This is a very interesting thread. I guess it's sinking fast over the edge of the page and will disappear soon.. too bad it can't be bumped to the top.

Anyway, imo, the Navajo culture and the uncanny ways of the land and nature around them have a great and beautiful intrigue. I think that I did know something about the Long Walk and the terrible proprietary ways of white Europeans, though I had not known that much about Kit Carson't horrible doings until now.

What interests and disturbs me is the internalized conflict of Navajo on Navajo, along with the food and health problems due to eating habits. I can't really analyze my motivations exactly, but I keep wanting to see native tribal nations flourish and do well; and I hope that wish includes all peoples and cultures, including my own.

I do appreciate the notion that the disruptive and oppressive night predations of the skinwalkers might have the consequence of strengthening and reviving the native Navajo spiritual and healing practices. Still, isn't the idea that such a cultural and spiritual vivification would not take place otherwise somewhat sad and perhaps even tragic?

I was also wondering whether anyone here has been watching the Tony Hillerman films produced by Robert Redford and shown on PBS? The haunting music and the beautifully evoked ghosts of a wonderful spiritual past are well depicted, and that might be where I learned about skinwalkers without knowing exactly what they were.

As for Carlos Castaneda, aren't his writings and researches considered quite charatanistic and controversial these days? As I remember, his books were part of the hippie scene in the seventies, and added a bit of cache and a considerable amount of justification for using mushroom hallucinogens. A former friend of mine developed a passionate obsession for the teachings in Castaneda's books and eventually joined something of a Castaneda cult, attending out of town workshops. She became so immersed in the cultlike phenomenon that a proclivity towards paranoia turned into a crazy belief in something like dark watchers/ predators that could take over your entire mind and being and so you had to do these exercises every day to ward them off, along with studying and learning and doing spiritual exercises designed to enable you to evolve your mind to the poing that you would live on after death. In the early days, long before she got to that crazy paranoid obsessive stage, I used to enjoy hearing her talk about the books and her experiences with mescaline, something I never experienced. It's weird how people I used to know and admire, even look up to, ended up crazily obsessed with cults. I will always remember my shock when the music teacher and choral master at my university ended up as the male half of Bo and Peep and then later as the leader of the suicidal Heaven's Gate. In college, I almost took singing lessons from him.

Sue