The Dark Wind

Jim Chee, as a Navajo Tribal Policeman, often exists between the two worlds of Anglo American stereotypes and bureaucracy and his own Navajo culture. In his senior year at the University of New Mexico he learned not to be upset by the all encompassing generalizations of the white man in terms of his own culture when he or his culture was labeled as "Indian". The same generalizations are, of course, used when the Hopis refer to the Navajos, and as it has been pointed out to him, he himself cannot distinguish between the different European nationalities.

Jim Chee uses his native Navajo culture to properly focus his thinking on the pattern of the evidence he has to unravel to solve the puzzling case in which he becomes embroiled. As his uncle Hosteen Nakai told him, he has to think in "sunwise" fashion and not in the...