Originally appeared in the Boston Book
Review.
Tony Hillerman: Sheep Camp Navajo
He was beginning to suspect that she didn’t really want to
marry him. Or, at least he wasn’t sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he
currently existed — a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed
to the more romantic and politically correct indigenous Person.
The Fallen Man
TH: I see that The Boston Book Review is a literary magazine. You want to
talk about creativity and all that stuff?
HB: Sure, I’m interested in that. But I was thinking of
asking you first of all about place. Your work is so rooted in place, in the
American West.
TH: It is indeed. I have two neckties, one striped, the
other not. If you go west, you leave your necktie home. But if you go east,
well, the further east you go, the more likely you are to bring a necktie.
For example, we had a public television station at the
University of New Mexico, and the FCC said all licensees had to be represented
at a meeting. I was the guy tapped to make the symbolic appearance in
Washington. I get there: huge room, big table surrounded by guys, each one
representing a television station. Forty-eight guys. Forty-six neckties.
I think, who would it be? Texas would have a necktie on,
‘cause Texas is getting pretty chic.
HB: California.
TH: Uh uh. They’d have a necktie on. Montana? No. Montana is
getting an influx of civilization. Laramie Wyoming, I thought. That’s it,
there’s about seven neckties in all of Wyoming. Just to see if I’m right I walk
up to these guys without the neckties and say, “What kind of weather are you
having in Laramie this year?”
And they say, “Good.”
HB: So you’ve got some of Joe Leaphorn’s detective skills in
you.
TH: Or vice versa.
HB: Besides dress, food stands out in your books. It’s hard
not to notice the amount of Twinkies your characters consume.
TH: They are part of the food chain on the Navajo
Reservation. Twinkies, orange soda pop, and mutton are the basis of nutritional
life. And Spam — the Navajo Reservation is the Spam capital of the country. The
Navajo’s even have a word for
white people’s complexion that relates to Spam. Pinkish.
HB: The Navajo Reservation is housed within the continental
United States, and English is spoken there, but you make it feel like another
country.
TH: I kind of feel that way, too, when I go back there. I
used to take the train to
California. It runs down to the river and then climbs this ridge out of
the Rio Grande and all of a sudden you’re at the top. And all of a sudden, man,
the world falls away. You can see seven million acres of mountains and mesas
and tanned gray silver grasslands. Empty. No sign that any body’s ever walked
on it, no sign of buildings.
It just does something to you. Your spirit soars. On your
right you see Mt. Taylor, one of the sacred mountains. Over to your left there
are the Buttes, all these places tied up with mythology. A different world.
One time, I’m sitting there and three guys are sitting next
to me in the observation car. One got on, as I recall, in Hartford. Two are
from Chicago. They were talking about business machines, faxes, and I’ve been
eavesdropping on them, listening.
HB: Is eavesdropping a professional responsibility?
TH: It is; I’m thinking, pick up something. The conversation
drops dead. The guy from Hartford said, “My God! Why would anybody live out
here?”
And it doesn’t look like it’s made for human occupancy. It
looks like it was designed for something different. Those mesas are too steep
to climb. There’s no water. Green grass means money, but this color grass means
kangaroo rats and snakes.
HB: And Navajos without faxes. What brought you to that part
of country initially?
TH: It was August, ‘45. I was back from the War. Anybody
breathing could get a job. I got a
job driving oil field equipment north of Crown Point, New Mexico, the
Checkerboard Reservation. I’d never been out there before; I was tremendously
impressed by the landscape.
And I saw two Navajos back from the Marine corps having a
curing ceremony, an Enemy Way. I’m driving this truck and here come these
ceremonially dressed Indians on horseback. I was really impressed. I grew with Potawatomi
Indians and with Seminoles. They were just like us. When we played cowboy and
Indian, they wanted to be the cowboys. They were smart enough to know who won.
I asked the Navajo if could go to the ceremony. They said,
sure, if I stayed sober and behaved myself. I went back there and watched some
of it. I liked the notion, I liked what I was seeing. There wasn’t anybody
organizing the clans to bring me home.
And I thought, this is interesting. I have to come back
here.
HB: Did you come back with the intention of writing about
it?
TH: I came back as a UP political reporter, transferred to
Sante Fe. I had no intention of being a mystery writer or writing about that
locale. I was going to write the great American novel, and it was going to be
based on what happened in the Belgian Congo. The Belgians had just left the
place in total chaos. There were three tribal factions fighting for it.
Paratroopers were dropping in. Mercenaries were being hired. Stanleyville was
burning.
I wanted to write a story about Joe Pilgrim, a bookkeeper or
something, a pretty nice guy but no hero.
HB: Very Conradian
TH: There you go, I was in my early twenties and I’d been
reading Conrad. I wanted to send Joe over there to straighten out the books for
one of these companies. He gets caught in the chaos, and I write a great novel
about it.
I tried and found I wasn’t anywhere near it, so I quit. I
decided that since I wasn’t good enough to write that book, I’d write something
much shorter with a structure that didn’t depend so much on character
development. I’d been reading Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler — mystery writers
who really write novels instead of tales — and Eric Ambler, who we don’t think
of as literature but who writes a hell of a good story.
