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Disney is dubbing Pixar's "Finding Nemo" into the Navajo language.

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By Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green After World War II, economic development was at the top of the agendas of virtually every reservation. Unemployment was almost universal, family incomes were virtually nil, and the tribes had no income beyond government appropriations to the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. Some reservations did have natural resources. Some tribes own important timber reserves, but mineral resources attracted most postwar attention. Thirty percent of the low-sulfur coal west of the Mississippi is on Indian land, as is 5 to 10 percent of the oil and gas and some 50 to 80 percent of the uranium. Congress enacted legislation in 1918 and again in 1938 to authorize the secretary of the interior to negotiate leases to develop tribal mineral resources.

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One of the many distinctive cultural, iconic homes of our Native American people.

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By Rosemary Herbert

Canonize or confine to the dustbin of literary history? How do the editors decide?

Well may readers wonder how scholars decide which story/author to canonize and which to confine to the dustbin of literary history. This was an issue I dealt with in several books for Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, for which I served as editor in chief, and the anthologies that I edited with the late Tony Hillerman, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime. With the Companion, I had the privilege of drawing on the expertise of sixteen advisory editors. But final judgment on which stories to include in our two anthologies fell to just Tony and me. Fortunately, in Tony, I had a great resource and support in making decisions that we both took quite seriously, even while we indulged in some good laughs along the way.

Tony Hillerman is well known to readers as the author of numerous novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Navajo Tribal Policemen who solved crimes at the cultural crossroads of the American Southwest. He won numerous awards for his fiction. But while his skills as an editor are less recognized, they deserve to be celebrated, too. Take it from one who edited two anthologies with him: Tony Hillerman knew his genre. He also possessed a wonderful playfulness and sense of humor.

Both of the anthologies that Tony and I edited were designed to represent developments in the literary history of crime writing. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, our goal was to illustrate the rise of detective fiction in the United States from earliest times to the close of the twentieth century. In our next book, A New Omnibus of Crime, our mission was to bring together stories representing seventy-five years of genre innovations that have occurred since Sayers published her landmark anthology, The Omnibus of Crime.

We knew it was a tall order to follow in Sayers’ footsteps, so we decided to tread carefully. We pulled together reams of short stories and, over a period of months, we pored over them earnestly in our own homes.

We were looking for stories that took steps forward from the fiction of Sayers’ day. We wanted to demonstrate how mystery writers over the last three quarters of a century allowed the love element — which had been largely shunned in Sayers’ time as a distraction from the mystery plot — to enter and enrich their stories. We sought to showcase the growth of the regional crime story by selecting some distinctly regional writings. We decided to show how some contemporary crime writers dare to leave the stain of crime on the scene instead of tidying up as thoroughly as did Sayers’ contemporaries. And of course we wanted to make sure a variety of sleuths and crime types would be found in A New Omnibus of Crime. We found stories that feature private eyes and policeman, nosey neighbors and accidental sleuths, murder in the mean streets and plots cooked up over Christmas pudding. We were just as ready to be original in our choices as we were to carefully consider stories that already stood tall in the landscape of crime and mystery writing.

Finally, we got together in Tony’s home just outside of Al

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Like most authors, when Rosemary Herbert speaks at book events about the mystery fiction anthologies she edited with Tony Hillerman, A New Omnibus of Crime and The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and about her own new first novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery, she always makes sure that she allows plenty of opportunity to for people to ask her questions. Lots of times authors become tired of the questions they are most frequently asked, but that it not true for Herbert, especially when the question is, “What was it like to work with Tony Hillerman?” Today – the second anniversary of Hillerman’s death – she reflects on this question.

I just love it when people ask me what it was like to work with Tony Hillerman. That’s because I never tire of remembering and sharing moments spent in his company.  I always begin my answer to this question by keeping my promise to Tony. As he was reaching the end of his life, he told me two things. One was that he trusted me to make any future decisions about our two books. The other was that I should always remember to thank people who gather anywhere to hear me talk about our books. No matter how famous he became, Tony always appreciated each and every person who took an interest in his work. Hence, on behalf of Tony – and for my part, too – I thank readers of this piece for their interest in what I have to say here.

Two things leap to mind when I recall working with Tony Hillerman. The first is an image of this large, fatherly man standing in the doorway of his home near Albuquerque, New Mexico, greeting me warmly when I first arrived there to interview him for my 1994 book, The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. During an extended interview, Tony revealed much about his modest boyhood beginnings – and about his warm sense of humor – as he told me about the unusual manner in which he discovered the work of a writer who would exert a profound influence on his own work:

“Well, in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there was no library,” Tony told me. “The only way to get books was to order them from the mimeographed catalog of the state library. I’ve often said this was a guaranteed way to get a broad education. You would order all kinds of adventure stories, like Captain Blood and the Tom Swift stories, and Treasure Island. And then, weeks later, a package would arrive, and in it you would find exciting material like History of the Masonic Order in Oklahoma! But on rare occasions you would get something about the Foreign Legion or a novel about a half-breed, Australian aborigine policeman who solved crimes in the Outback. That was my introduction to Arthur Upfield.”

