Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)

A scientist whose work it is to understand the history of our planet. Geology is the study of the Earth, what it's made of, how it came to be made out of those materials, and the processes that have acted, and continue to act, upon those materials, including natural and human-caused disasters at the local and global scales.

A genius is an individual of exceptional talent in some, or perhaps many, areas such as music, film, mathematics, architecture, or even the culinary arts. Although geniuses are considered "gifted," with great precocity and ability can come often but not always a certain amount social awkwardness, resulting in a tendency to associate genius with introversion, antipathy, or antisociability.

Animals hunted for food or sport by other animals, including humans.

A word that may have appeared at the turn of the twentieth century as a term of contempt for police, based on derogatory criminal slang from the period. To be "fuzzy" was to be unmanly, incompetent, and soft. Therefore, to call the police "the fuzz" was to insult their manhood.

An animal's guts, or innards, especially its intestines.

A general, if antiquated, reference to the early progenitors of bipedal evolution.

The temporary state of a person's physical and mental functions being impaired by the over-consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The history of alcohol use by Native Americans is a long and tortured one. Alcohol was introduced to many North American tribes by European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first as an item of trade and later as a substance that was intended to deliberately interfere with the groups’ traditional way of life. Alcohol has been and continues to be extensively "abused" by Native Americans on and off reservations, and the reasons for this abuse are many, and include problems of social, political, and financial nature. None of these reasons, however, can nor should be linked to a supposed indigenous or cultural predilection toward drunkenness. Instead, the effects of poverty, isolation, and lack of educational and other resources are the stimuli that engender alcohol abuse in Native American populations.

In his Navajo detective novels, Tony Hillerman notes both the beauty and the darkness he saw in the Southwest. Substance abuse, physical violence, greed, and crime were examples of the darkness he found; expressions of individual and cultural imbalances whose root causes he depicts as originating in modern U.S. society, rather than as organic to Native communities.

Removing the blood and internal organs of an animal in order to best preserve its meat until it can be further processed.

An anachronisitic reference to an individual who uses mind-altering substances recreationally.

"Dope" itself is slang for marijuana, so a doper often, but not exclusively, refers to one who smokes marijuana on a regular basis. Depending upon the context, dope can also refer to heroin. Finally, in more contemporary usage, if something is "dope," then it is good, cool, awesome.

An often strict, conservative set of rules, beliefs, or even cultural practices that are intended to be disseminated and accepted as truth. In many cases, a sense of ethics, or moral and philosphical weight, inheres within dogmatic practices and their associated core beliefs, often functioning as structural ideologies.