The Story: Do three seemingly unconnected homicides and the attempted murder of Navajo Tribal Officer Jim Chee point to the activity of a “skinwalker” or Navajo witch? Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn team up, solving the case using their own knowledge of Navajo tradition, solid inductive reasoning, and a little luck. Hillerman’s settings include the Utah-Arizona border country, Window Rock, Teec Nos Pos Trading Post, Black Mesa, Casa del Eco Mesa, Gallup, Shiprock, Chilchinbito Canyon, Piñon, and Long Flat Wash.
Of Interest: This Golden Spur and Anthony Award winner paired Leaphorn and Chee for the first time and introduced another long-running character, Janet Pete. Skinwalkers was the first Hillerman novel to make the best-seller lists, moving him from regional to national attention. The novel drew European acclaim as well, receiving the French International Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
Executive producer Robert Redford helped craft the story into a PBS American Mystery! movie in November 2002, the first of three TV movies based on Hillerman’s books. Independent filmmaker Chris Eyre directed the film, which costarred Native American actors Wes Studi and Adam Beach. Hillerman said he liked the movies “because they’ll encourage people to read the books.”
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “How do I awaken Jim Chee, sleeping in his cot beside the paper-thin aluminum wall of his trailer home, so he will not be killed when the assassin fires a shotgun through said wall? Everything I try sounds like pure psychic coincides—which I detest in mysteries. Nothing works until I remember the ‘clack, clack’ sound made when a friend’s cat goes through the ‘cat door’ on his porch. I write in a spooky stray cat, for whom Chee makes this cat door (thereby establishing him as a nice guy and giving me a chance to explain Navajo ‘equal citizenship’ relationships with animals). The cat, spooked by the assassin’s approach, darts from its bed under a piñon into the trailer and awakens Chee. At book’s end, when I need to terminate a budding romance, the cat serves a wonderfully symbolic role.”
WINDOW ROCK RODEO
The councilwoman finally left, replaced by a small freckled white man who declared himself owner of the company that provided stock for the Navajo rodeo. He wanted assurance that his broncos, riding bulls, and roping calves would be adequately guarded at night. That pulled Leaphorn into the maze of administrative decision, memos, and paperwork required by the rodeo—an event dreaded by all hands in the Window Rock contingent of the tribal police.
[CHAPTER 2]
ABOUT THE WINDOW ROCK RODEO
Held each year over the Fourth of July, the Window Rock Rodeo is one of the largest rodeos in the West in terms of the number of competitors and the prize money at stake. Sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, the rodeo brings reigning world champions, past world champs, and other top-ranked contestants to Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation. An all-Indian rodeo, junior rodeo, senior rodeo, and a wild horse race add to the Ahoohai Days celebration that runs concurrently. The events draw thousands of folks from throughout the reservation. Don and I noticed that we non-Navajos were clearly in the minority.
When we lived in Santa Fe, Dad would leave his office to watch the Rodeo de Santa Fe parade with Mom and us kids. Afterwards, he sometimes finagled tickets so we could see the rodeo itself. Like many little girls, I was crazy about horses. From his former farm boy perspective, Dad viewed them as necessary work animals and never gave in to my pleas for a pony. Years later, the Navajos honored him at the Shiprock Fair. The organizers wanted Dad to ride a horse in their big parade, and he told them he would only if they could find a very old, very tired one. They let him ride in a convertible instead.
A saddle bronc rider at the Window Rock fair
At Teec Nos Pos Trading Post visitors can see Navajo rugs that reflect the complex designs developed on this part of the reservation.
In Skinwalkers, Dad uses the rodeo as an example of the distractions that keep Leaphorn from focusing on a series of murders. Leaphorn describes it as a “three day flood of macho white cowboys, macho Indian cowboys, cowboy groupies, drunks, thieves, con men, Texans, swindlers, photographers, and just plain tourists.”
