Note by Hunterbear: Although some have seen my basic post on the soon-to-appear Redford/PBS "Navajo film", Skinwalkers, others have not and, in addition, there is also relevant and both-ways reasonable and brief colloquy material which I've attached to this. Some of Skinwalkers' advertising now shows an ostensible Navajo res scene -- with a big Sahuaro cactus. And that, believe me, tells a lot. Skinwalkers is making its public PBS debut on November 24. That Sahuaro ad convinces me that I'd better fire another round. Maybe the film folk wanted to camp in the luxurious [if you've got the dinero] Phoenix metro country -- and not up in the genuinely rugged and beautiful Navajo country. Read on for what I mean by that comment.
Another film earlier this year, Windtalkers, based on the heroic role of Navajo Code-Talkers in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, drew very solid comments from me -- and very much from almost all Navajo viewers. A quite long-time and close friend of mine, the late Carl Gorman, was an internationally known artist and a principal spokesperson for the Code Talkers until his death at Gallup early in 1998. Here's our website link to Windtalkers and, via that, closely related links: http://www.hunterbear.org/Carl%20(Code%20Talker).htm This Skinwalkers film strikes me as very questionable for many reasons. Here are my thoughts -- and it's now one of our more visited Hunterbear website pages at this point. Ultimately, the basic judgment will be made by the Navajo people -- but the initial indications are strong wariness from many of those quarters. NAVAJO WITCHCRAFT AND THE SKINWALKERS -- AND A DUBIOUS FILM [HUNTER GRAY 4/29/02] Added discussional note Note by Hunterbear: This news story on a PBS / Tony Hillerman Navajo witch-craft film, "Skinwalkers," strikes several hard, discordant notes within me -- and some brief and very critical comment is appropriate. First, the place-line is Superior, Arizona. This -- an old Magma Copper town which I knew well -- is southeast of Phoenix, in the Big Cactus and Hot Desert country and not far from the Superstition Mountains. It's a far, far cry distance-wise and geographically and certainly culture-wise from the Navajo Nation: far north/northeast of Superior in the high-altitude Colorado River plateau country of frequent cedars, pinons, yellow pines. Superior is old Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers country and my memories of its copper workers [mostly Chicano, some Anglo, a few Apaches] in those struggles -- consistently won by Mine-Mill -- are fond indeed. In early December, 1963, I came up from the Deep South and spoke at Superior on the civil rights struggle under the auspices of the Arizona Mine-Mill Council. Delegations came from all of the Arizona Mine-Mill locals, some of which traveled great distances [e.g., from the Mexican border.] I spoke virtually all night as people came and went. A page about this great Mine-Mill gathering -- on behalf of our Southern Movement -- in on our large website: http://www.hunterbear.org/salt2.htm This Hillerman / Navajo film is being made in the country around Superior. That, frankly, is bizarre. And that is only one very significant mistake. But the other very significant mistake indeed -- in my opinion, someone who grew up among the Navajo [the Dine'] -- is the very film itself. Tony Hillerman is an Anglo writer whose many murder mysteries -- detective stories set in the very vast Navajo nation, and certainly friendly to the Dine' people -- have a wide following. But, even though they're about 80% accurate, the 20% of inaccuracy is a vast Grand Canyon that certainly precludes their use as reliable material in any even remotely scholarly setting. [And, yes, I've read the Hillerman book, Skinwalkers, on which this film is based. I find it wanting.] For many non-Navajo people all over the country [and world], Hillerman's stuff is their only introduction to the vast and often remote and isolated Navajo reservation [bigger than the state of West Virginia] and the now relatively huge Navajo Nation [about a quarter of a million people.] This film, which will undoubtedly distort even Hillerman's distortions, is -- like a great many other basically fast-buck enterprises -- wearing the "public service" cloak: a spurious disservice. 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] 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&de pt_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 S. L.: 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] S.L. 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 NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ A BIT OF FURTHER COMMENT [4 / 30 / 02] Your own comments, S. L., 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, S. L.: 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 NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
