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Skinwalker: The Witch Behind the Monster · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: What?
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: What's going to happen?
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: Something wonderful.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: What? I understand how you feel.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: You see, it's all very clear to me now. Welcome
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: back to the Occult Rejects. Today we are looking at
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: a word that somewhere along the way became one of
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: the most recognizable names in American paranormal culture. Attached to
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: videos of strangely moving deer, pale things crouching beside roads,
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: animals that seem almost human, voices calling from the darkness,
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: creatures supposedly keeping pace with speeding cars, and practically anything
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: wandering through the woods that looks frightening enough for somebody
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: online to declare that it is definitely not what it
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: appears to be. The word has traveled so far from
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: its original setting that alleged skinwalkers are now reported thousands
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: of miles from the Navajo Nation, often in stories whose
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: detail owe as much to internet horror as they do
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: to anything documented in Diné tradition. The older materials describe
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: something more specific and, in many ways, more disturbing, because
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: the figure commonly associated with the skinwalkers belonged to a
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: much larger Navajo system of ideas concerning harmful supernatural practices
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: rather than standing outside that system as an independent species
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: of monster. English language writers often use the broad word
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: witchcraft for this material, although the people they interviewed distinguished
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: several categories of harmful practice more carefully, and the animal-changing
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: figure occupied only one part of that larger structure. One
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: of the major sources we will use is anthropologist Clyde
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Cocon's Navajo Witchcraft, published in 1944 from years of fieldwork
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: and testimony. But Cluckone is not where the documentary trail begins,
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: and following the older record backward reveals material that almost
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: never appears in modern paranormal retellings. Early 20th century linguistic collections,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: stories dictated by Denae narrators, a 1936 monograph devoted entirely
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: to human wolves, and even a lethal witchcraft crisis documented
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: in 1878 all show that the subject has a much
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: deeper history than the version popularized by television and the internet.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: We are therefore going to begin inside the Diné world,
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: in which these beliefs had meaning, moved through the older
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: ethnographic record and the stories people actually told, and only
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: afterwards followed the name into Tony Hilleman's fiction, Skinwalker Ranch,
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Pentagon Associated Research, television, Reddit, TikTok, and modern cryptid culture.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: By doing that in chronological order, the transformation becomes visible
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: without requiring us to declare every later encounter false. because
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: the history of the word and the explanation for any
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: individual frightening experience are not the same question. So today,
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: we are not starting by asking whether a strange deer
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: in a 20 second video is a skinwalker, because there
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: is a more useful question waiting underneath the viral clips.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Before America turned the skinwalker into a monster, what was
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: it actually supposed to be? Before the skinwalker can make
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: sense as anything more than a frightening animal story, We
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: need to understand the kind of moral and spiritual landscape
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: in which Navajo ideas about harmful supernatural power developed, because
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Diné traditions do not begin by dividing reality into the
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: simple Western categories of natural versus supernatural, medicine versus religion,
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: or good magic versus evil magic. A much more useful
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: starting point is the concept usually written as hozo, a
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: word that can carry meanings involving beauty, harmony, balance, order, well-being,
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: and the proper arrangement of relationships among people, the land,
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: the holy people, the body, the community, and the larger world.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Michelle Kanjan and Mary Coython describe hozo not as a
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: decorative spiritual slogan, but as a complex philosophy governing thought, speech, behavior, relationships,
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: and health, with well-being understood as something maintained through continual
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: attention rather than possessed once and permanently. Their work also
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: discusses the opposing condition, haxo, which can involve disorder, disharmony, sadness, chaos,
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: and forms of imbalance that disrupt an individual or community,
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: making the contrast between harmony and disorder central to the
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: way illness, conduct, and healing can be understood within a
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Dene framework. That framework matters because the figure, later translated
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: into English as a witch, is not simply a supernatural
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: villain imported into an otherwise neutral universe. Harmful action becomes
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: meaningful against a world in which relationships, intentions, speech, ritual knowledge, health,
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: and social responsibility carry consequences, while ceremonial specialists work to
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: restore order when illness or imbalance threatens a person or family.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: The healer, singer, or ceremonial practitioner, therefore, should not be
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: reduced to a generic medicine man, just as the harmful
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: practitioner should not be reduced to an inverted version of one.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: because Navajo ceremonial knowledge contains highly specialized roles, practices, and
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: bodies of training that cannot be explained by imagining a
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: single class of shamans choosing either a good or evil
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: career path. Clark Cohen's material becomes easy to understand against
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: that background, because the practices he grouped under the English
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: word witchcraft are repeatedly associated with destructive intention, secrecy, illness,
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: and the reversal of relationships that ordinarily bind people to
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: one another. His most relevant category for the Skinwalker tradition
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: was what he called witchery, where were-animal accounts involving wolves
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: and coyotes appear alongside accusations concerning envy, death, grave material,
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: and hidden attacks, while other forms of harmful practice follow
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: different mechanisms that we will separate rather than treating them
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: as one undifferentiated body of dark magic. That does not
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: mean we should reduce the tradition to psychology and announce
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: that witches were merely metaphors for social tension, because doing
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: so would place one oversimplification with another. Claucon was writing
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: as a mid-20th century anthropologist, and some of his interpretive
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: language reflects the psychological and functionalist theories fashionable in his period.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: While contemporary Diné' s scholarship makes clear that hozo, ceremonial life,
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: spiritual relationships, and indigenous concepts of health cannot be adequately
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: translated into a Western theory of anxiety management, His work
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: remains extraordinarily valuable because of the quality of testimony he collected,
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: but the testimony and his explanation of that testimony are
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: not always the same thing. Once that distinction is kept
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: in view, the Skinwalker begins to look less like an
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: isolated monster and more like one expression of a larger
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: concern with what happens when knowledge, intention, relationship, and power
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: are turned toward destructive ends. The animal form matters, the
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: nighttime stories matter, and the fear surrounding them matters. But
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: underneath those features is a much more disturbing possibility than
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: a strange creature in the desert, because the threat is
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: ultimately human, and the frightening transformation begins long before anybody
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: claims to see fur, tracks, glowing eyes, or something moving
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: beside the road. Cluckone believed four principal techniques could be
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: distinguished in the testimony he collected, which he rendered in
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: English as witchery, Sorcery, Wizardry, and Frenzy Witchcraft, while emphasizing
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: that those labels were analytical translations rather than exact equivalents
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: of European categories. The divisions overlapped and informants sometimes disagreed
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: about details, but the differences mattered enough that collapsing every
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: harmful practice into Skinwalker would erase most of the structure
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: he was trying to record. The category he called Witchery
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: is one of the most directly connected with the figure
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: later popularized as the Skinwalker. and it is also the
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: darkest portion of his material, because the narratives surrounding it
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: revolve around deliberate violations of some of the strongest boundaries
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: governing ordinary human behavior. Cluckone's informants associated witchery with death,
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: grave material, secrecy, revenge, envy, illness, the deliberate harming of relatives,
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: and nocturnal transformation or disguise as an animal, while several
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: stories claim the initiation required an extreme act against a
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: close family member. His accounts also describe preparations supposedly made
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: from human remains and used to cause catastrophic illness. Although
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: these details come to us through reports about feared witches
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: rather than observations of people actually performing the alleged acts,
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: which is a distinction we need to preserve whenever the
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: material becomes especially sensational. That distinction between belief about witches