TEEC NOS POS TRADING POST
Why did the white culture either cool things or heat them before consumption? The first time [Chee] had experienced a cold bottle of pop had been at the Teec Nos Pos Trading Post. He’d been about twelve. The school bus driver had brought a bottle for everyone on the baseball team. Chee remembered drinking it, standing in the shade of the porch…
[CHAPTER 3]
ABOUT TEEC NOS POS, ARIZONA AND ITS TRADING POST
This small community sits at the junction of U.S. Highways 64 and 160, west of Shiprock, New Mexico. The name is a variation on the Navajo words Tiis nazbas, which mean “cottonwoods in a circle.” Teec Nos Pos is best known for two things: as the childhood home of Peter MacDonald, former chairman of the Navajo Nation, and for its weaving. Collectors prize Teec Nos Pos rugs for their skilled artisanship and intricate designs. They often feature zigzags, triangles, or serrated diamonds enclosed within a border. Weavers from this area tend to create larger works than do their Navajo neighbors.
The store sells supplies, including Blue Bird Flour for fry bread, to area residents.
The trading post, which resembles a convenience store from the outside, is worth a look. Hamblin Bridger Noel started the business in 1905. Noel, from Virginia, was the first white man the Navajo permitted to establish a post in this section of the reservation. John McCulloch owned the store when we visited. I was thrilled to see children’s books in Navajo and in English for sale here—and a pair of pint-sized Navajo girls sitting on the floor, enraptured by the stories.
In addition to using the trading post as a memory trigger for Chee in Skinwalkers, Dad also mentioned it in several other novels including his first, The Blessing Way.
DUST STORM
The turbulence caused by the thunderhead was sweeping across the valley floor toward them. It kicked up an opaque gray-white wall of dust which obscured the distant shape of Black Mesa and spawned dust devils in the caliche flats south of them. They were standing, officer Al Gorman and Joe Leaphorn, beside Gorman’s patrol car on the track that led across the sagebrush flats below Sege Butte toward Chilchinbito Canyon.
[CHAPTER 10]
Dust storm over the desert, Navajo Nation
Leaphorn grunted. He was watching the dust storm moving down the valley with its outrider of whirlwinds. One of them had crossed a gypsum sink, and its winds had sucked up that heavier mineral. The cone changed from the yellow-gray of the dusty earth to almost pure white. It was the sort of thing Emma would have noticed and found beauty in….
[CHAPTER 10]
PAINTED DESERT
By midnight there was no more thunder; the cloud formation had sagged into itself, flattening to a vast general rain—the sort the Navajos call female rain—which gently drenched an area from Painted Desert northward to Sleeping Ute Mountain.
[CHAPTER 22]
Dust storm over Chinle near Canyon de Chelly
ABOUT THE PAINTED DESERT
The Painted Desert, a broad area of colorful badland formations, stretches about 160 miles in northeastern Arizona east of Holbrook. Much of this brilliant and eerie landscape lies within the Navajo Nation; the Hopi Mesas sit on the northern boundary.
Petrified Forest National Park, easily accessible from Interstate 40, preserves some of the fascinating scenery.
The colors—vivid bands of reds, oranges, soft grays, whites, and yellows—come from stratifications of minerals and decayed organic matter. Unlike some “deserts,” this one includes mesas, buttes, trees turned to stone, and dinosaur tracks. The clay soil expands when wet, then cracks as it dries. The moving surface prevents plants from growing, giving the area its barren look. The landscape also shows evidence of ancient volcanoes. The lava here is pillow basalt, the same type of lava found in Hawaii.
An overlook of the Painted Desert from inside the national park, about 28 miles east of Holbrook, Arizona
The steady work of wind and water continue to erode the landscape, exposing new layers of what geologists call the Chinle Formation, rock that is 200 million years old. The south part of the desert is rich in petrified wood and fossils from the Triassic period. The park’s north entrance has a visitor center with hands-on exhibits, orientation information, post office, café, gas station, and gift shop. The Painted Desert Inn National Historic Landmark is a hotel-turned-museum that sometimes hosts demonstrations by Native American artists.
Dad never used Painted Desert as a setting for his action, but rather as a bookend for Navajo Nation landscape. His references to the Painted Desert include not only the park but the whole lovely parade of colors and shapes beyond park boundaries. Toward the end of Skinwalkers, Leap horn anchors his thoughts in this landscape as he begins to consider the good news that his wife, Emma, does not have Alzheimer’s disease but an operable brain tumor.