Cultural Reference

In military or paramilitary organizations, such as police departments, a hierarchical organization of personnel exists, often called the chain of command.

The general rankings within a police force, depending on its size, is as follows, in order from highest to lowest rankings:

• Chief
• Deputy/Assistant Chief
• Commander
• Inspector
• Captain
• Lieutenant
• Sergeant
• Trooper
• Police Officer

A term that means deadly. Literally. If something is lethal, it will kill you. If some one has a lethal intention, his or her intention is to kill.

Also known as "island hopping," leapfrogging as a strategy occurs when two or more units support each other as they advance or retreat. While one unit changes location, the other unit(s) provide cover. Once the first unit is in place, the second unit can advance (or retreat) under the protective cover provided by the other unit(s).

Tony Hillerman’s use of “Division of Law and Order” as part of the Navajo Nation's tribal authority is an intentional “mistake,” as there is no Division of Law and Order under the Navajo Tribal Council. Rather, the Navajo Nation maintains the Division of Public Safety, under which are several branches, including the Navajo Police Department. In addition, Hillerman makes a distinction between local Law and Order, which occurs at the tribal and agency level, and federal Law and Order, which occurs at the bureau level and emanates from Washington, D.C.

Law and order, as understood from a Western perspective, was established among the Navajo by an 1849 Treaty between the United States and the Navajo. In exchange for Navajo recognition of U.S. authority, access to and passage through Navajo lands, and the establishment on Navajo lands of U.S. military posts, the U.S. would provide "gifts" to the Navajo. Later, from the time the U.S. acquired the territory of New Mexico from Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), "law enforcement" among the Navajo was handled primarily by the U.S. military or by the Federal Government’s Branch of Law and Order. This included the forced relocation of the Navajo from their tribal lands during the Long Walk and internment at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Today, the Navajo Police Department is a law enforcement agency on the Navajo Nation Reservation, originally established in 1872, four years after the Navajo were released from captivity in Fort Sumner. Despite it's initial success, the Navajo Tribal Police was dissolved in 1975. The Navajo Nation Police were not reestablished until 1959 when the Navajo Tribal Council requested its reinstatement.

A general reference to the societal construction of and belief in "the law" as a body of order, surveillance, and discipline. The "law" can also be practiced by lawyers and advocates as well as enacted by public servants, such as police officers. Hillerman's relationship with "the law," at least in his novels, is ambiguous. At times, the law, as dictated by a society, serves to extract civil order from uncivil chaos. On the other hand, cultural traditions, such as those he observed on the Navajo and other reservations, seem to express a natural law, one that perhaps informs but that also transcends jurisprudence, for example the Navajo idea of hózhǫ́, an expression of natural equilibrium. The protagonists in Hillerman's Navajo detective novels, Leaphorn and Chee, are often placed in situations where they understand the written laws, but remain aware of the limitations and contradictions of the written law as it is practiced.

Land of the People, also known as Dinétah, refers to the ancestral and traditional homeland of the Navajo. Dinétah extends beyond the political boundaries of the Navajo Reservation to include traditional cultural properties that have been part of Navajo lifeways and cosmology for centuries. Four mountains, or sacred peaks, anchor Dinétah and its people: Mount Blanca (Tsisnaasjini'), Dawn or White Shell Mountain, the sacred mountain of the East, near Alamosa, Colorado; Mount Taylor (Tsoodzil), Blue Bead or Turquoise Mountain, the sacred mountain of the South, near Grants, New Mexico; the San Francisco Peaks (Doko'oosliid), Abalone Shell Mountain, the sacred mountain of the West, near Flagstaff, Arizona; and Mount Hesperus (Dibé Nitsaa) Big Mountain Sheep or Obsidian Mountain, the sacred mountain of the North, in the La Plata Mountains of Colorado.

Mutton, or lamb, stew is a traditional and beloved component of the Navajo diet. Mutton stew consists of mutton simmered in a simple broth that may contain a variety of vegetables, especially green chile, squash, and hominy, and is often accompanied by fry bread, a form of unleavened bread that became a staple of the Navajo diet during their forced Long Walk and internment at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s. Sheep were introduced into the Americas by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, along with horses and cattle. During this time, the Navajo traded and raided for sheep from the Spanish. Sheep became a major part of their economy as well as their diet.

According to the Zuni migration story, as the Zuni migrated in search of the Middle Place, conceptually understood to be the center of the world and what today is known as Halona:Itiwana, or the Zuni Pueblo, the people split into several groups. One group followed the Little Colorado River south, and near to where it joins the Zuni River running west out of what today is New Mexico, they found the Lake of the Dead, or in Zuni Koluwala:wa. Underneath its waters lay a village where the Zuni kachina, or ancestor spirits, live. The Zuni believe that after they die, they return to the lake to join their ancestors.

Kothluwalawa is also referred to as the Dance Hall of the Dead.

The Laguna people of central New Mexico consist of a pueblo group that occupies six major villages, of which the political center is Old Laguna (Kawaika) on a knoll above the San Jose River about 42 miles west of Albuquerque on U.S. Route 66/Interstate-40. Both the Spanish word "laguna" and the Keresan word "Kawaika" mean "lake." Living in modular, terraced pueblo communities similar to other regional descendants of the Ancestral Mogollon Puebloans, the Laguna understand that all things in nature are sacred and connected and that relationships between natural elements are both reciprocal as well as cyclical.

Notable members of the Laguna include photographer Lee Marmon, his daughter the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, and political activist Paula Gunn Allen. Allen is considered the foremother of Native literature.

Clown figures that appear alongside kachina during Zuni and Hopi ceremonial processions and dances. With grotesque features formed from misshapen and irregular lumps of clay, koyemshi appear uncanny and unformed, familiar yet disturbingly alien. Part of their purpose is to maintain order during ceremonial occassions, and to do so they employ ribald humour and an organic, mocking slapstick that underscores the sacredness and moral seriousness of the ceremony at hand by countering it with sly parody and comedic anarchy.