Navajo Tribe Pros And Cons

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In the world of today, the actions of our ancestors are frowned upon and chastised, but piles of history books cannot cover the crude horrors of the people before us and the suffering they caused. Centuries ago, American soldiers drove the Navajo Indian tribe off their land to seize it for themselves. They were thrown into places with “conditions that could only be described as concentration camp-like” (Ault). The Navajo Nation, the largest of the approximately 500 Native American tribes who used to roam the lands of the United States, had to stand up to the American government over a century ago and fight to keep their land that their ancestors had held for hundreds of years (Ault). The Navajo were a very dominant tribe in the Americas, but were restrained to life within the range of four mountains that surrounded their land, due to religious beliefs. In the year of 1848, the United States army appeared in their lands and took over 11,000 Navajo people and marched them hundreds of miles at gunpoint to a reservation in New Mexico. Contrary to many other tribes, the Navajo did not use violence or attack the Americans to try to escape their reserve. Rather, they wrote a treaty on a simple stolen sheet of ledger paper. This treaty entitled them to the land between the Four Sacred Mountains that their tribe was bound to. Their 13 article treaty was passed through Congress and allowed them back to their homeland in 1868 (Navajo). Thanks to the United States Congress and the