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: and documented behavior by accused witches is essentially throughout Cluckone's book.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: He collected stories, accusations, explanations of illness, personal recollections, and
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: descriptions of what informants believed practitioners were capable of doing.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: But he was not standing inside a secret gathering watching
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: these events take place. And the book itself repeatedly records
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: disagreement among the people he interviewed. What his material demonstrates,
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: beyond doubt, is that these ideas existed, were widely recognizable,
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: and could generate genuine fear. Whether every specific act attributed
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: to witches ever occurred exactly as described is a separate
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: historical question that the ethnography cannot always answer. Sorcery, which
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: Cluckone found closely connected with witchery, operated according to a
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: somewhat different logic because the defining feature was destructive enchantment
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: directed toward a specific victim, rather than animal transformation. Informants
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: described personal materials such as hair, clothing, bodily traces, or
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: objects connected with an intended victim becoming focal points for
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: harmful spells while spoken formulas and ritual reversals were believed
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: capable of producing sickness, misfortune, or or death from a distance.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: Some of Cluckholm's interviewees regarded sorcery as essentially a branch
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: of witchery, while others preserved enough distinction between the two
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: that he maintained separate categories. And even here, there was
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: a disagreement about how lethal sorcery was supposed to be,
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: with several informants describing it as less catastrophic than witchery
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: or wizardry. Wizardry introduced another mechanism entirely, built around the
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: belief that a harmful foreign object could be supernaturally projected
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: into a person's body and produce pain, wasting, or illness.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Cluckone recorded references to tiny stones, bone fragments, quills, ash, charcoal,
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: and other substances imagined as supernatural projectiles, while treatment focused
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: upon removing the intrusive object from the afflicted person. This
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: is particularly valuable for our purposes because many of his
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: informants considered wizardry comparatively recent among the Navajo, with some
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: placing its appearance after the period of forced confinement at
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: Fort Summer and others attributing elements of it to Pueblo
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: or Mexican influence, showing that even a supposedly traditional body
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: of witchcraft beliefs could absorb techniques, stories, and explanations through
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: contact with neighboring peoples and historical upheaval. Clacon's fourth major category,
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Frenzy Witchcraft, stood farther apart from the first three, and
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: centered upon plants believed capable of influencing desire, judgment, gambling, trade,
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: and behavior. Datorre appears prominently in his accounts, but the
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: testimony is complicated because the same larger complex also included
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: forms of divination and a ceremonial treatment for people thought
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: to have been harmed by these practices, meaning that plant
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: knowledge could not simply be divided into a neat category
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: of evil magic. Some informants described frenzy witchcraft as universally dangerous,
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: while others believed certain uses connected with hunting, gambling, trading,
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: or dealings with outsiders occupied a more ambiguous moral position.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: And Cluckhorn himself admitted that boundaries between these practices were
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: not always perfectly clear. Taken together, the categories describe a
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: world organized around methods and intentions, rather than a catalog
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: of monsters. Because witchery could involve nocturnal animal forms, sorcery
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: emphasized destructive enchantment directed toward a victim, wizardry involved harmful
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: intrusion into the body, and frenzy witchcraft occupied a more
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: complicated plant-associated complex. The boundaries could blur, but the structure
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: itself reminds us that the Skinwalker represents one feared mode
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: of human action inside a much broader system rather than
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: the name of everything strange or malevolent. There is another
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: detail in Cluckone's interviews that becomes extremely revealing once we
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: remember how modern skinwalker stories are told, because he specifically
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: records that his Navajo consultants distinguished witches from ghosts. During
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: one interview, an informant initially answered a question about witches
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: with what Cluckone recognized as a ghost story, yet when
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: he systematically checked the distinction, his consultants agreed that ghosts
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: were not witches and did not practice witchcraft. while different
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: ceremonial responses were associated with ghost-related illnesses and witchcraft-related illnesses.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: That distinction would eventually become almost invisible in popular paranormal culture,
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: where ghosts, demons, shapeshifters, mimics, cryptids, and skinwalkers can all
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: be dumped into the same supernatural category simply because they
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: are frightening. Within the older ethnographic material, however, the were-animal
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: belongs most clearly to witchery way, and that is where
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: the animal imagery we recognize begins to sharpen into focus.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: Cluckone found wolves and coyotes accepted more consistently than other
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: animal forms, while bears, foxes, owls, crows, and additional creatures
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: appeared with less agreement among individual informants, which suggests that
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: there was never one rigid zoological checklist that could be
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: used to identify a skinwalker from a distance. The defining
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: horror was not whether the creature had the correct number
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: of teeth, or moved like a cryptid, but whether something
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: apparently animal might conceal a human intention behind it. With
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: the larger structure in place, the where animal material can
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: be examined on its own terms, and the documentary trail
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: becomes especially interesting because Cluckone was not the first researcher
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: to record it. By the time his book appeared in 1944,
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: earlier collections had already preserved witchcraft narratives terminology, and an
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: entire monograph devoted to what one anthropologist called Navajo human wolves.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: The paper trail becomes unexpectedly deep once we stop beginning
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: every history with Kluckholm. In 1910, the Franciscan fathers at St.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: Michael's published an ethnologic dictionary of the Navajo language. A
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: massive linguistic and ethnographic compilation that included material on witchcraft, spells,
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: ceremonial knowledge, and practices the authors believed were already changing
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: under the pressure of the new century. The book has
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: to be read as a missionary error source rather than
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: a neutral denier account, but its value for us is chronological.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Decades before the modern cryptid vocabulary existed, outsiders were already
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: trying to record a complex Navajo lexicon of harmful supernatural
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: practice rather than describing one generic shape-changing beast. And even
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: more revealing sources come from stories dictated in 1923 and
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: 1924 by a Diné narrator as Sandoval, or Hastine, to
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: linguist Pliny Earl Goddard. Goddard died before the material appeared,
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: and Gladys Rekerd edited it for publication in 1933 as
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Navajo Texts, whose contents included a section literally titled Pot
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: Woman Teaches Witchcraft, as well as another identified as Wizard Story.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Reichard's introduction makes clear that recording such material was not
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: treated casually, because some narratives had to wait until winter
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: when the ground was frozen, certain songs were considered too
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: sacred to surrender at all, and the two witchcraft stories
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: were described as possessing extreme potency. Sandoval's own reaction is
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: one of the most revealing lines anywhere in the early record,
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: because Reichard preserved his warning that if people knew I
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: knew this story, they would call me a wizard. a
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: remark that turned source collection itself into part of the history.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: The danger was not merely that a story described frightening things.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: Possessing knowledge of the story could potentially alter how other
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: people interpreted the storyteller, which helps explain why later researchers
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: repeatedly encountered secrecy, reluctance, partial disclosure, and disagreement when asking
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: about witchcraft. Three years after Navajo texts appeared, Yale published
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: William Morgan's Human Wolves Among the Navajo. a 43-page monograph
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: based on interviews with an extended family and devoted specifically
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: to stories about human beings associated with wolf-like transformation, disguise,
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: and feared witchcraft.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: There is a bibliographic trap here worth.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: Mentioning because William Morgan is often confused with William Morgan Sr.,
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: the later Diné linguist and translator born in 1917. Charlotte
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Frisbee's study on two William Morgans in Navajo studies was
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: written precisely because two men became tangled together in later references.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: The 1936 Human Wolves author was the earlier anthropological researcher,
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: and the book nevertheless matters because it demonstrates that the
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: were-animal tradition had already generated a specialized academic study eight
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: years before Cluckone's Navajo witchcraft. Morgan's fieldwork behind the story
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: dated largely from 1929 onwards, through 1933. And Yale's later
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: human relations area files rated the material as containing excellent
