PERSPECTIVES

A second Navajo geographic advantage was their environment: varied, much of it dry and rugged, it was useful for the Nava-jos ’ life-style of dispersed families practic-ing a mixed economy of hunting, herding, and farming, but unattractive to Euro-Amer-icans looking for lush farmland. Chero-kees and many other tribes were unlucky to occupy prime farmland coveted by whites, who expelled them. When the U.S. army fi nally did expel the Navajos in the 1860s, many remained hidden in canyons. The sur-vivors were eventually permitted to return to their homeland, and then gradually to acquire surrounding land unattractive to white farm-ers, so that the Navajos now occupy the larg-est reservation in the lower 48 states. A by-product of their remote location and dispersed life-style was that smallpox and other European epidemic diseases reached the Navajos less often, spread among them with more diffi culty, and hence caused lower mortality than among many other tribes such as the nearby Hopis, who lived in small, densely populated pueblos. The remaining Navajo geographic advan-tage lay in their homeland’s commercially exploitable resources ( 2, 8, 10). Navajos were fortunate to lack gold, the early discovery and recognized value of which led to the expul-sion of the Cherokees and Black Hills Sioux and the massacre of California foothill Indi-ans. Instead, the main Navajo resources are uranium, vanadium, oil, natural gas, and coal, which were not discovered on Navajo land or considered valuable until 1922 and later. By then, Navajos could assert rights to their resources (although deals offered to them were often unfair) ( 2, 8, 10). As for cultural explanations, the main-stream view of archaeologists and linguists is that Navajos and Apaches originated a