Navajo Witchcraft and the Skinwalkers -- and a dubious film

Note by Hunterbear:

This news story on a PBS / Tony Hillerman Navajo witch-craft film,
"Skinwalkers," strikes several hard, discordant notes within me -- and some
brief and very critical comment is appropriate.

First, the place-line is Superior, Arizona.  This -- an old Magma Copper
town which I knew well -- is southeast of Phoenix, in the  Big Cactus and
Hot Desert country and not far from the Superstition Mountains.  It's a far,
far cry distance-wise and geographically and certainly culture-wise from the
Navajo Nation: far north/northeast of Superior in the high-altitude Colorado
River plateau country of  frequent cedars, pinons, yellow pines.  Superior
is old Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers country and my memories of its copper
workers [mostly Chicano, some Anglo, a few Apaches] in those struggles --
consistently won by Mine-Mill -- are fond indeed.  In early December, 1963,
I came up from the Deep South and spoke at Superior on the civil rights
struggle under the auspices of the Arizona Mine-Mill Council.  Delegations
came from all of the Arizona Mine-Mill locals, some of which traveled great
distances [e.g., from the Mexican border.]  I spoke virtually all night as
people came and went.  A page about  this great Mine-Mill gathering  -- on
behalf of our Southern Movement -- in on our large website:
http://www.hunterbear.org/salt2.htm

This Hillerman / Navajo film is being made in the country around Superior.
That, frankly, is bizarre. And that is only one very significant mistake.

But the other very significant mistake indeed -- in my opinion, someone who
grew up among the Navajo [the Dine'] -- is the very film itself.  Tony
Hillerman is an Anglo writer whose many murder mysteries -- detective
stories set in the very vast Navajo nation, and certainly friendly to the
Dine' people -- have a wide following.  But, even though they're about 80%
accurate, the  20% of inaccuracy is a vast Grand Canyon that certainly
precludes their use as reliable material in any even remotely scholarly
setting. [And, yes, I've read the Hillerman book, Skinwalkers, on which this
film is based. I find it wanting.]

 For many non-Navajo people all over the country [and world], Hillerman's
stuff is their only introduction to the vast and often remote and isolated
Navajo reservation [bigger than the state of West Virginia] and the now
relatively huge Navajo Nation [about a quarter of a million people.]

This film, which will undoubtedly distort even Hillerman's distortions,
is -- like a great many other basically fast-buck enterprises -- wearing the
"public service" cloak:  a spurious disservice.

In addition to the assurance of significant inaccuracy, I also have some
other profound concerns.  The film deals with Navajo witch-craft,  a very
real situation which is not the sort of thing the greatest majority of
Navajo and many other Indian people as well,  believe should ever be
discussed publicly.

Navajo medicine men are religious leaders and healers [these dimensions as
inextricably bound together in the Navajo view -- and that of other
Natives -- as a myriad of copper wires fused forever by super-intense fire.
Medicine men train rigorously for many, many  years -- often as many as
seventeen -- before they're considered full-fledged practitioners in the
context of the very rich traditional Dine' culture and its myriad of
extraordinarily complex rituals that reach across the Four Directions to the
very corners of the Creation.

Navajo medicine men are extremely effective.  Anyone who has lived for any
period of time at all in and around the Navajo country is very well aware
of this.

United States Indian Health Service [PHS] now works closely, frequently
side-by-side with the medicine men.  The results are very good.

And then there is the other side:  Witchery Way.  Not a great deal is known,
intricately, by most people about the very shadowy and dangerous world of
Navajo witchcraft -- "bad medicine", so to speak.

But no one who has lived extensively in the Navajo country would ever make
light of this sinister situation.  It's taken very seriously.  Witches
practice their evil for purely mercenary purposes. Few Navajo would ever
have anything to do with them, even remotely -- but there are always a few
who do.

Witches train extensively -- in their own very isolated and secure settings.
By Navajo traditional law, a known witch, one who has thus forfeited its
status as human, can be  killed and this certainly applies to a kind of
witch much involved in these endeavours:  the Skinwalkers. These are
obviously profoundly deviant Navajo who travel at night for nefarious
purposes and who are believed to have the ability to turn themselves into
various animals.  They certainly are garbed in the skins of respective
animals.

These -- Witches and the closely related Skinwalkers -- are not the sorts of
things about which one should talk much at all.

The Harvard anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, did a book, Navaho Witchcraft
[Boston:  Beacon Press, 1944.]  An excellent person, he wisely recognized
his own limitations and those of his book.

