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550 Reservations in the US, so that has to be a HUGE amount of territory. The Navajo reservation has to be larger than quite a few states.
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You can break those concepts down in quite a few ways:
1. There may be 550 recognized tribes, but there are only 309 or 311 reservations (depending on who you ask
). Some recognized tribes have no tribal lands, at all; and there are several hundred tribes that the government does not recognize (also, of course, with no tribal lands).
2. Huge amount of territory? Not really. Most reservations are actually quite small. Many are less than 160 acres, total. In the midwest, there are several reservation on less than 10 acres; and in California, there are multiple reservations with less than 3 acres (several with only 1.2 or 1.5 acres). The total of all Indian lands in the US is just over 55,700,000 acres (2.3% of the U.S.), with the Navajo Nation, alone, holding more than 17 million of those acres (or 0.7% of the U.S. and 32% of all tribal lands).
3. As shown above, the Navajo reservation is the largest in the United States, by a
significant margin. It is not representative of most reservations - even other large reservations. Even so, the 50 largest reservations account for 93% of all tribal lands. That leaves about 260 other reservations on just 7% of the land (~3.9 million acres).
4. Not all land is created equally. In most places, reservations were located in places where there was believed to be no value in the land (not even by grazing cattle or sheep). Most Indian reservations are on what was historically the nastiest, driest, most worthless pieces of land you could find. (A drive through the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah or the original [small] Navajo Nation, will show a perfect example of a deplorable location that no one else wanted.) So, the "huge" amounts of land appropriated for some reservations was
required to make a living.