan River.

1972

June: the last trail. Two teenage Kady brothers move more than a hundred head some 22 miles — Utah winter camp to the Carrizo summit.

MID-1980s

Roy takes over the flock.

2013

Shimá passes. Her sheep pass to Roy.

2022

Roy revives the trail with family and community — landing, unknowingly, on the 50th anniversary of the last one.

TODAY

The apprenticeship: youth learn herding, fiber, food, and land beside Roy — see the seasonal calendar for what's happening now.

4–5

active sheep camps remain atop the Carrizo Mountains.
This family's is one of them.

TODAY · THE APPRENTICES

This year's apprentices

Young Diné artists learning herding, fiber, food, and the land beside Roy — carrying the lifeways forward, and stewarding the apprenticeship together.

Casey Teseny

CHAIR · CHINLE, AZ

A traditional Navajo potter since 2016 and a former Canyon de Chelly ranger, Casey is a multidisciplinary artist in pottery, yucca fiber, and weaving — set on seeing traditional pieces made and used in the community again.

Ryann Hadley

CO-CHAIR · TEEC NOS POS, AZ

A Diné Studies student at Diné College, Ryann pairs a love of botany and plant medicine — herbal salves, soaps, and oils — with weaving, eager to turn native plants into natural dyes for Churro wool.

Naomi Begaye

SECRETARY · SHIPROCK, NM

Mother to two sons who are her motivation, Naomi first wove in high school and is relearning the craft as an apprentice — assembling her loom, mastering the spindle, and planning to pass it on to her children.

Zack Goldtooth

TREASURER · SHIPROCK, NM

A Diné artist and weaver who found the traditional beginnings of Navajo weaving at Diné College — a way to reconnect with culture, family, and Diné storytelling, walking in Hózhó.

Kaydence Yazzie

MEMBER · ROUND ROCK, AZ

Raised in a traditional upbringing of ceremonies, songs, and prayers, Kaydence pours herself into cultural perpetuation — a presenter and workshop leader refining her skills in herbs, pottery, and fiber arts, and caring for her animals along the way.

WHAT THE CAMP TEACHES

Fiber. Food. Land.

In-progress weaving of handspun churro wool on the loom

Fiber

From fleece to spindle to loom. Apprentices shear, card, spin, dye with plants gathered from the land, and weave — the full sheep-to-loom way.

Food

Churro has sustained Diné families for centuries. The camp keeps that food tradition alive with the Slow Food Presidium — good, clean, and fair.

Land

Roy teaches a reciprocity: the sheep keep the land strong. Where herding has ceased, he has watched the beneficial plants leave and invasives move in. Herding is stewardship.

SHIMÁ'S WAY

Learning by watching

Shimá learned at the edge of her mother's loom — watching, then secretly weaving rows and undoing them before anyone could see; later, a hidden loom up on the mesa. A generation on, Roy learned the same way, at her loom, at nine years old.

The camp teaches the way this family has always taught: watch, try, undo, try again — beside someone who loves you.

Apprentices and Roy at their looms in the weaving room — AT THE LOOMS — TEEC NOS POS

Tyrrell Tapaha herding with the flock on the high desert

WHERE THE CHAIN LEADS

Tyrrell Tapaha, sixth-generation weaver

The apprenticeship's proof of concept: a sheep-to-loom practitioner who is self-sufficient through his weaving and preparing to take over the flock. The chain Shimá kept is not a memory — it is hiring.

THE BREED — NAVAJO-CHURRO

Nearly gone, twice. Still here.

The Navajo-Churro is North America's earliest domesticated sheep breed — central to Diné sustenance, spirituality, and weaving. It was nearly exterminated twice: in the scorched-earth campaign of the 1860s, and again in the federal livestock reduction of the 1930s. By the 1970s roughly 450 animals remained. Community-led restoration rebuilt the flocks.

This camp lives inside that revival.

THE TEACHER

Roy Kady

Diné weaver and shepherd of Teec Nos Pos. Coordinator of the Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium with Slow Food. He has taught weaving at Navajo Technical University's Teec Nos Pos campus, served his chapter as Mayor-Elect, and teaches weavers who come to the camp from around the world — anyone willing to learn.

PRESIDIUM COORDINATOR · NTU TEEC NOS POS · FORMER CHAPTER MAYOR-ELECT

SOURCES

Family history on this page is drawn from three Arizona Highways features by Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi — "The Great Horseman They Called Kady" (2021), "Shimá's Legacy" (2022), and "According to Custom" (2023). Read these and more in the press room →

KADY YOUTH SHEEP CAMP · TEEC NOS POS, AZ · 36.9°N 109.1°W

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