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: primary data, even while noting that Morgan's own psychological interpretation
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: reflected the theories of his period. Taken together, these sources
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: create a documentary chain that looks very different from the
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: usual paranormal genealogy. A 1910 missionary-era dictionary, Denae Narratives, recorded
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: in the 1920s and published in 1933, Morgan's 1936 study
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: of human wolves, and then Cluckone's far larger 1944 synthesis.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: None of those works gives us a perfect window into
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: an untouched, pre-contact past, but they allow us to watch
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: different observers and DNA narratives describe a feared human practice
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: long before Skinwalker Ranch, Creepypasta, or the modern idea of
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: a cryptid species entered the conversation. The Navajo expression now
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: commonly written, Yee Nalaushi is often translated into English as
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: something close to with it he goes on all fours.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Although the exact spelling and rendering have varied considerably as
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Navajo words pass through different systems of transcription. Clarkone wrote
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: the term phonetically as Yee Nalaushi in his 1944 study
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: and identified it as one of the most common expressions
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: his informants used when referring to the were-animal form of
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: witchery while the modern English expression skinwalker functions more as
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: a descriptive label than as a perfectly literal translation.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Of the Navajo term.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Native writer Noah Nez likewise gives the familiar translation, with
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: it he goes on all fours, connecting the expression specifically
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: with the ability attributed to a witch who moves in
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: the form or guise of a four-legged animal. Once Cluckone's
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: actual accounts are examined, the image becomes considerably stranger than
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: the standardized monster that dominates modern paranormal culture, because his
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: informants did not describe a single animal with a fixed appearance, anatomy,
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: or a set of cryptic characteristics. Wolves and coyotes were
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: the two forms in which his interviewees agreed most consistently,
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: while bears, owls, desert foxes, crows, mountain lions, goats, and
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: other animals appeared in individual accounts with varying degrees of acceptance,
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: and Clacon openly recorded those disagreements rather than smoothing them
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: into a single authoritative description. What united the narratives was
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: the belief that the figure was fundamentally human and moved
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: through the night under an altered animal identity, sometimes described
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: as literally becoming like an animal and sometimes described more
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: concretely as wearing its hide while running or crawling on
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: all fours. The animal skins themselves appeared repeatedly enough in
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Cluckone's material that they deserve attention, although the accounts are
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: far less cinematic than modern depictions of a body violently
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: transforming into another species. Several informants described witches putting on wolf, coyote, bear,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: or other hides, sometimes while otherwise unclothed except for beads
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: and body paint. And some accounts describe masks or skins
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: arranged in ways that allowed the wearer to appear animal-like
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: from a distance. Other stories went further and spoke as
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: though the person had actually become indistinguishable from the animal
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: whose form had been assumed, which leaves us with exactly
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: the kind of ambiguity that oral supernatural traditions often preserve.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: Some narrators emphasize disguise, others transformation, and the ethnographer encounters
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: both without being able to collapse them into one mechanical explanation.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Speed is another feature that genuinely belongs to the older
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: record rather than being invented by internet horror stories. Cluckone
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: summarized his informants as believing that were-animals roamed primarily at
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: night and moved at extraordinary speed, while individual accounts insisted
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: that a person on horseback could not catch one unless
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: the creature stumbled into an animal burrow or encountered some
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: other accident. The point was not simply that a wolf
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: or coyote could run quickly, because the unnatural speed helped
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: mark the creature as something whose apparent animal body, concealed
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: powers that ordinary animals did not possess. Tracks also occupy
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: a surprisingly large place in the accounts, and this may
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: be one of the oldest documented pieces of lore that
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: sounds immediately familiar to anybody who has listened to modern
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: Skinwalker stories. Cluckone records people examining the ground after dogs
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: barked violently. Unusual sounds were heard near a Hogan, where
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: something strange was believed to have moved around a household
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: during the night. with the suspected were-animal tracks sometimes described
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: as larger than those of the corresponding natural animal. In
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: several narratives, people followed those tracks until they approached or
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: ended near the home of somebody already suspected of witchcraft,
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: turning physical traces in the landscape into evidence connecting an
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: apparently animal visitor with a known human being. Other informants
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: claimed there were visual details by which an experienced observer
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: could distinguish the unnatural animal from the real one. But
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: here again, the testimony varies enough that we should resist
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: turning the descriptions into a field guide. One narrator claimed
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: the eyes looked through narrow openings in a mask. Others
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: said the tail of the disguised creature hung differently from
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: the tail of a real wolf. And others described unnatural
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: movements of ears or tails produced by the way the
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: hide was worn. While a separate story involved a suspected
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: animal being followed into a woman who supposedly discovered sitting
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: with a coyote hide over her shoulders. These are individual
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: testimonies collected by Cluckone rather than universal law of skinwalker identification.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: And presenting them that way preserves something much closer to
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: the original folklore than modern lists promising 10 foolproof signs
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: that the creature outside your window is a skinwalker. The
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: same caution becomes useful when we compare those accounts with
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: some of the features now treated as essential skinwalker lore online.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: Cluckone certainly records animal noises, nighttime activity, Extraordinary speed, strange tricks,
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: fear among horses and dogs, and human beings allegedly recognized
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: beneath or after an animal guise. But his were-animal section
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: does not make glowing red eyes, telepathic mind-reading, perfect imitation
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: of a loved one's human voice, or an obsessive desire
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: to lure people into forests the defining features of the tradition.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Modern stories may contain those elements, and folklore is perfectly
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: capable of developing new motifs over time. but their popularity
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: today should not be mistaken for proof that they belong
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: to the earliest documented form of the belief. Even the
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: gender of the figure is more complicated than the popular
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: image of an elderly male sorcerer. Cluckone's interviews included allegations
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: involving both men and women, and one of the accounts
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: he preserves specifically describes a woman discovered with a coyote
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: hide after an animal had been pursued through open country.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: What mattered was not that one accused person fit one
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: fixed physical profile, but that a human being was believed
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: to have crossed into a socially terrifying category in which
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: ordinary identity could no longer be trusted. That certainly may
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: explain why these stories retain so much power. Because an
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: unknown monster becomes less frightening once somebody gives it a
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: species name, a habitat, and a predictable set of behaviors,
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: whereas the older Skinwalker narrative refuses that comfort. The coyote
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: near the sheep pen may simply be a coyote. The
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: tracks besides the hogan may belong to an animal passing
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: through the night. And the dogs may be barking at
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: something entirely ordinary. Yet the belief introduces another possibility in
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: which the animal's shape is only a surface and the
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: real danger comes from a person whose intentions remain hidden
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: until the evidence seems to lead directly back toward another
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: human being. What the early record gives us, then, is
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: not an official species description of but a cluster of
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: reoccurring narrative features. Nighttime movement, animal skins or animal identity,
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: extraordinary speed, abnormal tracks, disturbance among domestic animals, and the
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: possibility that a suspicious creature might ultimately be connected with
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: a recognizable person. That is already enough to produce a
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: frightening tradition without importing every glowing-eyed mimic, pale crawler, or
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: voice-stealing creature that later internet culture would place beneath the
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: same name. The most disturbing accusation surrounding witchery way concerned death,
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: because the same ethnographic record that describes nocturnal animal forms
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: also places witches in deliberate contact with graves, corpses, and
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: substances associated with the dead. In Diné communities, where death
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: itself could carry powerful danger, and where contact with the
