Lee Wrote:
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> Stephanie,
>
> I've been following this for a while and find it
> fascinating. I did a little looking elsewhere,
> and found this statement on a website by a guy who
> calls himself hunterbear and has worked and lived
> among the Navajo: "By Navajo traditional law,
> skinwalkers -- like the "master" witches -- are
> viewed as having consciously abandoned their
> status as human beings and should be killed . All
> of these are practitioners of extremely negative
> phenomena that no genuinely knowledgeable person
> ever discounts."

I think it is a little over simplifying of the matter. visitations aren't necessarily confined to any sort of "extremely negative phenomena". Yes, they will plant negative medicine bundles near a person's home with the absolute intention to do harm but they will also injure a person directly if they are their target and have the opportunity (ie in the case of the uncle who was knocked unconscious by one). They are very dangerous and if you have somebody outside your home with the full intention to do you or one of your family members harm (physical and etc as the situation presents itself), what do you do? If you live in a town on the reservation, you're not going to go out with guns blazing. You may make a tough showing to say hey, I'm not afraid of you but you just lock up and stay inside. Now, if you're on a ranch on the reservation, odds are you're not going to have a phone line and the police are going to be about 30 miles away. Skinwalkers get alot more brazen outside of towns. It becomes an entirely different matter and it is a mini-war. It's not that skinwalkers have departed their humanity, which is somewhat true to a Navajo. They are no longer part of the dine--"the people"--although they are still human. They are defending their homes and families from serious threat. It's hard to say if skinwalkers do get killed, however. One might hear a grunt but you won't find any bodies in the morning. The skinwalkers take their injured and/or dead with them and it does not go without retaliation as in the case of the murdered cousin.

>Is this a correct statement in
> your view? I'm not asking about the theorized
> telekinesis, by the way: I mean, is the view that
> it is proper to kill a skinwalker in certain
> situations a part of traditional law? And if so,
> how often does this happen?

If a skinwalker is killed in the midst of a visitation, it's impossible to know for sure. As I said above, they take any supposed fallen comrades with them. Any deaths or injuries on their side go unreported. They act outside the law as if there is none. My guess would be if one was killed and the body was left behind, it would be considered self defense but I don't think that there has been any instance where that has happened.

> Hunterbear also
> mentions (as in the quote) so-called
> "masterwitches," and states that skinwalkers
> generally work for them. What is he talking about
> there?

I think it's a little presumptous of "HunterBear" to assume that skinwalkers are under the employ of "master witches" although there could definitely be a hierarchy in place. My husband's grandfather said that there were legends of witches coming together once or twice a year. It would not surprise me if such a community would have their own set of "elders" as well. However, there is very little known about this potential witch community so the answer is that it's just unknown. You're not going to get a skinwalker discussing these sort of things and giving us all the answers because s/he would simply be killed by others for doing so. For them, discussion with outsiders has a penalty of death.

Stephanie




In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.--Ralph Waldo Emerson