The Story: Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn hunts down a cold-blooded killer in a double murder investigation that endangers his own life. The story begins with the blind Navajo Listening Woman and leads Leaphorn to uncover a dead man’s long-held secret, the theft of the helicopter, a kidnapping scheme, and a violent conspiracy. Heroin, a heartfelt promise, and conflicts between traditional Navajo beliefs and the modern world help fuel the plot. Settings include the beautiful Rainbow Plateau area east of Page, Arizona.
Of Interest: The third and final book in which Joe Leaphorn appears alone, Listening Woman was nominated for an Edgar for Best Mystery Novel of 1979, losing to Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. The book drew praise from fans and reviewers and is remembered as Hillerman’s Navajo novel with the most on-page action—fires, floods, dog attacks, and explosions that put Leaphorn at grave risk.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “This book taught me that inability to outline a plot has advantages. The plan was to use Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the hero twins of the Navajo genesis story, in a mystery involving orphaned brothers (a ‘spoiled priest’ and a militant radical) who collide in their campaigns to help their people. I would use a shaman, the last person to talk to my murder victim before he is killed, as a source for religious information meaningless to the FBI but revealing to Leaphorn. After a series of first chapters that led nowhere, I wrote a second chapter in which Leaphorn stops the villain for speeding and, more or less out of whimsy, I have him see a big ugly dog in the backseat of the car, intending to use the delete key on my new (and first) computer to delete said dog later. That un-outlined dog became crucial to the plot. No more trying to outline.”
MONUMENT VALLEY
The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in the windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sandblasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. Over the arid immensity of the Nokaito Bench it filled the blank blue sky with a rushing sound.
[CHAPTER 1]
ABOUT MONUMENT VALLEY
Monument Valley, a vast and beautiful expanse of sandstone buttes, mesas, and arches, has provided scenery for movies, commercials, and music videos. The media exposure helped to make this exotic landscape familiar to many people around the world. It’s one of those places where Dad found inspiration. I’m sure that’s why he used it to set the scene in the quote above, from the very first page of Listening Woman.
On his first trip, he and Mom arrived here after a couple of days exploring the reservation and at least one cramped night sleeping in their truck. Dad told me he thought the bed at Monument Valley’s Goulding’s Lodge was extraordinarily comfortable.
Looking toward Monument Valley from U.S. 163. The sandstone pinnacles, mesas, and buttes tower at heights of 400 to 1,000 feet above the sandy desert floor.
Tourists can explore some of the valley on a self-guided tour. A Navajo guide offers access to areas that would otherwise be off-limits.
Part of the expansive Colorado Plateau, the “valley” consists of a wide flatness interrupted not by trees but by stone formations rising as much as a thousand feet. Sand-blown wind and water spent fifty million years peeling away the surface of the plateau, wearing down layers of soft and hard rock to carve the mesas, buttes, and towers. The characteristic red comes from iron oxide; the blue-gray from manganese oxide. The Navajo name Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii means “Clearings Among the Rocks.”
Don and I followed Dad’s advice and stayed at historic Goulding’s Lodge. Our second-story motel room looked out on the Mitten Buttes. We saw sunset create streaks of pink and crimson, wrapping the sandstone like a graceful chiffon scarf. The next morning, we awoke before sunrise to find a dusting of snow on the Mittens, as though a heavenly cook had sprinkled them with powdered sugar.
In Navajo tradition, the formations represent hands left behind by the gods, a sign of their ongoing connection to the Diné. After Dad died, I learned that he had purchased the lights for a sports field at the predominately Navajo Monument Valley High School just down the road from the lodge.
Encompassing more than 91,000 acres, Monument Valley Tribal Park extends from Arizona into Utah.
Lake Powell flooded many sites the Navajo held sacred.
LAKE POWELL
The line extended between Navajo Mountain and Short Mountain—into the Nokaito Bench and onward into the bottomless stone wilderness of the Glen Canyon country and across Lake Powell Reservoir…. Leaphorn wound his way through the sandstone landscape, his khaki-uniformed figure dwarfed by the immense outcroppings and turned red by the dying light.
[CHAPTER 4]
[Leaphorn] looked down at its surface, toward the source of light. And then he realized that this water must be part of Lake Powell—backed into the cave as the lake surface rose with spring runoff and draining out as the level fell with autumn and winter. He drank thirstily.