I know a few things, at least.  And here is a short, personal anecdote:

When we lived and worked at very remote Navajo Community College [now Dine'
College], seven thousand feet above sea level and almost right under the
much, much higher Lukachukai Mountains and just to the north of historic
Canyon de Chelly, our little house was on the far outer edge of the small
community of Tsaile [Say-Lee.]  We were 95 miles from Gallup, New Mexico
[where my youngest daughter was born in late '79] and 125 miles by road from
Farmington.  Our area was split by the Arizona / New Mexico border which
means virtually nothing on the Navajo reservation.  My Chev pickup had New
Mexico plates and I had an Arizona driver's license from Chinle [Chin-Lee],
the small Navajo town with a few BIA offices and a tribal police station 35
miles to the south. [Our good friend, Easy, now of Spokane, who posts
regularly on our RedBadBear list, knows all about this setting.  He was
there at the college, then, a top-flight computer expert for NCC,  and
that's where we first met and became firm friends.]

Skinwalkers and witches in general are a concern in this setting -- as they
are everywhere in the Navajo country.

It was a July night, 1980, with the brightest high-altitude day-light Moon
one could ever imagine.  I awoke suddenly at 2 a.m. in our rather isolated
house -- roughly the dimensional parameters of a traditional Navajo hogan,
but much larger --  and, through our bedroom window, I saw figures circling.

And I knew immediately.

Turning on the lights, I yelled and our house and its people and animals
came alive wildly.  Our three dogs jumped from the couch, barking.  One,
Ruggie, was a wonderful little terrier and the other her mother, Wendy.  The
third was the very formidable looking -- but eminently gentle -- Good:
half-coyote and half German shepherd.  Clad only in my underclothes and with
my always loaded Marlin .444 lever action, I went out the front door into
the moonlight.  There was movement -- revealing movement -- just inside the
ring of cedar trees around one side of our little house.  I held the rifle
high, the dogs now barking very wildly.

Then the shadowy but revealing motion  just inside the cedars was gone.

They were gone.

Hunter [Hunterbear]


PBS brings Hillerman mystery to television
By ALISA BLACKWOOD/
The Associated Press April 28, 2002
http://www.sfnewmexican.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=3976955&BRD=2144&PAG=461&de
pt_i\
d=367954&rfi=6


SUPERIOR, Ariz. - The PBS series Mystery! takes a hard turn to the West from
its British heritage this fall with its first American story, Skinwalkers,
by
the master of Southwestern mystery, Tony Hillerman.

And in trademark Hillerman style, it's steeped in Navajo culture, weaving in
folklore about American Indian witches known as skinwalkers as it unfolds on
the Navajo reservation spread across parts of northern Arizona and New
Mexico.

Otto Penzler, who owns the Mysterious Book Shop in New York City and one of
the
world's largest private mystery collections, said the Public Broadcasting
Service couldn't have selected a better author's work to represent the
series'
first venture into American mysteries.

"There is nothing more American than what Tony Hillerman writes about," he
said. "It's not only set in America but involves Native Americans. There's
no
author who could compete with that as far as being quintessentially
American."

The story centers on three seemingly unrelated murders and an attempt to
kill
Navajo tribal police officer Jim Chee. It follows Chee and his partner,
tribal
police Lt. Joe Leaphorn, the American Indian protagonists of 14 Hillerman
mystery novels.

The film stars actor Wes Studi of Dances With Wolves as Leaphorn and Adam
Beach
of the upcoming Windtalkers as Chee. It is directed by Chris Eyre of Smoke
Signals, an award winner at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The crew spent
most of March filming in this rural town about 60 miles east of Phoenix.

The story is significant to Hillerman die-hards because it's the book that
brings Chee and Leaphorn together for the first time.

"What Hillerman has is a classic buddy-cop story between Leaphorn and Chee,"
said Skinwalkers screenwriter James Redford, the son of the film's
co-executive
producer, actor Robert Redford.

"He had the Jim Chee mystery series and the Joe Leaphorn mystery series for
quite a long time before he brought them together," the younger Redford
said.
"It just leaped off the page with the two of them."

It was James Redford's job to adapt Hillerman's work into a script that
would
jump off the screen, too. It wasn't without challenges, and James Redford
warns
that while he remained true to the heart of the story, the film version does
make a few changes.

For example, the murders in the novel happen before the book begins, but for
a
more natural sequence on film, James Redford felt events should unfold as
the
movie progresses.

"So, structurally, it was difficult," he said. "Also you lose no matter what
you do in this movie. ... You can't translate Hillerman's magical prose. It
just doesn't translate to film. This movie will have its own beauty and its
own
magic, but Hillerman's is his own."

Hillerman fan or not, the film's executives hope the story, along with the
threads of Navajo culture, will captivate the audience.

"It's a vehicle into a culture most of us don't know, (set) in the
spectacular
desert and mountains of the Southwest," said Rebecca Eaton, the movie's
co-executive producer. "So I think it will have an allure in television."

Adds James Redford: "Anybody that has spent time around native cultures is
bound to recognize the ... elements of the mysterious and mystical. The
mystical and the magical seem to pervade their way of life, which can lead
to
both great mystery and suspense and the eerie aspect of the unknown." ©Santa
Fe
New Mexican 2002





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