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]