Jared Diamond Explains Navajo Success and Population Boom

In 1491, there were hundreds of tribes of Native Americans. Many went extinct, but the Navajo not only survived, their numbers exploded from about 5000 to 300,000, according to a short paper published in Science this week.

I took notice as soon as I got the press announcement on Monday. One of the authors is Jared Diamond, who wrote two of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse. Those books changed the way I saw history and current affiars. Every time I see some obscenely useless display of wealth I think of his chapter on Easter Island, where resources were channeled into statues to honor the powerful while ordinary people stuggled to survive. It didn't end well.

When I spoke to Diamond on the phone on Friday, he said the Navajo survival was based on a complex combination of factors – both cultural and geographic. They weren't sitting on coveted farmland or gold deposits, so Europeans put more energy into slaughtering other tribes. They lived in a remote part of the country and were relatively spread out, making it harder for smallpox to wipe them out. And Navajo tradition allows people to marry outside the tribe and consider their families to be Navajo.

Diamond said he thinks there's a lesson here about survivorship. The Navajo survived a world that was turned upside down with the arrival of Europeans. Today the entire planet is in a state of upheaval, he said. We're contending with climate change, loss of topsoil, loss of wild fish, loss of fresh water and a multitude of other factors. Can science predict who will survive in this changing world?

My dad lived with the Navajo in Arizona the 1930s when his father worked for the Indian Service. I just happened to be visiting him this week out in California. When I told him about this remarkable Navajo population growth, he said must be due to the fact that their women were charge. Navajo women weren't economically beholden to men as far as he could tell. If a woman wanted to get divorced, she put her husband's boots outside the Hogan.

I asked Jared Diamond if the Navajo were matriarchal in the 1930s, and he said he wasn't sure. Of course every human culture is unique, and labels are just artificial ways of categorizing people. What my father remembered was that the Navajo women seemed to have more power among their own people than did white women of the same era. It would be intriguing to know if this, too, was a contributing factor in their success. There's definitely an interesting story here.

You can more about this at Livescience.