In the 1970s, when Jaymus Perry was growing up on the Navajo Nation reservation near Buell Park, Ariz., he and his siblings used to fill coffee cans with the raw peridots and chrome pyrope garnets that they found and sold the gems to local trading posts for spending money.
“The sooner we could fill up the cans, the sooner we could play,” Mr. Perry, now 56, recalled during a recent phone interview from his home in Durango, Colo. “We were just happy to receive funds — $50 in 1974 sure went a long way.”
Mr. Perry could not have foreseen that, five decades later, he would still be selling the same
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