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: deceased was traditionally minimized, the accusation that somebody willingly entered
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: a grave handled a corpse, or removed material from it
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: represented more than macabre behavior. It inverted an entire field
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: of caution surrounding the dead and turned what most people
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: avoided into a source of feared power. Mary Shepardson's later
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: study of Navajo mortuary practice helps explain why those accusations
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: would have carried such force. Because she describes traditional patterns
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: in which the dead were handled by very few people,
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: burial occurred quickly, and contact with the deceased was limited
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: as much as possible. Gerald Levy likewise recorded traditions in
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: which a dwelling where someone died could be abandoned, while
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: relatives and those involved in burial observed protective or purifying
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: practices afterward, showing that the boundary between the living and
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: the dead were not treated casually. Against that background, a
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: witch accused of seeking out graves was not simply breaking
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: a social rule, but deliberately moving toward a source of
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: danger that ordinary people were expected to leave alone. Cluckone's
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: witchery accounts repeatedly describe what his English-speaking informants called corpse poison,
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: a feared preparation said to be made from material taken
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: from the dead and then used to cause illness or death.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: The exact recipes and methods vary across his interviews, and
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: there is no reason for us to reproduce them as
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: though we are reading an instruction manual, because the historically
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: significant point is that the human remains were were imagined
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: as a concentrated instrument of harmful power. Symptoms attributed to
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: this substance could be dramatic and immediate, while other stories
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: connected exposure with prolonged illness, wasting, paralysis, or death, allowing
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: an unexplained medical crisis to become interpretable within an existing
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: system of witchcraft belief. The grave-robbing stories become even more
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: revealing when Cluckone steps away from simply recording what informants
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: told him and evaluate the evidence himself. He says that
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: he doubted the elaborate descriptions of organized witches' gatherings, even
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: though particular caves were repeatedly identified as supposed meeting places.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: Yet he considered grave robbery plausible, and believed that at
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: least some practices categorized as witchcraft were probably attempted in
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: real life. At the same time, he admitted that he
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: could not establish how frequently such acts occurred or whether
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: every technique described in stories was ever performed exactly as narrated,
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: which gives us an unusually useful warning from the principal
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: ethnographer himself. The existence of a detailed belief does not
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: automatically prove the literal existence of of every behavior the
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: belief describes. That distinction becomes crucial because accusations of witchcraft
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: can create their own evidence. If an animal was seen
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: near a burial place, strange tracks appeared around a grave,
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: somebody became sick after a conflict, or an object associated
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: with the dead seemed disturbed, those events could be interpreted
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: through a narrative system already capable of linking nocturnal animals,
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: hostile human intention, grave material, and illness. those events could
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: be interpreted through a narrative system already capable of linking
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: nocturnal animals, hostile human intention, grave material, and illness. Later
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: events might reinforce the accusation regardless of whether the person
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: had actually done anything supernatural. And Cluck Hone's interviews preserve
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: enough cases involving named suspects, family disputes, wealth, jealousy, revenge,
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: and interpersonal hostility to show that witchcraft existed not only
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: as a supernatural explanation, but as a dangerous social accusation.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: The association with death also helps explain why witchery could
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: be imagined as a profound moral inversion rather than merely
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: another form of ritual specialization. A singer or ceremonial practitioner
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: was valued for restoring harmony, diagnosing disorder, and helping return
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: a patient toward health, whereas the witch was feared for
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: taking relationships and knowledge in the opposite direction, using secrecy, hostility,
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: and and contact with dangerous materials to injure rather than restore.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Older ethnographic descriptions sometimes express this contrast through the language
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: of good and evil, but the underlying pattern is more
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: precise than that Christian-sounding binary, because the feared practitioner is
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: defined by destructive intention and by crossing boundaries that ordinary
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: social and ceremonial life work to maintain. Some of the
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: most sensational stories go even further, by claiming that entry
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: into witchery demanded a terrible act against someone close to
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: the initiate, usually a relative, thereby making the destruction of
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: kinship part of the imagined transformation. Cluckone recorded variations of
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: this claim rather than one universally agreed initiation narrative, and
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: we should treat them exactly as he encountered them, as
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: statements about what witches were believed to have done, not
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: as verified transcripts from secret ceremonies. Even so, the motif
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: makes psychological sense within the tradition's larger structure, because a
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: person feared as a witch was not simply someone possessing
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: unusual knowledge, but someone believed capable of turning the obligations
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: of family, community, and reciprocity inside out. The animal disguise
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: therefore belongs inside a much larger accusation involving destructive intention, secrecy, death,
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: social betrayal, illness, and the manipulation of materials that other
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: people regarded as dangerous. Clark Cohen's own caution is especially
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: useful here because he doubted some elaborate stories about organized
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: witches' gatherings while considering grave robbery plausible, which leaves us
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: with exactly the distinction this subject requires. The beliefs and
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: accusations are historically demonstrable, even when the literal performance of
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: every alleged act is not. Once a person became suspected
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: of witchcraft, The belief could stop functioning as private fear
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: and become a collective problem because Navajo accounts recorded by
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: Cluckone describe suspicion moving through families and communities until somebody
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: was identified as the possible source of illness, misfortune, or
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: repeated disturbance. That identification might come through divination, through the
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: interpretation of unusual behavior, through tracks or nocturnal encounters connected
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: with a particular household, or through a pattern of interpersonal hostility,
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: that made one individual seem increasingly plausible as the hidden
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: cause behind events that.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: Otherwise resisted explanation.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: Cluckone's material is especially revealing here because it preserves the
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: uncomfortable point at which supernatural belief and social action meet.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: He describes cases in which divinatory specialists or observations of
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: suspicious behavior convinced the group that a particular person was responsible,
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: after which the accused could be summoned before relatives or
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: other members of the community and pressured to confess. In
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: some of the accounts he collected, the accused person was
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: physically restrained, denied food or water, or otherwise subjected to
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: coercion until a confession was obtained. Why, Cluckone also recorded
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: traditions in which an accused witch, who refused to confess,
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: might be forced to leave the community, or in older cases,
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: be killed. That confession was not merely a legal admission
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: of guilt in the western sense. because Cluckone's informants repeatedly
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: described confession as therapeutically important for the person believed to
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: be suffering from witchcraft. If the harmful act was acknowledged
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: and the witch revealed what had supposedly been done, the
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: victim's condition might improve, especially if the illness had not
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: progressed too far, which meant that identifying and confronting the
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: suspected practitioner could become part of the curing process itself.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: The distinction matters because the accused was not simply being
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: punished for violating a rule. The community might believe that
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: the health of another person depended upon obtaining an admission
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: and breaking the hidden action believed to be causing the illness.
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: Because the alleged attack was hidden by definition, suspicion could
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: become self-reinforcing once it settled on a particular person, especially
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: when illness worsened or an accused individual resisted pressure to confess.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: Cluckone recognized the evidentiary problem and repeatedly separated what his
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: informants believed from what he thought could be demonstrated, while
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: also documenting the fact that accusations themselves could lead to coercion, expulsion,
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: and violence, regardless of whether the supernatural mechanism could be verified.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: Protection and curing, therefore, occupied as much space in the
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: traditional system as fear itself, and Cluckone cataloged several responses
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: intended to prevent harm, identify its source, or reverse its effects.
