As to sourcing, I can respond. Our statements are not based on simply stories passed down from a small family unit to my husband. To understand how prolific the information is, you have to understand a little bit about Navajo culture, particuliarly outside of towns where you don't have regular tv use to pass the evening hours away. Maintaining connection with family members is very important for the Navajo and my husband's grandparents were very good at keeping these connections. They would visit the homes of their brothers, sisters or other members of their clans (considered family), sit around a woodstove or fire and share stories to pass the night away on a near nightly basis. As I have said before, the Navajo are very reluctant to discuss skinwalkers too much, especially to outsiders or even those outside their family. However, within a family or clan (clan equates family even if no obvious blood relation exists)--including a greater family, tongues do loosen because it is "safe". So, these stories are collected from great-aunts and uncles, irrespective of whether the family link is of blood connection or marriage, cousins, second cousins and further (this extension of older family and clan members are what my husband refers to as his elders). They consist of stories from outside of my husband's particuliar family line, from family lines that married into ours and from family lines that have no obvious familial connection but are within the same clan. Compound onto this vast information pool the discussions and experiences of friends throughout my husband's life. To tell you how early this information exchange occurs between friends for Navajo children, my son first learned of skinwalkers from one of his Navajo friends in kindergarten.

There are more extra-familial sources for the stories as well. Recall that one of the uncles is descended from medicine men and his stepfather is our medicine man. This uncle has no blood connection to my husband and is an uncle by marriage by European views. As the son of a medicine man, this particuliar uncle is often the one that his coworkers, friends and peers will turn to if they have been visited for advice and consolation. There is little reluctance for any who know him to discuss skinwalkers with him if the need should arise based primarily upon his own person (raised by medicine men, he knows alot about medicine lore personally and is seen as a good man) and his heritage.

If a number needs to put to how many sources all the information we have presented here comes from, it would number in the several hundreds. Neither my uncle or my husband have thought to put a number of how many accounts/experiences that they have experienced themselves or that they have been told by the persons witnessing them in the firsthand. My husband would not be suprised if it was even close to 1000 sources.

Stephanie

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