Examines land-use patterns and economic development on the Navajo Nation, telling a story about resource exploitation and tribal sovereignty.

This book sketches the long geological history, and explores the many physical landscapes of this rocky, colorful region bound by the Four Sacred Mountains, and settled by the Navajo Indians 500 years ago.

A History of the Navajos examines these circumstances over the century and more that the tribe has lived on the reservation. In 1868, the year that the United States government released the Navajos from four years of imprisonment at Bosque Redondo and created the Navajo reservation, their very survival was in doubt. In spite of conflicts over land and administrative control, by the 1890s they had achieved a greater level of prosperity than at any previous time in their history.

"In the late 1940s and early 1950s the great anthropological photographer John Collier Jr. made nearly one thousand photographs documenting Navajo life in Fruitland, New Mexico, near the Four Corners. Lost until recently in archives far from the Southwest, most of these photos have never before been published. The authors of this book have assembled a selection of Collier's Navajo photographs showing the changes in post-World War II reservation life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Native nations, like the Navajo nation, have proven to be remarkably adept at retaining and exercising ever-increasing amounts of self-determination even when faced with powerful external constraints and limited resources. Now in this fourth edition of David E. Wilkins' The Navajo Political Experience, political developments of the last decade are discussed and analyzed comprehensively, and with as much accessibility as thoroughness and detail.