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: Some involve ceremonial specialists, protective medicines, prayer, or divination, while
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: others focused on removing an intrusive object believed to have
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: been supernaturally placed or neutralizing a harmful act through knowledge
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: of how it had been performed. The larger pattern is
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: important because it shows that witchcraft belief was not simply
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: a mythology of helpless victims surrounded by invisible enemies. It
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: was part of a world containing recognized methods for diagnosis, protection, confrontation,
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: and restoration. The accusations also reveal why envy, resentment, wealth,
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: and damaged relationships appear so frequently in Cluckhorn's analysis. A
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: person who accumulated unusual wealth, behaved arrogantly, carried a long-standing grievance,
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: quarreled with relatives, or became associated with repeated misfortune might
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: become vulnerable to suspicions. while the accusation itself communicated something
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: about what the community regarded as dangerous behavior. Later anthropological
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: discussions of Cluckone's work have therefore emphasized that witchcraft law
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: could operate as a form of social control, defining unacceptable
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: conduct by dramatizing the extreme figure of a person whose envy, selfishness,
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: or hostility had become so destructive that it threatened the
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: health and stability of others. The most dramatic historical example
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: is the event usually called the Navajo Witch Purge of 1878,
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: which Martha Blue reconstructed a century later through Indian service
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: and military records, trader correspondence, an Indian agent's diary, and
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: oral histories from the Granado area. Blue's study concluded that
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: 40 or more Navajo people were killed during a wave
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: of witchcraft accusations in the unstable early reservation years after
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: the return from Bosque Redondo. and she argued that older
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: explanations treating the violence mainly as political maneuvering by Navajo
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: leaders failed to capture the social, economic, and cultural pressures
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: visible in the Diné accounts. Blue's method is worth emphasizing
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: because the event survives through two very different archives that
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: do not tell the story in exactly the same way.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: Contemporary Anglo-American records viewed the crisis largely through questions of
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: political order. while oral histories recorded decades later preserved nay explanations, names, sequence,
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: and motives that the official paperwork either compressed or misunderstood.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: Reading the two together allowed Blue to reconstruct the Purge
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: as an episode of internal conflict occurring under intense colonial
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: pressure rather than reducing it to either superstition or a
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: simple power grab by individual leaders. The Purge matters because
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: it prevents the social consequences of witchcraft belief from remaining abstract,
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: while also resisting an easy comparison with Salem or European
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: witch trials. Blue located the events inside the upheaval of
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: the early reservation period, when communities were rebuilding after forced removal, scarcity,
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: political realignment, and changing relationships with federal officials and traders,
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: so the accusation of hidden supernatural harm became entangled with
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: very real struggles over authority, kinship, resources, and the restoration
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: of order. By the time a witchcraft accusation reached that level,
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: the terrifying question was no longer whether something unnatural had
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: crossed the desert after dark, because a hidden threat had
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: acquired a human identity and the community could act against
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: that person with consequences that were entirely real. The history
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: of 1878 is therefore one of the clearest reminders that
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: whatever we think about supernatural claims themselves, the belief systems
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: surrounding them could shape illness, reputation, punishment, and even life
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: or death. By the time Margaret K. Brady published Some
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: Kind of Power, Navajo Children's Skinwalker Narratives in 1984, nearly
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: 40 years had passed since Cluckone's major study appeared, which
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: makes her work especially valuable because it allows us to
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: see what happened to the skinwalker tradition after the anthropologists
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: of the earlier 20th century had already declared it worthy
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: of documentation. Brady was not primarily interested in reconstructing a
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: supposedly ancient religion from fragments, nor was she attempting to
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: produce a catalog of paranormal encounters, because her attention was
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: focused on the stories Navajo children told one another and
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: the ways those stories functioned as performances through which cultural knowledge, fear, humor, identity,
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: and social expectations were continually being recreated. Brady's study matters
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: because she found a tradition being learned and performed rather
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: than merely remembered, with children already understanding recognizable narrative patterns,
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: expectations about suspense, and the kinds of details that made
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: a Skinwalker story convincing to other children. Instead of treating
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: folklore as a fossil inherited unchanged from older relatives, she
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: examined the way young narratives selected, rearranged, and dramatized material
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: for their own audiences. That findings complicate one of the
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: easiest assumptions outsiders make about indigenous folklore. which is that
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: contact with modern American culture must automatically cause older beliefs
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: to weaken until eventually they disappear. Brady reached almost the
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: opposite conclusion, because she found that contact with other cultural
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: influences could sharpen the boundaries through which Navajo children understood themselves,
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: allowing the Skinwalker figure to remain meaningful precisely because it
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: expressed dangers, values, and social relationships that could be narrated
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: in a distinctly Navajo way. WorldCat's summary of the study
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: captures Brady's conclusion that the stories demonstrate how traditional symbols
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: are not merely carried forward unchanged, but repeatedly recreated through
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: the act of storytelling itself. The children's stories also contain
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: many of the features that appear in adult accounts, including nighttime, encounters,
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: threatening animals, frightening noises, family members reacting to danger, weapons
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: being used against suspected skinwalkers, and stories in which a
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: supposedly animal figure is eventually connected to a recognizable human being.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: Yet Brady's interest was not simply in checking whether each
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: motif matched Cluckone's earlier taxonomy, because she examined how children
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: arranged those elements into narratives that their peers would recognize
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: as convincing, frightening, funny, or worth repeating, which turned skinwalker
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: lore into a form of cultural performance rather than a
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: static checklist of supernatural abilities. Family occupies a particular important
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: place in those stories, because many of the narratives Brady
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: collected were presented not as abstract myths set in some
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: distant legendary age, but as things that happened to a father, grandfather, uncle, cousin, grandmother, neighbor,
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: or someone known personally to the storyteller. The narrative style
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: brings the skinwalker close without requiring the child telling the
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: story to claim direct contact. while the chain of transmission
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: itself becomes part of the authority behind the account. This
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: happened to somebody connected to us. Somebody remembered it, and
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: now the story is being passed forward through the family
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: or peer group. The result resembles the structure of many
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: living legends around the world, where credibility comes from not
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: an ancient manuscript, but from social proximity to the person
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: said to have experienced the event. Brady also paid attention
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: to the performance itself, including the way narrators used pacing, repetition, gesture, voice,
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: audience reaction, and dramatic emphasis to make a skinwalker encounter
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: work as a story. That is an important corrective to
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: the way these accounts are often stripped down when they
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: reach paranormal books, because a transcription that preserves only the
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: claim that somebody saw a strange coyote near a house
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: removes much of what made the original narrative meaningful. The
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: storyteller's hesitation, the moment when the audience recognizes what kind
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: of story is being told, the escalation of danger, and
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: the eventual revelation that an apparent ordinary animal may have
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: been something else all contribute to the power of the tradition.
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: This also helps explain why Skinwalker stories can survive even
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: among people who may disagree about how literally every.
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: Detail should be believed.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: A legend does not need unanimous theological agreement in order
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: to remain culturally important, because the act of telling it
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: can communicate ideas about danger, nighttime behavior, strangers, family protection, secrecy, courage,
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: and the boundaries between what is ordinary and what should
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: make a person cautious. Brady's work therefore gives us something
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: that Cluckone's adult interviews could not provide in quite the
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: same way. A view of children learning how to recognize
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: the shape of a skinwalker story and then reproducing that
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: shape for one another. That performance dimension also echoes the
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: much earlier Sandoval material, where the conditions under which a
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: dangerous story could be told were themselves culturally meaningful. although
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: Brady was working in a very different period and with
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: children rather than an elder dictating formal texts to a linguist.
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: Across those sources, storytelling is not merely a delivery system
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: for information about skinwalkers. It is one of the places
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: where the tradition actually lives, because authority, danger, humor, hesitation,
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: family memory, and audience reaction all shape what survives. By
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: the 1980s then, the skinwalker had not disappeared into an
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: anthropology archive. Because Navajo children were still telling the stories,
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: reshaping them, frightening one another with them, and using them
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: to negotiate a world that contained both traditional Navajo meanings
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: and rapidly expanding outside influences. That living continuity becomes crucial
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: when we eventually watch the term leave Navajo communities and
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: enter American popular culture. because what outsiders adopted was not
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: an abandoned piece of folklore waiting to be rediscovered, but
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: a tradition that was already very much alive among the
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: people from whom the name had been taken. Brady's work
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: shows that skinwalker narratives were still being actively exchanged within
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: Navajo communities during the late 20th century, but at almost
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: the same moment another version of the figure was beginning
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: to travel much farther, because American readers who had never
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: lived on the Navajo Nation were encountering Diné ideas about
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: witchcraft through mystery novels, magazine articles, environmental writing, tourism, and
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: an expanding popular fascination with the Southwest. Among the writers
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: involved in that transition, none became more influential than Tony Hilleman,
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: whose enormously successful detective fiction helped introduce generations of non-Navajo
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: readers to Navajo characters, landscapes, ceremonial ideas, and eventually the
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: word skinwalker itself. Hilleman was not Diné, and his novels
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: were always fiction rather than ethnography. But he spent decades
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: setting mysteries within and around the Navajo Nation while building
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: stories around Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee, two
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: Navajo law enforcement characters whose different attitudes toward tradition allowed
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: Hilleman to place questions about ceremony, belief, medicine, witchcraft, and
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: cultural change directly inside the machinery of a crime novel.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: His first Leaphorn novel, The Blessing Way, appeared in 1970,
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: and by the time Skinwalkers was published by Harper and
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: Rowe in 1986, Hilleman had already developed a substantial readership
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: for mysteries in which crimes recognizable to a mainstream audience
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: unfolded within a world most of those readers almost knew
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: nothing about. The 1986 novel was especially consequential because it
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: brought Leaphorn and Chee together in the same investigation and
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: placed alleged Navajo witchcraft at the center of a series
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: of killings, with the title itself putting the word skinwalkers
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: directly onto bookstore shelves across the country. Stephen Pavlik, writing
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: in the peer-reviewed American Indian Culture and Research Journal in 2000,
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: went so far as to argue that the Navajo skinwalker
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: phenomenon had become well-known to the general American public in
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: a large part through popular fiction, identifying Hilleman and the
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: success of skinwalkers specifically. Pavlik's concern was not simply that
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: the concept had become famous, however, because he was examining
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: another distortion created when outsiders concentrated so heavily upon the
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: connection between wolves and witchcraft that they obscured the much
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: broader and frequently positive role of wolf within Navajo mythology
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: and ceremonial tradition. In the material he surveys, wolf can
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: appear as an important animal person, a hunter, a figure
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: associated with knowledge and ceremonial power, and even a helper
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: involved in restoring life. which means that reducing the Navajo
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: wolf to an ominous skinwalker costume cuts away an enormous
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: portion of the animal's traditional significance. That point gives us
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: another useful warning about the way popular folklore gets constructed,
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: because once one frightening association becomes famous, it can begin
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: swallowing every other meaning surrounding the same symbol. A wolf
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: appearing in Navajo tradition is not automatically a witch, just
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: as every coyote is not automatically a skinwalker. and Pavlik
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: specifically criticized environmental writers who emphasized the wolf-witchcraft connection so
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: strongly that readers could come away believing Navajo attitudes toward
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: wolves were primarily negative. His reconstruction instead presents wolf as
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: a figure of considerable prestige within parts of Navajo traditional narrative,
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: which makes the werewolf accusation associated with witchery more complicated
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: rather than less frightening. because the horror rests in a
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: human being misusing or imitating an animal identity whose significance
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: extends far beyond witchcraft. Hilleman himself occupied a complicated position
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: in this transmission because he researched extensively, consulted Navajo acquaintances,
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: and was generally admired by many Navajo readers, while remaining
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: a non-Dené novelist writing fictional Navajo protagonists for a national
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: and international market. The Navajo Times reported after his death
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: that his book circulated heavily on the reservation. Navajo public
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: safety officials praised his respect for the culture, and in 1987,
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: he received the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend of the Diné Award.
