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&dept_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
BRIEF DISCUSSIONAL NOTE [MARXISM DISCUSSION 4/29/02]
Hunterbear responds to Stuart Lawrence:
The Navajo Nation is -- to couch something of great complexity in trenchant
terms -- another country and another world with very distinctive roots
whose continual and vital life are far, far more ancient than anything in
Europe! [And this is, of course, true of any tribal nation.] Unless
you're willing to spend a good deal of objective time in the vast Navajo
country, I don't think you would ever be able to even slightly understand
this matter of witchcraft -- and, in any case, I don't think you have the
slightest moral or other justification to attempt to make any kind of value
judgment in this or any kind of Native American socio-cultural setting.
That's the prerogative of the Native people involved -- and no one else.
A note just received from my oldest son recalls that summer night in July,
1980 that we were visited -- and were quite prepared to exercise our very
much Navajo-approved self-defense rights. He writes: "I remember that night
. . .I have a hard time explaining skinwalkers etc to anyone who hasn't been
in that setting, period. " [John Salter III]
Navajo witchery is the essence of predatory criminality. No law enforcement
agency of any kind intrudes into the matter of traditional Navajo
self-defense when this extremely ancient and malignant evil threatens one's
very health and life.
Yours -
Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]
Stuart Lawrence writes:
"Profound deviance in a society, resulting in the dehumanizing of the
deviant and the acceptance of their being murdered, is something we should never discuss publicly? I have at least one ancestor of my own who was put to death for witchcraft, but one doesn't have to reach back into history to see the
pattern repeated. The last thing I want is for this
sort of social construct to be put beyond inquiry or challenge."
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( social justice )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
A BIT OF FURTHER COMMENT [4 / 30 / 02]
Your own comments, Stuart Lawrence, really prove my point very well: that
it's flatly impossible for non-Natives, or any non-tribal people, unless
they're willing to spend a great deal of objective time in a setting like
the Navajo nation [or that of any tribal nation], to even begin to
comprehend the complexity of something like, say, Navajo witchcraft [a very
real matter indeed -- as is the far more prevalent " very good medicine" of
the medicine men] -- and the context, deep and high and wide, of an ancient
and vigorous and vital and very healthy culture with a very primary emphasis
on Harmony as necessary to individual and social health and life.
This is, frankly, something beyond your ken. This is not a "Salem" thing at
all: i.e., flaring, collective hysteria. Navajo witch-craft is a matter so
fundamentally deeply rooted and sensitive that many Navajo will not even
discuss it with other Navajo. I taught many sociology and related courses
at Navajo Community College. We did not discuss this particular topic --
even remotely or implicitly.
When you emerge with something accusing me of a " wholly anti-Marxist,
spiritualist view of Navajo witchcraft," I can only say that that sort of
ethnocentric twaddle does no constructive service to the advancement of
anything. And, if you're not prepared to defend yourself and your family
and friends, I feel very sorry for you -- and for them.
In a word, Stuart Lawrence: I don't know where you're sitting -- but it
obviously isn't in the cedars and pinons and yellow pines and sage in the
middle of the night.
On the matter of my considerable concern about the film, Skinwalkers: It's
already being touted in some Hollywood circles as a "Navajo werewolf"
production. My point proved, once again.
Yours,
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( social justice )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
At this point, this basically concludes my public responses on the matter of Navajo witchcraft. It is possible -- even probable -- that the film, "Skinwalkers," will generate much controversy. I may well have much more indeed to say publicly on that matter. HG
AND THEN MY MINI-REVIEW OF THE FILM ITSELF [HUNTER GRAY 11/25/02]
From the outset, I've been quite critical of the Skinwalkers [PBS] film
effort. Now that I've just finished seeing the Redford creation, I do know
for sure that I was indeed on target. [My earlier post on the matter is
contained on this page in our large Lair of Hunterbear website:
http://www.hunterbear.org/navajo_witchcraft_and_the_skinwa.htm ]
Some acting was quite good. I always like Adam Beach who played one Navajo
detective and did it well. Wes Studi did a solid job as his superior.
There were certainly other examples of good acting -- and then there were
some that were neither good -- nor believably Navajo.
The very large Navajo [Dine'] Nation, with now about a quarter of a million
members, occupies reservation land larger than the state of West Virginia.
Navajo culture is quite intact and the tribe is making every effort to
ensure that that continues in enduring fashion. Navajo traditional
medicine -- good medicine -- is very real indeed. A Navajo medicine man
often trains for as many as seventeen rigorous years.
Very real as well, unfortunately, is Navajo witch-craft -- bad medicine --
and with it the Skinwalkers. These, an integral component of Witchery Way,
are profoundly deviant Navajo who, depicted as animals, travel at night --
planting malignant spells and also robbing and plundering. Far less
prevalent than the forces of good medicine, witchery and its works -- bad
medicine -- is extremely dangerous.
I repeat, this is all -- good medicine and bad -- very real indeed. It's
not hocus pocus -- and it's not "psychological". It's all one of the many
dimensions in the Creation that simply cannot be defined materialistically.
Tony Hillerman's novels about the Navajo country and its people are usually
well written but there are always very substantial accuracy gaps. Here, his
novel Skinwalkers -- quite less than culturally accurate in its own right --
has been greatly changed by the film makers. And for the worse. The plot
themes that emerge -- in many respects Anglo mystery in nature despite
efforts to give them Navajo clothing -- come off as hokey and hybrid.
The Skinwalker situation with its witchcraft nature and context -- even as
attempted in this film where it's set forth simply as a cover/pretense
used by a conventionally deranged killer in an effort to throw authorities
off his lethal trail -- is an extremely complex and sensitive matter which
is not openly discussed much in the Navajo setting and even more rarely with
outsiders. Here, the whole Skinwalker situation comes off ambiguously,
extremely confused.
Finally, in many good films and, certainly, in any with a genuine Native
theme, the central force is the Land itself -- the Earth. Skinwalkers, was
made 'way down in the general Phoenix region -- Sahuaro cactus desert -- and
very, very far south of the highly elevated and ruggedly beautiful Colorado
Plateau region of Northeastern Arizona and Northwestern New Mexico which
contains and always undergirds the vast Navajo Nation. This alone
constitutes a signal travesty of the worst sort -- and obviously dooms the
project from its very outset.
Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]
www.hunterbear.orgProtected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'
NOTE: SKINWALKERS II [NEW STUFF] -- NEXT PAGE