Just as Upfield’s sleuth, the half-aboriginal Detective Inspector Napolean Bonaparte is torn between the different worlds represented by his parentage — and uses his knowledge of both to advantage in solving crimes – Tony’s Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee solve mysteries by understanding the uneasy intersection of contemporary Am

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We are delighted to welcome author and educator Nancy Bo Flood as a guest on the PaperTigers Blog. Nancy has lived and worked in several different cultures, including Japan, Hawaii, Malawi, Samoa and Saipan of Micronesia, the setting for her most recent book, Warriors in the Crossfire. We will be reviewing it soon; in the meantime, do read Julie Larios’ interview with Nancy, in which she talks about the book’s background.

Nancy now lives on the Navajo Nation Reservation, in northern Arizona, where she teaches and promotes literacy. In this, the first of two Guest Posts, she highlights some of the projects working to bring books to Navajo children and young people:

It was my first class teaching for Diné College in Tuba City, Arizona. I asked students to buy a dictionary and bring it to class. Our campus building had no library, no dictionaries.

The next week I drove through a sandstorm to get to class; my students had done the same after watering livestock and getting their children to school. Not one student brought a dictionary. Why not? It turns out the nearest bookstore was two hours away. That meant a lot of driving time, a lot of money for gas. This was the beginning of my education about the need for books and libraries across the Navajo Nation.

Here are some resources I have found:

Tuba City Outreach Library

The Navajo Nation extends into Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah. It is about as big as New England (without Maine) but has only one official public library. Almost no bookstores exist. On the western side of the Reservation the small Tuba City Outreach Library is sponsored by Coconino County / Flagstaff. For the past 10 years I have worked with the librarian, Trish Polacca, to develop the children’s and teen sections.

We’ve worked hard to get books through donations, private foundations, my graduation class’s community service and through a used book store in Flagstaff. Finding “appropriate books” is another challenge. Picture books with contemporary, non-stereotyped images of children who are Native American are hard to find, new or used.

International Reading Association (IRA) and Arizona Reading Association (ARA)

In 2009 I worked with ARA to collect left-over books from vendors at the annual IRA convention in Phoenix. These books were distributed to local literacy organizations and school libraries. There is a full description of this project in the Spring-Summer issue of Arizona Reading Journal, Vol XXXV, 2009. Next time, we will ask attendees to bring books to donate – or buy books at the conference to donate.

Reach Out and Read (ROR), American Indian and Alaskan Native

This national organization was begun over 20 years ago and has grown into a nationwide project giving free new books and literacy guidance to children at their regular pediatric check-ups. As a board member of the Arizona coalition, we have worked to bring books to health clinics throughout Arizona, including the Navajo and Hopi Nations.

A new coalition was formed in 2007 to focus on children who receive health care at Indian Health Service Clinics, or tribal or urban Indian Health Centers.

Save the Children

Supports program

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In case you hadn't noticed, I'm completely obsessed with spinning right now. It's a shame because I'm already a jack-of-all-trades and I really didn't need yet another craft to keep me busy. But there you go, it's something I can't help.

Anyway, here's something I've just learned. Navajo plying on a spindle! Before I finished the candy cane yarn I posted recently, I had finished spinning a single from the first batch of roving that I dyed with red, pink and green.

After reading a comment on my blog about Navajo plying, I looked it up and tried to discover if I could do this on my spindle. Thanks for the suggestion Rachel! I thought this would be a good solution for this yarn because I had spun it so fine that it would have been difficult to wind it in an Andean bracelet and it would have gotten really tangled. (I've learned I could wind it onto a nostepinne, but I don't have one yet.)
So here's what I've learned about Navajo plying on a spindle (with a reminder that I'm hardly an expert at this point):

What is Navajo plying?
Navajo plying is essentially the same as creating a crochet chain, but with long loops. As you pull the loop through, the two strands it creates combine with the original single strand and you spin all 3 to ply them together.

Why bother?
The benefits are that in the end you have a 3-ply yarn that maintains the colour sequence in your single. Also, as with Andean plying, you use every bit of your yarn and don't have to try to divvy up yarn into equally sized balls to ply together.

How do you learn how to do this?
I figured out Navajo plying after watching this video and this one (and a few others) a few times. Then I had to think about exactly how I would do it on my spindle.

My big confusion was about what happens to the "knot" in the chain. The answer is that it is there, but it can hide a bit behind the twist. This is one reason though, why you might want to make longer loops. Longer loops = fewer "knots". However, the length of the loops also affects the way the colours blend together.

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