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: Even as some Diné scholars continued questioning how much authority
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: an outsider should acquire over representations of Navajo life. Those
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: questions have become even more visible through recent adaptation of
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: Hilleman's work, particularly the television series Dark Winds, whose native
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: writers actors and filmmakers have spoken openly about reshaping Hilleman's
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: fictional world through indigenous perspectives. Diné, Hopi, and Laguna filmmaker
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: Billy Luther has described Hilleman's books as one of the
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: few representations of Navajo people available to him while growing up,
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: while also acknowledging that much of Hilleman's cultural world was fictionalized,
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: and Diné historian Jennifer Dennettdale had been considerably more critical.
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: describing Hilleman's Southwest as an outsider construction shaped by what
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: non-Native audiences expected Native people to look like. Those positions
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: do not cancel one another. Together they show how influential
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: Hilleman became because his work could simultaneously be appreciated, challenged, adapted,
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: and recognized as a major gateway through which outsiders imagined
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: Navajo culture. For the history of the skinwalker, that influence
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: matters enormously because fiction changes the conditions under which a
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: tradition travels. Cluckone's ethnography asked readers to navigate categories, contradictory testimony, terminology,
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: and social context, while Brady asked them to pay attention
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: to the mechanics of children's storytelling. Yet a mystery novel
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: needs characters, danger, suspense, clues, and a resolution, which naturally
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: pushes ambiguous cultural material toward narrative forms that outsiders can
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: grasp more quickly. Hilleman did not invent the Navajo Witch
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: or the Skinwalker, but his success helped make the figure
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: legible to an audience that had never encountered ethnographic literature
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: and might never distinguish between a fictional use of Navajo
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: belief and the enormously more complicated traditions from which that
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: fiction borrowed. By the middle of the 1900s, the Skinwalker
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: had already traveled from Diné oral tradition into anthropology and
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: popular fiction, but the transmission that would eventually turn the
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: name into a global paranormal brand began on a cattle
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: ranch in northeastern Utah. hundreds of miles from the center
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: of the Navajo Nation, an insider region with its own
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: long history of UFO reports, livestock death, local folklore, and
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: stories about strain lights moving across the Uintah Basin. The
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: property was not originally famous as Skinwalker Ranch, nor did
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: the first major newspaper report about it describe a traditional
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: Navajo witch stalking the land. Because when Terry and Gwen
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: Sherman discovered spoke publicly in 1996, the story they told
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: was overwhelmingly about UFOs, unexplained lights, missing and mutated cattle,
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: strange impressions in the ground, voices apparently coming from nowhere,
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: and the phenomena they themselves admitted they did not understand.
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: The Sermons had purchased the roughly 480-acre property south of
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: Fort Duchesne in 1994 and moved there hoping to raise
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: registered cattle, but according to the account they gave journalist
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: Zach Van Eyck, from the Deseret News on June 30, 1996,
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: unusual activity began becoming impossible for them to ignore during
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: the following year. They described several different types of unidentified
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: flying objects, including small illuminated craft, a larger object roughly
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: 40 feet long, and something they estimated to be as
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: large as several football fields. While Terry Sherman also reported
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: hearing male voices speaking an unfamiliar language from somewhere above him,
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: even though nobody could be seen. The family further connected
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: some of those sightings with cattle that disappeared or were
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: discovered dead under circumstances they considered inexplicable. Although the article
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: also quoted skeptics who emphasized that eyewitness testimony and unusual
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: livestock deaths did not demonstrate extraterrestrial visitation. The original article
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: is worth lingering over because of what it does not contain.
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: The property is simply the Sherman's Ranch, and the central
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: explanatory vocabulary is UFOs, cattle mutilations, unexplained phenomena, and possibly
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: secret technology rather than Navajo witchcraft. Which means the now
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: famous association between the ranch and the word skinwalker was
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: not the framework through which the story first entered the
• 54:43
  Speaker 2: national record. Later retellings would add enormous amounts of material
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: surrounding gigantic wolf-like animals, portals, poltergeist activity, glowing orbs, humanoids,
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: and other forms of high strangeness. But the contemporary 1996
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: newspaper report gives us a useful baseline before those claims
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: were assembled into a larger mythology. The article immediately attracted
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: the attention of Robert Bigelow, a wealthy Las Vegas real
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: estate developer with a long-standing interest in UFOs and anomalous
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: phenomena who had recently established the National Institute for Discovery Science,
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: also known as NIDS. Bigelow purchased the property in September 1996,
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: for approximately $ 200, 000 and turned it into a private research site,
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: installing equipment and sending researchers to investigate whether any of
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: the phenomena reported by the Shermans could be documented under observation.
