Venture Aims to Build a Better Navajo Hogan

The demand, the raw materials and the motivation to mass produce traditional Navajo hogans have been around for some time. But until recently no one had found a way to harness them at once.

Now an organization sponsored by Northern Arizona University, working with the Navajo Nation and the U.S. Forest Service, has developed a way to make better hogans--octagonal dwellings often used in ceremonies--and produce a number of spinoff benefits in the process.

If the plans by Indigenous Community Enterprises work out, they could provide new jobs, create a new technology to use wood normally considered scrap, produce a new market and maybe create an industry in northern Arizona.

Tribal officials estimate that at least 30,000 hogans (pronounced ho-GAHNS) are needed to ease a severe housing shortage on the Navajo Reservation, home to 200,000 Navajos.

The Navajo Nation lacks affordable housing, and the goal is to keep costs to less than $30,000 for a typical single-room hogan. That’s about the price of a mobile home and perhaps half of what other typical non-Indian homes cost.

Buyers’ options will range from do-it-yourself construction to attached kitchen, bath and additional living quarters and concrete or dirt flooring.

“A lot of our elders want to go back to our traditional dwellings, the hogan. They’ve expressed interest in hogans that are low cost, low maintenance and affordable,” said Mae Franklin, a Navajo who is Grand Canyon National Park’s liaison to the Kaibab and Coconino forests.

Plans developed over the last two years by the nonprofit ICE include:

* A dozen prototypes to be built across the Navajo Nation before deciding what to mass produce.

* A manufacturing plant employing up to 10 people in the next year that could produce as many as 300 hogans a year initially, evolving into the first of a worker- and community-held, stock-owned enterprise.

* Manufacture of other products, from small roundwood cabins to carports, gazebos, even furniture and byproducts, from decorative bark to garden mulch, to be spun off under a separate operation.

* Transferring the method and technology for building the hogans and other products to high schools to build prototypes and to train future work forces.

The key to it all is roundwood: peeled ponderosa pine trees fashioned into poles rather than cut into boards.

“We’re trying to create a way to create a useful building product without having to slice up a tree into square or rectangular pieces,” said Brett KenCairn, executive director of ICE, which has developed a way to make uniformly standard pole materials. “We’re trying to crack the code of roundwood building.”

Flagstaff-based ICE, established by several Navajos and KenCairn and sponsored by the NAU School of Forestry, is developing a roundwood truss system to carry roof loads. It’s using modern technology in a variety of ways to join round pieces together.

The prototypes are intended to test different designs and aesthetics, but also to address construction and efficiency issues, KenCairn said.

Roundwood is stronger than wood cut into boards or posts because it retains its structural integrity and strength, the product of its growth circles, he said.

It can also be made from relatively small pines that are unsuitable for commercial lumber but just right for creating standardized logs for hogans. Such trees are targeted by efforts to thin forests to reduce the potential for catastrophic fires like those that ravaged the West this year.

Because the timber lacks traditional commercial value, “the Forest Service basically has to pay people to take it out or leaves it there and burns it,” KenCairn said.

ICE is a collaborative effort to address both Navajo community development issues and “these vexing challenges for how to use the byproducts of restoration,” KenCairn said.

ICE has an agreement with the Navajo Nation that supports the manufacturing enterprise’s business plan development. The Kaibab National Forest has a similar agreement with the tribe’s Cameron chapter to assist with the hogan project. The Kaibab and Coconino forests have expanses of suitable trees.

It is trying to create a model linking responsible and cautious restoration of forests to development of new economic opportunities, especially for rural and tribal communities, KenCairn said.

Another aim is to link Indians with the economic opportunities that will evolve from restoring the forests, he said.

“Very frequently, native peoples have not been the beneficiaries of new approaches, of modern, public land management activities,” KenCairn said. “The Navajos and all the other tribes have endured innumerable projects that were foisted off on them. A lot of people are very cautious and reserved right now to see whether we’re going to follow through.”

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Navajo Nation: https://www.navajo.org/