My dad, as the son of a good Frenchwoman, was obsessed with detective novels so I grew up with the Leaphorn series. It was one of the ways in which I bonded with the attorneys I worked under when I spent a summer on the Rez.
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I went to a native American boarding school for junior high
aug 29, 2025, 3:54 am • 2 0 • view
Whereabouts?
aug 29, 2025, 2:47 pm • 0 0 • view
It was always fun to take drives on the Rez, pass random towns, and think of the (fictional) murders that happened there.
aug 29, 2025, 3:44 am • 4 0 • view
Dark Winds, the tv adaptation is fairly good, but is also a key example of how the Navajo are completely boxed out of a lot of elite Native American circles and institutions.
aug 29, 2025, 3:46 am • 5 0 • view
Why is that
aug 29, 2025, 3:54 am • 0 0 • view
You could probably write multiple PhD theses on that. IMO it boils down to the fact that the Navajo are really the only true rez in the sense of a very large community geographically isolated from almost the entirety of the rest of the US who are extremely distinct.
aug 29, 2025, 3:55 am • 7 0 • view
The rez was only fully electrified in the 1990s and it was extremely common for clients of the legal service group who were 50 or 60+ (this is in 2016) to need a translator to speak with staff who didn't speak Navajo.
aug 29, 2025, 3:57 am • 6 0 • view
The isolation means that the Navajo weren't assimilated into major US political and cultural networks as they were being set up, unlike the Oklahoma tribes who already had a vice president in the 1920s. Given that BIA is a patronage knife fight, this meant that they were frozen out latecomers.
aug 29, 2025, 3:58 am • 4 0 • view
What cements this is that everyone knows that the Navajo are by a massive margin the biggest rez (though the Washington tribes are no joke here if considered together) and also the most politically coherent, due to the lack of assimilation. So there's a lot of incentive to keep them frozen out.
aug 29, 2025, 4:01 am • 4 0 • view
It also certainly doesn't help that the Navajo have very low educational attainment and there's a lot of internal cultural pressure on people not to stray too far for the rez, which really hamstrings any chances for people to grow.
aug 29, 2025, 4:04 am • 4 0 • view
Remember any of those towns names? I grew up in the 4 corners, NM quadrant.
aug 29, 2025, 2:48 pm • 0 0 • view