Crimes on the Reservation

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 windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sand-blasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border.

from ‘Listening Woman’ (1978)

Anyone who has seen and loved the glorious vastness of the American southwest will immediately be enchanted by that paragraph. Shortly thereafter the author brings us back to the more mundane concerns of the humans living therein.

At the hogan of Hosteen Tso, at 3.17 pm it gusted and eddied, and formed a dust devil, which crossed the wagon track and raced with a swirling road across Margaret Cigaret’s old Dodge pickup. […] She held down the edges of her shawl.

“Damn dirty wind”, she said.

from ‘Listening Woman’ (1978)

Starting in the 1970s, Tony Hillerman wrote a collection of detective novels set on and around the Navajo reservation, some featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, some Seargent Jim Chee, and some featuring both of these lawmen. They are members of the Navajo Tribal Police, which has jurisdiction over most crimes in the area. Most, but not all:

The Navajo police lived with jurisdiction problems. Even on the Big Reservation, which sprawled larger than all New England across the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, jurisdiction was always a question. The serious felony brought in the FBI. If the suspect was non-Navajo, other questions were raised. Or the crime might lap into the territory of the New Mexico State Police, Utah or Arizona Highway Patrol, or involve the Law and Order Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Or even a Hopi constable, or Southern Ute Tribal Police, or an officer of the Jicarilla Apache tribe, or any of a dozen county sheriffs of the three states.

from ‘People of Darkness’ (1980)

The novels typically start with something small, such as a Navajo whose hat has been stolen but the silver hatband left behind. This incident may seem unremarkable to the reader, but is noteworthy to a Navajo: why would anyone leave behind the valuable hatband? Joe Leaphorn is puzzled: a Navajo would steal out of need, but this theft doesn’t add up. Another novel starts with a Navajo boy missing in Zuni territory; there is a secret Zuni ritual involved, and age-old suspicions between the Navajos and the Zunis that only members of those tribes really understand.

And that is the charm of these books: they open a reader’s eyes to a whole different human world just below the surface of a geographical area that we might already be familiar with.

Hillerman was a white man writing novels about Navajo characters, and so in 2024 it is impossible to read his novels without considering cultural appropriation. What did the Navajos themselves think of his novels? Many articles say they were generally happy to share the history and culture embedded in his books, and appreciated his respectful portrayals (see here and here). The Hillerman books are used in Navajo Nation schools (see here). Hillerman was made an honorary member of the Navajo tribe by the Navajo Tribal Council. The books (and subsequent TV series) have undoubtedly increased interest in Navajo culture as well. That said, some Navajos did think the books contained exploitative stereotypes (see here). Weighing this all up, I’m seeing more positive than negative responses.

For me, part of what makes the books worthwhile is that the characters are distinct: there is not one single Navajo stereotype that appears over and over, but a plethora of individuals who are deeply Navajo but are each unique. Jim Chee is young, but is training to become a yataali, a Navajo singer who can conduct rituals. Joe Leaphorn is also embedded in Navajo culture, but is skeptical of luck and distrustful of what he sees as Navajo superstition — witches and skinwalkers and suchlike. Irma Onesalt is an angry young woman. Dr Bahe Yellowhorse is a barrel of a man who treats via western medicine as well as crystal gazing.

The beliefs and practices of the Navajo Nation are described in a respectful matter-of-fact style, without a hint of superiority, but also without an outsider’s worshipful reverence. The only practices that are regularly belittled are those of the FBI, who are portrayed as a bunch of supercilious and patronizing men with a bull-in-a-china-shop attitude to solving crime.

Hillerman’s plots are intrinsically entangled with Navajo culture: the cause of the incident (murder, theft, or missing person) is usually related to something distinctly Navajo, and the resolution of the novels also involves something that only a Navajo would know. In Skinwalkers, a suspect leaves tracks that show he avoided stepping over a body, and shuffled his feet when he crosses the path of a snake — both Navajo traits. In Listening Woman, a knowledge of sand painting is critical to identifying the ritual performed and the likely clan of the suspect. In People of Darkness, someone asks ‘What kind of Navajo would use a mole for an amulet?’, and the answer is critical to solving the crime.

In all the books, those who know and understand clan membership have a huge advantage in solving the crimes. For example, those who are born to the same clan are considered brothers and can ask and grant favors, some clans perform only some rituals, Eastern Navajo clans have more Pueblo and Christianity in their culture, and so on.

Both Leaphorn and Chee are masterful trackers, able to read the marks of man or animal days later. They are both very patient, willing to wait until their quarry makes a move.

[Leaphorn] simply sat, letting his senses work for him. (‘Listening Woman’)

Chee’s memory stands him in good stead in both his detective and his yataali work:

Even among a people who placed high value on memory and who honed it in their children almost from birth, Chee’s talent was unusually strong.

Of course, there are always those glorious descriptions of the southwest and its weather and geography.

Cumulus clouds climbing the sky over the Chuskas were tall enough to form the anvil tops that promised rain. But here the August sun glared off the asphalt beyond the small shade of Leaphorn’s olive.

from ‘Skinwalkers’ (1986)

Chee drove up the valley toward Tsaya, with the Chuska Range rising blue to his left and autumn asters forming two lines of color along the opposite sides of the cracked old asphalt of US 666, and snakeweed and chamisa coloring the slopes mottled tan-yellow-gold, and the November sky dark-blue overhead.

from ‘A Thief of Time’ (1988)

I just re-read a handful of the books, and they made me want to revisit the Southwest.