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: A December 1996 Deseret News report described NIDS erecting an
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: observation building and placing scientists and a veterinarian at the ranch,
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: while Terry Sherman remained involved for a period as caretaker
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: after the sale. What happened after NIDS arrived is where
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: the evidentiary problem becomes particularly interesting. When the Deseret News
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: checked back in April 1997, John Alexander, NIDS director for
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: scientific liaison, acknowledged that the researchers had not observed the
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: dramatic UFOs, cattle mutilation, or dog-killing balls of light reported
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: by the Shermans, and said that the team had recorded
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: only minor observations that were unwilling to defend as significant evidence,
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: or dog-killing balls of light reported by the Shermans. and
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: said that the team had recorded only minor observations that
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: he was unwilling to defend as significant evidence. NIDS did
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: not abandon the property, however, and later researchers claimed that
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: unusual incidents continued intermittently, creating exactly the kind of frustrating
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: investigative environment in which extraordinary stories multiplied while repeatable scientific
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: measurements remained difficult to obtain. Colm Kelleher, a biochemist who
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: became one of the principal NIDS investigators, and journalist George
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: Knapp eventually turned that period into the 205-book Hunt for
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: the Skinwalker, Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: in Utah. Their narrative dramatically expanded the public image of
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: the property by combining the Sherman's family experiences with stories
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: gathered from Ned's personnel and other witnesses, including glowing spheres,
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: enormous wolf-like creatures, strange animal deaths, apparently impossible objects in
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: the sky, poltergeist-like disturbances and phenomena that seemed to shift
• 57:26
  Speaker 2: unpredictably between categories normally kept separate in paranormal literature. Instead
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: of presenting the ranch as merely a UFO location, the
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: book portrayed it as something closer to a crossroads where cryptozoology,
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: hunting phenomena, unidentified aerial objects, psychic effects, and folklore appeared
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: to overlap. The title of Kelleher and Knapp's book had
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: enormous consequences because it helped weld the Navajo Skinwalker name
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: onto a Utah paranormal hotspot whose first major public account
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: had not depended upon the concept at all. In the
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: years after publication, the property increasingly became known as Skinwalker Ranch,
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: while stories about gigantic walls, portals, glowing spheres, poltergeist activity,
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: mutilated cattle, and unidentified aerial objects were pulled beneath one
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: increasingly broad paranormal umbrella. That transformation deserves caution, because northeastern
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: Utah is primarily Ute country, while the Skinwalker concept we
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: have been tracing is specifically Diné, and the popular story
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: that the ranch sits beneath an ancient Navajo curse directed
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: against the Utes is repeated far more confidently in paranormal
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: literature than the historical record justifies. The ranch nevertheless changed
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: the vocabulary permanently by turning Skinwalker from the name of
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: a feared human practitioner into the brand for an entire
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: environment of high strangeness, setting the stage for books, government-associated investigations, documentaries,
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: and television to expand the term even further. The ranch
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: acquired another layer of legitimacy in the public imagination when
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: it became entangled with the Defense Intelligence Agency program at
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: the end of the 2000s.
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: Although the history is considerably.
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: More complicated, than the familiar claim that the Pentagon secretly
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: investigated Skinwalker Ranch, DIA briefing documents state that Senators Harry
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: Reid of Nevada and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii co-sponsored an
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: initial $ 10 million earmark in 2008 for what became the
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program. followed by another $ 12
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: million for fiscal year 2010, while the contract itself went
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, usually abbreviated BASS. The
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: surviving government paperwork is unusually valuable because it allows us
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: to separate the official program from the mythology later built
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: around it. DIA documents show that Bass was the sole
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: bidder and received contract in September 2008. while congressional funding
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: ultimately amounted to roughly $ 22 million across the relevant fiscal years.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: The formal statement of work concentrated upon 12 areas of
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 2: advanced aerospace research, including propulsion, materials, energy generation, human interface
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: with advanced systems, and technologies that might seem speculative today
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 2: but could matter to future military capabilities. Nothing in the
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: public solicitation announces that the government was hiring Bigelow to
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: hunt werewolves, open portals, or investigate Navajo witches at a
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: ranch in Utah. Bigelow's organization employed researchers with extensive UFO
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: and paranormal investigation backgrounds, including people connected with NIDS in
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: the earlier ranch project. And the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: Office later acknowledged that contractor personnel investigated UAP reports and
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: alleged paranormal activity at Bigelow's Utah property. even though that
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: work sat outside the primary aerospace research purpose described in
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: the contract. The connection to the ranch was therefore real,
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: but the public solicitation did not advertise a government hunt
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: for portals, werewolves, or DNA witches. The confusion became even
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 2: thicker when the acronym AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: enters the story, because for years, journalists, former program participants,
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: government spokespeople, and released documents used AAWSAP and AATIP in
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: ways that were not always consistent. A 2009 DIA briefing
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: prepared for a meeting involving Senator Reid explicitly states that
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: Reid's office referred to AAWSAP as the Advanced Aerospace Threat
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: Identification Program, while the DIA itself continued using AAWSAP title.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: More recently, AARO, concluded that AAWSAP was the formerly funded
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: DIA program and that AATIP was never established as a
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: separate official Defense Department program with its own funding. Although
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: after AAWSAP ended, the AATIP name continued to be used
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: by an informal group of government personnel interested in military
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: UFO reports. That distinction may sound bureaucratic, but it matters
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: because countless paranormal histories now describe AATIP as though it
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: were one continuously funded secret UFO program running everything from
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: fighter pilot sightings to Skinwalker Ranch. The program's technical output
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: also needs a small correction that often gets lost in retellings,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: because 26 Defense Intelligence Reference documents were delivered in the
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: first batch during 2009, and 12 additional reports followed under
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: the later funding, bringing.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: The total to 38.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: Their subjects ranged from advanced propulsion... and metamaterials to highly
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: speculative concepts involving warp drives and traversable wormholes, while Senator
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: Reid later requested special access program protection that Defense Department
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: officials declined to approve. AAWSAP continued until 2012, when the
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: Defense Intelligence Agency ended the effort after its contractual deliverables
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: had been completed. AARO's later assessment was distinctively skeptical. stating
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: that the technical papers had not undergone thorough peer review
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: and that the program was terminated because the department questioned
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: the merit and usefulness of its output. Supporters of the
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: project have presented the story differently, arguing that the investigators
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 2: encountered genuinely anomalous phenomena and that the bureaucratic resistance prevented
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: more ambitious work from continuing. but the documentary record at
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: least allows us to identify where government fact ends and
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: interpretation begins. Once the government connection became public, however, Skinwalker
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: Ranch acquired something far more powerful than another witness statement,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: because it could now be discussed alongside Pentagon money, classified
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 2: program language, aerospace research, and official documents. Those facts demonstrate
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: that government-associated investigators studied anomalous reports and that BAS personnel
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: conducted work connected with the Utah property, but they do
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: not establish that the phenomena was extraterrestrial, interdimensional, supernatural, or
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: evidence of traditional Diné witchcraft, which is a distinction that
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: later popular accounts often blur. By the time the word
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: Skinwalker entered the internet age, it had already passed through
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: several filters, but digital culture accelerated that process in a
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: way neither anthropology nor popular fiction ever could. because online
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: folklore rewards stories that can be detached from place, copied quickly,
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: altered slightly, and recognized instantly by people who may know
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 2: almost nothing about the tradition from which the original name came.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: Folklorist David Pugulia has described the internet as a genuine
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: arena of folk transmission rather than a force that simply
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: destroys older tradition, while scholars of creepypasta say such as
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: Trevor Blank, Lynn McNeil, and Andrew Peck have shown how
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: online communities repeatedly build legends through variation, annotation, imitation, and
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 2: collaborative storytelling. A frightening image or brief encounter no longer
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: needs to remain inside one family or one region, because
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: it can be uploaded, renamed, reposted, embellished, and absorbed into
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: an existing monster category within hours. The Skinwalker was almost
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: perfectly designed to undergo that kind of transformation. because the
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: popular version already contains several motifs that translate extraordinarily well
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: into short-form horror.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: An animal that may secretly be human.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: Movement that seems physically wrong, strange tracks, nighttime pursuit, a
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: familiar landscape becoming unsafe, and the suspicion that whatever is
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 2: watching you understands more than an ordinary animal should. Once
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: those motifs were separated from the Dene witchcraft system that
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: gave them meaning, they could be attached to almost any
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: frightening encounter. and the name gradually became less a culturally
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: specific term than an internet diagnosis applied after somebody saw
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: something they could not immediately explain. That is where features
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: such as perfect human voice imitation, creatures calling a person's
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: name from outside, distorted deer walking upright, pale humanoids crawling
