The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (1972)

Navajo weavers are considered masters in the art of weaving, the art and craft of twining fibers together to create a variety of textiles.

In the early 1600s, the Navajo learned weaving from their Pueblo neighbors in what is now the Southwestern U.S.. It was men who mastered first mastered this skill, although women eventually absorbed the task. Weavers in the U.S. Southwest used wooden looms, sheep's wool, and natural dyes to make hand-woven blankets that were used in everyday life as cloaks, covers, and saddle blankets, among other items. Throughout the 1700s, Navajo textiles became a major commodity in trading with the region's other indigenous groups, as well as the Spanish and Europeans. Over time, weaving techniques improved, patterns became more elaborate, and Navajo textiles came to be desired for their aesthetic value. As the market developed, blankets became interchangeable as rugs and were valued as decorative, rather than utilitarian, pieces. Today hand-woven Navajo rugs are highly prized and are often purchased by wealthy collectors to be hung on the wall rather than used as the daily objects they originally were.

Buttes are similar to mesas in that they are flat-topped hills with steep sides, although they are much smaller than mesas, and tend to stand out as isolated landscape features. The Zuni Buttes are a group of such rock formations located in the northwestern corner of the Zuni Pueblo Reservation in western New Mexico.

In traditional Native American cultures, "religion" is an alien concept. Rather than religion, these traditional societies acknowledge, respect, and participate in what can be understood as a reciprocal relationship between the individual and other individuals, the community, nature and natural phenomenon, and sacred beings. This reciprocity has attained the level of ceremony and spiritual tradition over centuries of observance. It has also been augmented, and sometimes replaced, by the imposition of Christianity, especially, although not exclusively, Catholicism.

When Tony Hillerman writes "Zuni religion," for example, he is referring to the traditional Zuni way, one that predates Christianity or European influence.

An individual who is authorized to perform as a mediator between the people and a transcendent power. The priest's authority enables him or her to perform in both a spiritual and administrative capacity within his belief system's influence and jurisdiction.

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.

Prayer plumes are feathers that are attached to prayer sticks for a variety of rituals, ceremonies, and devotions specific to a number of pueblo and Southwestern tribes, including the Zuni and Hopi. These feathers are usually fastened with cotton string to a short stick, ranging between 6- and 12-inches in length, that is also painted with very specific patterns and colors depending upon the ritual or prayer being performed. The prayer sticks, decorated with their prayer plumes, can be placed to mark a sacred site, or are left as offerings and signs of appeasement. Sometimes, the term "prayer plume" is used interchangeably with the term "prayer stick" and its Hopi translation, "paho."

Belonging to the squirrel family of rodents, the prairie dog is a very social burrowing rodent who lives in colonies, called towns, that can include up to several hundred individuals. Communication occurs quickly throughout the town, as prairie dogs communicate via a range of physical contact, vocalization, and drumming patterns they beat into the earth's surface with their paws. The prairie dog language is believed to be the most advanced form of natural animal language.

Prairie dog numbers have declined drastically due to shootings, plague cycles, and poisoning.

An architectural feature found in the built environments of many cultures around the world, plazas are open spaces for public functions around which structures form an almost amphitheater-like setting. In Native American traditions in the U.S. Southwest, plazas are created by the terraced clustering of a pueblo community around usually one of several open spaces significant to the community. The early Spanish explorers in the region believed that they recognized in these open spaces the plazas of their own secular and religious built environments, and therefore called them plazas, which is the term still in use today. Puebloan plazas have social, secular, and spiritual functions, and are oriented in space to accommodate seasonal and diurnal solar patterns, as well as the ceremonial needs of a linked system of spiritual fraternities. Plazas are often associated with prominent kiva societies and ceremonies; because of this, the Catholic church appropriated Puebloan plazas as locations upon which to site their mission compounds as they evangelized the northern perimeters of New Spain in the Americas during the sixteenth, seventeenth , and eighteenth centuries. Over time, Puebloan plazas came to accommodate both indigenous and Catholic practices, revealing the syncretic use of space still in practice today in many Pueblo communities.

A large blue-grey song bird similar to a crow, the piñon jay is found in the Western Great Basin of North American, including the U.S. Southwest, especially in foothills and lower mountain slopes where the Pinyon-Juniper forest type is found. These jays harvest piñon pine seeds, storing them against the winter months.