I thought, I’ll bet I can write one of these. I’m good at
descriptive writing, and I know I can write narrative. I don’t know if I can
write character. So I’ll pick a fascinating setting. If everything else bombs
the setting can carry it. By then I was more and more fascinated with the
Navajo, and felt if I was fascinated by them, everybody would be.
I was wrong about that.
My agent said, don’t write a novel; everybody’s trying to
write novels and they’re not selling. And when I finally gave it to her, she
said, bad book, she couldn’t sell it. I’m not sure she even sent it out.
HB: There’s nothing like having your agent on your side.
TH: Well, I think she was really; I liked her. She was
giving me good honest opinion. I said, “What’s wrong with it?” She said, “The
book falls between two stools.”
I said, “what should I do?” She said, “Dump it. Go back to
writing nonfiction.” This was 1970. I didn’t dump it. I sent it to Harper and
Row.
HB: You’ve talked about a series of books you read as a kid,
saying that the “grotesque, empty landscape was important as any character.” As
an adult, you remembered the author of those books was the Australian writer,
Arthur Upfield. I’ve always
thought of you and Upfield as connected.
TH: The outback.
HB: And aboriginal culture.
TH: The Bone is Pointed, Death of a Lake, The Will of the Tribe. The ones focused on
aborigines and landscape were great.
HB: His detective, Bonaparte, was half aborigine. And there
were wild camels, rabbits dying en masse.
TH: Remember the drought, the dying lake.
HB: Also the witchcraft, the chanting, the gathering forces
of sorcery.
TH: And the way he handled it. You didn’t have to believe in
anything. All you had to believe
was that the aborigines believed. Then you see how you can make a guy like Joe
Leaphorn work. Does he believe in witchcraft?
HB: Leaphorn is a good mask for you. He’s inside Navajo
culture but questions it.
TH: When people ask which of the two, Jim Chee or Joe
Leaphorn, I identify with, I don’t
hesitate. It’s Leaphorn. Though I like Chee. He’s a combination of all those
idealistic, romantic, anti-War students that I taught during the Vietnam
period. They were tough to teach and made for some delightful years in normally
dead-from-the-neck-up academia. They read Herman Hesse, for god’s sake.
HB: And tended to idolize Indians. In Leaphorn you can feel the
divide between Navajo and non-Navajo culture. Chee is over on the other side,
completely Navajo identified.
TH: Oddly enough, the younger generation is more
traditional; they know the language better. Their daddies were taken out of
Navaho life and put in boarding school and told to speak only English. They weren’t in the hogan at home
hearing the winter stories. And, of course, there was capitalism in Farmington,
Gallup, and the Indian boarding schools on the border country — you fall in
love with pickup trucks and televisions.
HB: You’ve said that the Navajo were, “Poor but not letting
it bother them much, generous, deeply religious, hospitable — all those
valuable little things not on the agenda of the silver spoon set.”
TH: I’m seventy-one so I grew up in the tail end of the
depression. I didn’t have a goddamn idea we were poor folks. We didn’t have
indoor plumbing until I was fourteen. I made my first telephone call when I was
twenty-one back from overseas. I didn’t know anybody that had a telephone. Who
would I call? Hell, I had a happy childhood.
HB:
In The Fallen Man you've got Jim Chee encountering a
Navajo who runs an accounting firm in Flagstaff. Chee tells the man he seems to
be doing very well, and the man replies, "No, I will be a poor man all my
life." When Chee asks what he means, the man says, "Nobody ever
taught me any songs."
Are you romanticizing Navajo culture?
TH: I’ve been accused, with some justice, of romanticizing
the Navajo. But so many people have written about the border town, the guys
ground up by friction between the two cultures, the drunks staggering down
Interstate 40. I like to write about the people in the middle of the
reservation who don’t drink, who
disapprove of drinking, who try to stick to their religion, who make
compromises to make a living but still hold to their faith in the Navajo way.
Most Navajos are affected by their culture even though maybe
you couldn’t tell them from a loan shark, even though they’re working in Los
Alamos in the lab. Down deep they’re conscious of it and affected by it in some
way. And a lot of Navajos are still traditional. “Sheep camp Navajos.” Some
sheep camp Navajos live in cities but are still religious.
How can I illustrate this? As far as I know no Navajo has
actually run any trading post. Here you’ve got seventeen cases of Spam, all
this good stuff. . .
HB: Twinkies.
TH: The Twinkies, the gasoline, the orange soda pop. And
here comes some members of their clan, or maybe just strangers, and hell, if
they’re going to be halfway decent Navajos they give it to ‘em; they say, we’ve
got more than we need here.
HB: Your discussion of the culture clash as it plays out
within Leaphorn and between Jim Chee and his lovers is one of the strongest
things in the books.
TH: The first time I tried to do it was in a book called
People of Darkness. Chee met this
Wisconsin gal, this schoolteacher, Mary Langdon. They’re having coffee and she introduces herself by saying
who she is, what she does. Now it’s his turn. He says, “I’m the son of . . . “
and names his family. She accuses him of not playing fair. Then he explains. It
finally gets down to her saying, “You wouldn’t even tell your name?”
