The Blessing Way (1970)

A breed of sheep, originally from Spain, with fine crimped wool that is often used to make light sweaters. Merino sheep are medium sized sheep with very wooly faces. They thrive in semiarid environments, including the Southwestern United States.

The Prostitution Way is a Navajo ceremonial that protects people against frenzy witchcraft, which is a form of witchcraft believed to cause people to lose their minds. Women and children are not supposed to listen to or talk about this ceremonial, unless they have previously been cured by the Prostitution Way or the Mountain Smoke portion of the Blessingway ceremonial. The Prostitution Way lasts five nights and includes the use of datura, which has been gathered by the ceremonial healer, known as a singer, or hatáli in Navajo. The Prostitution Way ceremonial also involves the use of prayer sticks and sandpaintings and often ends with the Blessingway ceremony.

The indigenous peoples of the U.S. Southwest each have some version of a rain dance ceremonial. This dance is meant to honor the relationship between the people and the kachinas (or spirit beings) responsible for rain. At many points throughout Tony Hillerman's Navajo detective series, various phrases will be used interchangeably to reference the blessings and prayers for rain, calling to mind the variety of beliefs that the people of the Southwest region have with regard to rain in their desert environments.

A device that emits electromagnetic waves. These waves can be used to transmit sound at different frequencies, and the sound is picked up by radios tuned to those frequencies. The radio transmitter was first created in 1887 by German physicist Heinrich Hertz and the first music signal transmitted via radio waves was in 1906 in Boston, Massachusetts. Radio transmitters are still in use today, especially in remote areas with limited telephone capabilities.

Radar, an acronym for "radio detection and ranging," was developed and in use by several nations as early as World War II. Radar is a system that detects objects and their movements through time and space by emitting pulses of radio waves. When these waves encounter an object, the waves' movement is disrupted, and readings of this disruption bounce back in the direction from which they were emitted, where their energy is read and analyzed to determine size and direction and speed of movement of the object encountered.

A long-eared mammal known for its prominent front teeth and powerful hindlegs, with which it hops and leaps rather than runs. The most common rabbits in the Southwest are desert cottontails and mountain cottontails. The mountain cottontail often is associated with thickets, sagebrush and cliffs, while the desert cottontail prefers open plains, foothills and low valleys of the arid Southwest.

Although jackrabbits are also common throughout the Southwest, they are not really rabbits. Instead they are considered hares and prefer semi-open, grassy plains and deserts as opposed to higher, rougher country.

A Native American building form found along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and west as far as the Hopi mesas in Arizona. Pueblos are clustered, modular structures traditionally built of adobe, although pueblo buildings in more arid areas, like Chaco Canyon, have been built of unfinished sandstone blocks. Pueblo architecture is a fundamental synthesis of spiritual, social, and material sustainability. The block-like rooms, constructed of local materials, are typically built around one or more communal spaces called plazas, and are often terraced in rising and receding stories that create an open-air amphitheater around the plaza below. Although the interior spaces of pueblo structures are functional, they serve more as storage space rather than living space, because most traditional activities occur in the plaza or on the terraced patios created by the stepped nature of pueblos' aggregated stories. Few windows or doors penetrate load-bearing walls, so ventilation and access occurs through the ceilings into the rooms below. Descending into the darkened and enclosed space of a pueblo interior from the ceiling above is an enactment of returning to the womb and sacred space of Mother Earth, while climbing up out of these spaces functions as a reenactment of the Pueblo peoples' birth, or emergence, into the current world from the underworld.

Although contact with Europeans over the past five centuries has altered superficial elements of the pueblo building style, including its romanticized appropriation in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style popularized by U.S. architects during the 1920s and '30s, pueblos retain much of the same functionality and significance today as they did to the Pueblo communities who lived in them prior to European contact. Several pueblos have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, which speaks to the resiliency of pueblo architecture as both a building form and as a social and spiritual practice.

The term Pueblo refers to a diverse range of Native Americans living in pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona. These groups share similar world views and historically have participated in intensive agriculture, growing corn, beans, chile, and squash, yet each group is distinct and autonomous from the others. Generally, the Pueblos are divided into two groups: Western Pueblos, who live in canyon and mesa country along the Colorada Plateau, and the Eastern Pueblos, who live along the Rio Grande, a river running north-south through almost the entire length of New Mexico. There are four distinct linguistic stocks in the Pueblo community, including Tanoan, Keresan, Uto-Aztecan, and Zuni, which is a language isolate. These differences suggest that these groups have different origins.

Associated with the treatment of a mental illness or disorder by talking to a mental health practitioner about feelings, dreams, and behavior patterns.

A ponderosa pine is a large coniferous evergreen tree, with long pine needles, that can grows over 70 feet in height. Ponderosa are found throughout the western United States and in Canada. The tree is easily identifiable by its bark, which is often yellow or red with large plates separated by crevices, making ponderosa bark look kind of like puzzle pieces. Ponderosa pines are generally found in mountainous regions, and in the U.S. Southwest, ponderosa can be found in open, park-like stands above 6,000 feet in elevation.