Listening Woman (1978)

A pleasant smelling small shrub with hairy branches and groups of yellow flowers found across the American Great Basin. It provides nesting and cover to small birds and jackrabbits. The Navajo make yellow dye from the flowers.

When rabbit and coyote are mentioned together, Tony Hillerman is most likely referring to a Navajo reference in which Coyote chases Rabbit, yet Rabbit gets the best of him.

In Navajo mythology, Coyote is a trickster or troublemaker. He is often referred to as First Angry or First Scolder and is said to have brought witchcraft into the world. He appears in many stories both as a trickster who cannot be trusted and as a sexual being who tricks others in order to get his way. He is a main character of the Navajo creation story.

In this particular tale, Coyote finds Rabbit and begins to chase him, but Rabbit hides in a hole in the ground. Coyote threatens to smoke Rabbit out using weeds. Rabbit replies, saying that he will eat the weeds before Coyote lights them on fire. Coyote says he will use pinyon pine, which is know for being a pitchy wood that burns hot and produces a lot of smoke. Using pinyon pine instead of weeds to smoke out Rabbit will kill him, showing the darker side of Coyote's trickster nature. But as Coyote puts his plan in motion, drawing closer to his smoldering pile of pinyon to blow on it and make it bigger, Rabbit kicks him in the face, escaping with laughter. Coyote lives to tell the tale, but his singed coat reminds us of how Rabbit got away.

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.

Jars, bowls, and other containers shaped out of ceramic material, such as earthenware (or clay), stoneware, and porcelain, which are subsequently fired, or super-heated. Subjecting pottery to heat initiates chemical changes in its ceramic material, including the removal of all water from the clay, which facilitates the hardening and strengthening of the earthenware form.

Historically, the Southwest is known for its centuries of pottery production, specifically earthenware forms finished with complex abstract animal figures and geometric symbols.

The Potawatomi tribe is a Native American group that originally resided in southwest Michigan and whose language is in the Algonquin family. The tribe worked under a democratic clan chief system, with each village having its own leader. After the fall harvest, the tribe broke up into smaller winter hunting groups, meeting up again in the summer in larger groups, which included the Anishanaabe and Ottawa tribes, near lakes and rivers.

In the mid 1600s, the Potawatomi were driven out of their traditional lands by other Native American groups, relocating to upper Michigan near what is now Canada to occupy a single village. They were allies with the French through the 18th century and fought the British in Pontiac's Rebellion. They also participated in the Revolutionary War on the side of the British, Little Turtle's War, and the Black Hawk War of 1832. They were later moved to a reservation in Kansas but continued to fight for traditional land and recognition on the 20th century.

Unless stated otherwise, Hillerman's use of "pollen" refers to yellow corn pollen (or tádídíín in Navajo), which is a sweet tasting, yellow-colored powder that is collected from the tassels of mature corn plants. Because corn, or maize, has traditionally been a life-giving staple of indigenous groups throughout the Americas, the pollen, which is necessary for corn's own survival via pollination, has attained a sacred, life-giving status of its own. Often kept in small leather pouches, corn pollen is used in ceremonies as a blessing and offered in prayer.

An elevated, fairly level expanse of land raised sharply above adjacent land.

This regional classification is used to describe the variety of distinct Native American tribes who traditionally called the Great Plains and prairie regions of North America home. Although each tribe has its own specific culture and traditions, some common characteristics have been used to refer to them as a large group, including the dependence on bison for clothing, food, and other articles necessary for their level of basic subsistence and the nomadic lifestyle that came with following the bison herds. Because of this, many bands and tribes had to carry and build portable shelters like the tepee, although this housing was not used by all tribes.

Some of the tribes included in this classification are the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Cree, Crow, and Kiowa.