And he says, we don’t use the name of a person in their
presence. It’s kind of a code word to tell other people who we are talking
about but if they are there we don’t use the name. Then he tells her about
having the war name that somebody in your maternal clan gives you when you are
little. She more or less asks what his secret name is and he changes the
subject.
HB:
In "The Fallen Man " you have Chee thinking about Mary's
attempt to teach Navajo children:
"That first month or two in class I was always saying: 'Look at me when
I talk to you,' and the kids simply wouldn't do it . . . And finally one of the
other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about
things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive,
deceptive."
Chee thinks of
this as he is having his own face
closely scrutinized by Janet Pete. He reflects that this is rude behavior:
"No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual's
privacy."
TH: There are so many things about the culture I like. The
sense of what’s valuable: having a lot of stuff doesn’t have anything to do
with value. It might indicate you were selfish. Then there’s the pressure to
avoid excess; if you’re lazy, that’s bad too. You want to get the golden man.
A friend of mine is a hotshot rodeo bronc buster. I asked
him if he was going to ride in the Navajo rodeo, and he said, he might but he
didn’t think he’d win. When I asked what he meant he said he’d won three times
now and that’s too much.
HB: It’s interesting reading your books to realize that
right in the United States there’s a culture that espouses values totally
opposite to what we think of the as American way.
TH: I’m a Christian. I think the good lord taught us how to
have a happy life, and so did Buddha, and so did Mohammed. Don’t be selfish, is
what it boils down to. Despite the “In God We Trust” on our currency, that
makes America just about the most pagan country on the planet. And there’s a
little island in this pagan country where you have the teachings of Buddha,
Christ and Mohammed being acted upon. Don’t be selfish. Don’t value material
things. Value people. Respect women. Respect to children.
If I’m making them sound like a bunch of prefixed Mennonites
[PLEASE CHECK SPELLING] out there, they’re not. They’re human beings like we
are. We’ve had child abuse; we’ve had three Navajo cops killed in the last
thirteen months.
HB: The dark side, as you portray it, is coyote. Coyote is
the agent of evil. Your books make it seem that a lot of Navajo culture is organized the way it is
precisely in order to contain coyote.
TH: Absolutely.
HB: Witchcraft is powerful and pervasive.
TH: The taboo system is a system of fear.
HB: Coyote gets a lot of favorable press these days. Gary
Snyder, among others, talks about coyote as the trickster spirit, the spirit of
innovation. You say, wait a minute,
coyote is not about entertainment. He’s about death and dirtiness.
TH: We’re both right. The Plains Indians didn’t raise sheep.
They hunted buffalo. They saw coyote and said, ah, we both hunt buffalo, and
here’s one sonofabitch of a predator. To them, he’s funny, heroic, smart.
Navajos try to make a living raising sheep and turkeys, all the things coyote
likes to eat. To them, coyote is not benign; he getting ready to eat their
flock.
HB: In Talking God one of the characters tries to restore
the material housed in museums to the indigenous people it came from. What is
your take on that?
TH: Some of the stuff is sacred. For example, the Zuni lost
one of their important religious objects, and spotted it up in the Denver
Museum. They told the Denver Museum it was theirs and that it had to be stolen.
The Denver Museum told them to bug off. They generated some publicity and the Denver
Museum shifted to a more appropriate position.
In Talking God
the guy who wants to be an Indian goes and digs up the bones of the
museum’s curator to show her what it’s like to have an ancestor’s bones
displayed. I have the feeling that had a good effect on museum directors; more
and more directors now call the local tribes to say, come and look at our
collection, have we got any stuff stolen from you guys?
HB: What led you to write your Vietnam book, Finding Moon?
TH: Let’s get back to Stanleyville, and the Belgian Congo. I
kept trying to write that book for years and never could make it work. And
everybody had forgotten Stanleyville. Then I was watching television and saw
those images of helicopters evacuating Saigon, poor bastards trying to get
through the fence. Forget Stanleyville. This was the chaos I needed. So in
1980, I finally got around to it. And then my editor told me nobody’s buying
books about Vietnam. Which of course they weren’t. But some said, by god,
that’s the best book you ever wrote.
HB: You’ve said you’re going to avoid the trap that so many
writers of series fall into, of repeating yourself, of “getting steadily worse,
just to keep the books coming out on schedule.” You said, “Sure, the readers
will keep buying them for a while, but I’m not going to do that.”
TH: Probably will do it, but don’t want to. It’s the same
reason I quit teaching. It dawned on me one day I’m not doing this as well as I
used to.
HB: It doesn’t sound like you’ve run out of interest in
Navajo life or that it’s about to turn into reruns. I feel as if every book
gives me an aspect of Navajo life but I never see the totality, I always feel
like there’s more.
TH: If you can’t make it germane to the plot, you’ve got to
leave it out. I’m working on one now. It hasn’t come alive yet. It takes
awhile. All of a sudden you think of a name for it. Then you know you’ve got
the theme, and it takes on it’s own personality. It quits being “the next book.”
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