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: on all fours, unnaturally long limbs, glowing eyes, telepathic influence,
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: and things pretending to be family members begin appearing together
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: with extraordinary frequency. Some of those motifs have long histories
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: in other supernatural traditions, while other resemble modern creepypasta, horror films,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: ghost stories, cryptid lore, or the deliberately ambiguous monsters created
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: for online storytelling. Yet once enough users repeatedly label those
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: images and narratives Skinwalker, repetition itself begins producing a new
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: body of lore. The older Navajo figure does not need
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: to possess every characteristic, because the internet version acquires characteristics
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 2: through circulation. The result becomes particularly obvious when alleged skinwalker
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: encounters migrate far outside the Southwest, because stories now place
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: them in Appalachia, the Pacific Northwest, New England, Europe, and
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: practically anywhere containing a dark road or enough trees for
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 2: something unsettling to stand between them. At that point, geography
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: no longer functions as cultural context, but as horror scenery.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: A name originating in Diné traditions becomes interchangeable with terms
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: such as mimic, shapeshifter, knot deer, crawler, windigo, or whatever
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: other label happens to be circulating through the same online communities.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: The similarities between some of those modern creatures are real
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: at the level of horror storytelling, but treating them as
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 2: one ancient indigenous monster system erases the very different peoples, histories, languages,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: and traditions from which particular names emerged. Folklore Scholarship gives
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: us a useful way to understand what is happening without
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: dismissing everyone telling these stories as stupid or dishonest, because
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: digital legends behave through what folklorists describe as repetition with variation.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: A person encounters a frightening story, recognizes its structure, changes
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: detail to fit another landscape or experience, and passes it onward,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: while photographs, videos, sound clips, reaction channels, and comment sections
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: allow hundreds of other participants to to add interpretation almost immediately.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: The internet, therefore, does not merely preserve folklore. It manufactures
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: new traditional forms at enormous speed, and the Skinwalker offers
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: a particularly clear example of an older name being used
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: as raw material for a collaborative 21st century monster. The
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 2: process has not gone unnoticed among Dene peoples themselves, although
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: there is no single Navajo reaction that can honestly be
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: presented as universal. When the television program Ghost Adventures aired
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: a 2017 episode centered on Ojo Amarillo Canyon in the
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: Navajo Nation, Indian Country Today reported substantial criticism from native
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: viewers who objected to the treatment of skinwalker material. Even
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: though the production had received filming permission and host Zach
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: Baggins said other Navajo residents welcomed the crew. That disagreement
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: is useful because it prevents us from replacing one stereotype
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: with another. Some Diné people openly discuss the subject. Some
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: regard public discussion as inappropriate or unhealthy. some are irritated
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: by inaccurate portrayals, and others appeared far less concerned about
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: what outsiders do with the stories. Social media changed the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: scale of that mutation because Tony Hilleman's fiction still situated
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: the subject among Navajo characters and a recognizable southwestern landscape,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 2: whereas a short video can strip away almost every remaining
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 2: context before the first repost is finished. A malformed deer,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: an unidentified scream, a pale humanoid clip, or a staged
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: encounter can circulate through thousands of accounts whose users continually
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: add powers and rules, allowing reputation itself to build a
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: new tradition around the borrowed name. By this point, two
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: bodies of folklore occupy the same world. One rooted in
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: Diné ideas about feared human practitioners, and another produced through
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: American paranormal culture, cryptid communities, horror entertainment, and digital storytelling.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: The second is still folklore. because folklore has always changed
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: through performance, borrowing, and invention. But recognizing that it is
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: different folklore allows us to watch a modern monster being
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: created rather than projecting every new characteristic backward into the
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: older record. That distinction finally gives us a way to
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: answer the question that opened the episode. Because when someone
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: records an animal behaving strangely in Pennsylvania, here's a voice
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: in an Oregon forest, or sees a pale figure beside
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: a road and calls it a skinwalker, we no longer
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: have to argue about whether the experience itself was real
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: before noticing something much easier to demonstrate. Whatever frightened that
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: person may remain unexplained, but the name they chose has
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 2: already traveled through anthropology, fiction, paranormal literature, a Utah ranch, television,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: and the internet before arriving in their mouth, carrying a
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: history far stranger than the 20 seconds of video attached
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: to it. After following this skinwalker from DNA ideas about
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: harmful witchcraft into ethnography, family storytelling, popular fiction, paranormal investigation,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: government-adjacent research, television, and internet folklore, the most revealing thing
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: about the history is how little the oldest documented figure
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 2: resembles the creature most people now think they know. The
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: earlier material does not present an undiscovered desert animal waiting
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: to be photographed, cataloged, and given a habitat range. because
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: the fear begins with the human being whose knowledge, intentions,
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 2: and relationships have become dangerous, while the animal form functions
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: as one expression of that deeper violation rather than the
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: entire meaning of the tradition. That distinction changes almost everything
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: surrounding the familiar legend, because the strange coyote outside the
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: house is frightening not merely because it may possess supernatural abilities,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: but because someone known to the community may be concealed
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 2: behind it, carrying grievances and envy, hostility, or harmful knowledge
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: into a form that allows ordinary identity to disappear. The
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 2: grave material, accusations of illness, confession, divination, protection, and concern
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: with damaged relationships all belong to the same larger world,
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: which is why removing them and preserving only the shapeshifting
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: creates something easier to market but considerably less interesting than
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: what the ethnographic record actually contains. The older sources also
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: refused to give us the certainty that paranormal culture usually demands,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: because Cluckone's informants disagreed over which animals were possible, how
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: transformation worked, which practices belonged to which category, and how
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: particular incidents should be understood. While Cluckone himself repeatedly separated
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: what people believed from what he thought could be demonstrated,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: Brady's work decades later showed that this lack of rigid
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: uniformity was not evidence that tradition had failed. because children
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: were still telling skinwalker stories, adapting them to their own audiences,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: and preserving recognizable structures by changing details through performance, exactly
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: as living folklore normally behaves. None of that requires us
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: to decide that every modern witness is lying, because the
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: history of the word and the explanation for an experience
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: are different questions. People encounter animals they cannot immediately identify,
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: hear sounds whose sources remain hidden, misperceive shapes and poor light,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: tell stories about genuinely frightening experiences, exaggerate, remember imperfectly, perform
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: for an audience, and occasionally encounter things they cannot explain
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: at all. Yet whatever happened in a particular case does
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: not automatically tell us whether the label attached afterwards belongs
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: to the older Diné tradition. The unexplained event may remain
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: unexplained while the history of the name is still something
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: we can trace. That may be the most useful lesson
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: in the entire subject. Because folklore becomes easier to distort
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: when a powerful name begins doing more work than the
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 2: evidence behind it. Calling something a skinwalker can make an
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: ambiguous encounter feel instantly ancient, indigenous, forbidden, and supernatural. Even
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: when the story takes place thousands of miles from Navajo
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: country and contains features absent from the older record. While
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: repetition eventually makes those borrowed features appear traditional simply because
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: enough people have heard them. The process is not unique
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 2: to the skinwalker. few modern legends show it happening with
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 2: such clarity. What survives underneath all those later layers is
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 2: considerably darker than the generic cryptid anyway, because the original
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 2: fear does not depend upon discovering that an animal can
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 2: secretly become a person. It depends upon the possibility that
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: a person can become socially unrecognizable while remaining physically close,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: using knowledge, secrecy, resentment, and the violation of ordinary boundaries
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: to turn the familiar world against the people inside it.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: A monster living beyond the edge of civilization can be avoided, hunted,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: or dismissed as something belonging to the wilderness. Whereas a
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: feared witch introduced the possibility that danger is already inside
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: the network of family, neighbors, ceremony, memory, and obligation that
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 2: normally makes life secure. So if there is one image
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: worth carrying out of this story, it is possibly not
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: the pale creature from a viral video or the enormous
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: wolf from a paranormal book. because those images belong to
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: later chapters in a much longer history. The older and
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: more unsettling image is simpler. Something moves beyond the firelight,
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 2: the dogs begin reacting, tracks appear where nobody expects them,
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 2: and the people watching do not wonder what species has
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: entered the night so much as whose face might be
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: hidden behind it. That is the witch behind the monster.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: And once the human being hidden inside the older tradition
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: comes back into view, the Skinwalker becomes far stranger than
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: the creature the internet gave us. And that's the end
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: of another Occult Rejects. Hope you all enjoyed.