Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)

Most likely a reference to peyote, a small, spineless cactus that contains, among other compounds, mescaline, a psychoactive alkaloid that can alter one's perception and induce hallucinations. Peyote has been significant in many Native American medicinal and spiritual practices. It is still taken as a ritual sacrament by followers of the Native American Church ceremonies.

Although it can be found and harvested as far north as the Chihuahuan desert, in southern Texas and northern Mexico, it is unlikely that individuals would be able to find peyote as far north and west as the Zuni reservation in New Mexico and Arizona.

Aware.

The role a priest plays during a Catholic confession. In this function, the priest witnesses a supplicant's oral and physical expression of his or her desire to "return" to the Christian God after straying from the path of righteousness. The self-professed sinner acknowledges his or her sins by revealing them, in a private audience, to the priest, who has the power to authorize forgivenss on God's behalf, especially when accompanied by some sort of performative act of contrition. Ultimately, the supplicant receives absolution from the priest.

Similar to the rights of privacy that exist between a doctor and his or her patients, a priest is also under obligation to preserve and respect the privacy of the members of his congregation, meaning that what is said to the priest stays with the priest.

The small enclosure within which a priest hears a Catholic supplicant's confession.

A reference to a person's face. Sometimes the word specifically draws attention to skin color (dark, sun-burned, fair), sometime it refers to skin condition (smooth, leathery, weather-beaten), and sometimes it refers to a person's attitude, mood, or overall character (cheerful, obdurate, temperamental), which can often be read in a person's facial expression.

A commune is a group of people living together and sharing common interests, values, and endeavors, including property, possessions, and resources. In the 1960s and 1970s, communes were part of an international, post-industrial movement that worked toward realizing the utopian vision of non-violent, egalitarian societies. In Western Europe and North America, communes were and still are associated with "hippies," back to the land movements, and various expressions of alternative lifestyles and subcultures.

One of the most significant words in the Joe Leaphorn/Tony Hillerman lexicon.

The term refers to apparently random, often serendipitous, set of occurrences that are seemingly unrelated but that are aligned in a mix of happy accident and/or corresponding incidents. Sometimes coincidence is likened to "fate" or "fortune," events that come into being through forces that are beyond human control.

Joe Leaphorn, a savvy, experienced, and pragmatic lieutenant, does not believe in coincidence. Things happen for a reason, or come into alignment for a reason, and it's up to the perceptive investigator to recognize covert machinations that seem belied by overt, if allegedly random, connections.

A cigarette, often spelled cigaret in Tony Hillerman's mystery novels, is a small amount of finely cut dried tobacco rolled in small squares of thin paper into a torpedo-shaped tube for smoking.

Quite often, characters in Hillerman's novels smoke together or offer cigarettes to one another. The exchange and shared experience of smoking cigarettes, which is a common cultural phenomenon, is in some ways evocative of indigenous ceremonial practices of exchanging pipes, breath, and words. Not to over-simplify the effects of smoking cigarettes, especially those produced by large companies, Hillerman warns his readers through one of his main protagonists, Joe Leaphorn, that smoking is "never good. It hurts the lungs. But sometimes it is necessary, and therefore one does it" (Dance Hall of the Dead 13).

The waste product of stone work that involves chipping away at a core of hard rock. People in cultural groups around the world have developed stone-working techniques to produce tools such as sharp-edged knives, arrowheads, lance points, and bifaces (two-faced stone blades). To produce such tools, the core is held in one hand while the other hand holds a hammerstone (either another stone or an antler tine). The hammerstone is struck against the core at a specific angle in order to gradually break off chips of stone in the process of creating the desired shape of the tool. A chip, also known as a flake, is a small, long, and often thin piece of stone detached from the larger core of rock. The chipping process requires skill, experience, precision, and exact knowledge of the force and angle of the blow required to properly detach a chip. In this manner, stone tools can be produced from cores, often resulting in a large number of chips as waste products. In archaeological sites, chips can be classified by morphology (shape) and provide insights into what tools were produced.

In addition, chips can either be discarded as waste or used as tools themselves. For instance, chips with sharp edges can be used as cutting tools. In the American Southwest, chips were often used as blanks for arrowhead production.

Also spelled chʼįį́dii in Navajo, a “chindi” is the spirit of a dead person. Navajos are taught to avoid contact with the dead or enclosed places, like a hogan, where someone has passed to avoid coming into contact with chindi and contracting ghost sickness. Navajos believe that when a person dies, everything that is bad or out of harmony with the person will be left behind as a kind of malevolent spirit that has power to harm the living. For this reason, any hogan or structure inside which a person has died potentially contains chindi and must be abandoned. If a Navajo contracts ghost sickness by coming into contact with a site to which a chindi is still attached, the proper ceremonies must be performed in order to restore balance to the living.