The Late Arrival of the Native American Detective

WORLDLIT.ORG 27 photo : baeu rogers T he indignities and brutalities suffered by ethnic and racial groups at the hands of others are legion on the unhappiest pages of human history. Not the least of these insults is, of course, stereotyping or exaggerating ethnic traits with the intended or unintended result of reducing the complexities of a culture to an entertaining caricature. At the most basic level, we all shape reality, and storytellers adapt their experience of the people around them, kneading characteristics one way or another like a sculptor working clay. In the process, an artist’s or writer’s intentions are more often than not marred by poor execution, simple misunderstanding , or a malicious wrongheadedness . Nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who attempted to capture authentic folkways may have with sympathy and accuracy recorded the language of slaves, immigrants, and Native Americans, yet it did not take long for those stylings to become a means to dehumanize their subjects and ultimately to justify mistreatment . Individual character traits are generalized to a race or generalizations become lazy authors’ choices for character traits. The basic pattern of the mystery story as popularized by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle is amiably predictable —crime, investigation, revelation. So how were authors to make their stories distinctive ? One of the solutions was novelty detectives. Chan is Hawaiian Chinese. Mr. Moto is Japanese. Father Brown is a priest. Sid Halley has lost his hand. Longstreet is blind. Others, like Sherlock Holmes, are larded with peculiar habits. Adrian Monk is obsessive-compulsive. Nero Wolfe never leaves his brownstone. Similar variations happened on television in the 1950s and 1960s, when westerns filled the airwaves with repetitive plots. Josh Randall carried a sawed-off rifle, Wyatt Earp his Buntline Special, Bat Masterson his derby and cane, Lucas McCain his fast-firing rifle, and Johnny Yuma wore a kepi. Ultimately, with Law of the Plainsman (1959–60), NBC gave us Native American sheriff Sam Buckhart, played by Michael Ansara, an actor born in Syria. One can easily imagine the production meeting: “Have I got a wild one, guys! An Indian sheriff!” The commonness of this sort of badfaith story cobbling is why it is surprising to me that the Native American detective seems to be a rather late invention in the mystery and really only becomes a distinctive item on bookstore shelves after Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way (1970) and Dance Hall of the Dead (1973), a multiple award winner. Exactly how unusual Native American mysteries were at that point can be gathered from what Hillerman often recounted: a publisher advised him that his crime & mystery THELATEARRIVALOFTHE NATIVEAMERICANDETECTIVE by J. Madison Davis 28 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 crime &mystery the late arrival of the native american detective mystery was good but that he needed to get rid of all that Indian stuff. Hillerman learned the craft and ethics of writing in the newspaper business, and he drew his fiction from his familiarity with Native American culture. As I reported in my 2008 article in World Literature Today, Hillerman had been a day student in a school for Native American girls in Oklahoma. For him, Native Americans were not exotic. After becoming a highly decorated combat veteran in World War II, he settled in New Mexico and became familiar with the cultures of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and other southwestern tribes. Hillerman was influenced by the novels of Arthur W. Upfield, an Australian who created a series of twenty-nine mysteries (from the late 1920s until his death in 1964) with a “half-caste” aboriginal detective, Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte. When he created Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, he wanted them to solve cases as Bony did, based on their knowledge of the people and their land. Different tribes are often as different in nature as different nationalities, and privy to the private jokes and sacred beliefs of Native peoples, Hillerman knew about these differences and wanted them to be important in his stories. Hillerman sincerely cared about accurately representing his characters. Instead of novelty detectives or “cigar store Indians,” they became convincing representations of real people within their culture. Popular success predictably breeds

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