[CHAPTER 16]
ABOUT LAKE POWELL
Lake Powell and the surrounding Glen Canyon National Recreation Area span almost 2,000 square miles of high desert landscape in southern Utah and northern Arizona. The lake, formed by Glen Canyon Dam, is named in honor of Civil War veteran and one-armed explorer John Wesley Powell. Powell led the first scientific expedition in wooden boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869.
The second largest reservoir in the country, the lake stores water and provides power for much of the southwestern United States. The creation of Lake Powell flooded many sites the Navajo held sacred, including the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado Rivers and the landscape near Rainbow Bridge.
A Navajo rug with a sand painting design (far left) by Chinle, Arizona weaver Arlene Yazzie (Richardson’s Trading Post, Gallup, New Mexico)
In Listening Woman, Dad uses a cave in the empty country along the San Juan River arm of Lake Powell as the place where Indian militants hold a troop of Boy Scouts hostage. Sacred paintings preserved here (and mentioned in the next section) provide a key to the mystery.
The Wheelwright Museum began as the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. The bronze sculpture, Dineh, is by Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser.
NAVAJO SAND PAINTINGS
“Very strange,” Leaphorn said. The only place he knew of that a bona fide singer had produced genuine dry paintings to be preserved was at the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Arts in Santa Fe. There it had been done only after much soul-searching and argument, and only after certain elements had been slightly modified. The argument for breaking the rules had been to preserve certain paintings so they would never be lost.
[CHAPTER 10]
Leaphorn took two steps toward the old hearths and stopped abruptly. The floor here was patterned with sand paintings. At least thirty of them, each a geometric pattern of the colors and shapes of the Holy People of the Navajos. Leaphorn studied them, recognizing Corn Beetle, the Sacred Fly, Talking God, and Black God, Coyote and others. He could read some of the stories told in these pictures-formed-of-colored sand…. But some of the paintings were totally unfamiliar to him. These must be the great heritage Standing Medicine had left for The People—the Way to start the world again.
[CHAPTER 18]
ABOUT NAVAJO SAND PAINTINGS AND THE MUSEUM OF NAVAJO CEREMONIAL ART
Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum, known as the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art when Dad wrote Listening Woman, began as a depository for sacred Navajo religious information. The museum preserved copies of sand paintings used in Navajo ceremonies, recordings of the healing chants and weavings by esteemed Navajo singer or “medicine man” Hastiin (or Hosteen) Klah. As a child, I visited the museum several times with Dad. Although I was too young to understand much, I realized this was a place full of unexplained mysteries.
In the 1920s, Klah and many others believed traditional Navajo religious practice had a shaky future because of the U.S. government’s policy of sending Navajo children to boarding schools where they could not speak the Navajo language or follow their traditions. The efforts of Christian missionaries to discredit Navajo spirituality also were taking a toll.
Mary Cabot Wheelwright, a widely traveled, wealthy Bostonian with a deep interest in the study of religions, met Klah in 1921. They collaborated to record and preserve Diné ritual knowledge. Franc Newcomb, a trusted Navajo trader, sketched the sand paintings created and destroyed during healing ceremonies. Klah wove huge tapestries of the ritual designs. They planned for their work to be preserved in the museum Wheelwright financed. Klah blessed the ground on which the museum was to be built.
Over the next forty years, history contradicted the assumption that the Navajo traditional way of life would disappear. The Navajo people expressed concern that non-Navajos had access to the sacred material preserved at the museum. In 1977, the museum board voted to repatriate several Navajo medicine bundles and other sacred items. The Diné maintain these at the Cultural Center Museum at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona. The Wheelwright Museum maintains world-renowned collections that document Navajo art and culture from 1850 to the present, and broadened its focus to present traditional and contemporary Native American art.
Out of respect for the Navajos’ wishes, the museum does not allow non-Diné, and that included Don and me, to see the weavings or take photographs of them.
Modern Navajo weaving and jewelry may include designs based on images used in sand paintings. Artists also create and sell framed sand paintings, some inspired by ceremonial images.
In one of Listening Woman’s most chilling scenes, Leaphorn discovers an intricate library of sacred Diné sand paintings preserved in a cave. Deranged militants have rigged the place for explosive destruction.