Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman

Hillerman’s main characters, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, may both be Navaho police detectives, but they’re completely different culturally.

Tony Hillerman, an award-winning mystery writer, centers most of his novels in the American Southwest and around the lives of two Navaho characters: Joe Leaphorn, a decorated venerable police lieutenant, and Jim Chee, a young policeman who also wants to be a Navaho shaman. The ongoing stories of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in Hillerman’s works parallel the histories of Indians in the American Southwest.

Joe Leaphorn was a child during the boarding school days, when Navaho and other Indian children were routinely removed from their homes by the U.S. government and sent to boarding schools to civilize them and integrate them into mainstream American culture. As a result, these displaced children missed significant parts of their culture. For example, in The Shape Shifter, Leaphorn does not know some particular legends because those stories can only be told during the winter, when he was away at boarding school. Leaphorn does, however, know the summer stories. Leaphorn majored in anthropology at Arizona State University for his undergraduate, so he has a logical, intellectualized view of even those legends that he heard in the hogan as a child.

Jim Chee is from the next generation who attended day school on the reservations but was raised by parents who went to boarding schools and grandparents who were traditionalists, thus ensuring these children were in the center of generational and cultural conflict. Chee, like many people of his generation, rebelled against their acclimated parents by becoming more interested in the old ways. Chee is studying to become shaman and conduct sings (ceremonies) to return people to harmony with nature and society. Among these sings is the Enemy Way (also the title of one of Hillerman’s novels,) where a person who has had contact with people who are evil or otherwise not in harmony, such as in war or prison, returns to harmony with the People.

For more books like Tony Hillerman’s books, try reading this article about several other Western novels.

For more novel series, try this article about a series to read while waiting for Harry Potter 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

For more books with fascinating characters, try these books like American Psycho.

For more information on getting ideas for writing your own books, try this blog post or read my blog at Kunati Books.

For more books about the other kind of Indians (or at least their food,) check out this article.

For more highly plotted mystery-thriller books like The Da Vinci Code, try these books.

Thanks for reading,

TK Kenyon, Author of Rabid: A Novel, which is about neither cowboys nor Indians, but will be published by Kunati Books in April, 2007.