If you want another example of the difference between Native American Skinwalker lore and white America’s (find me a black person fondling crystals in Sedona and I’ll issue a correction) embarrassing Mulderfication thereof, one need look no further than Utah’s 480-acre Sherman Ranch, AKA Skinwalker Ranch. The muddled mythology of this supposed paranormal hotbed reads like a veritable roll call of late 20th century fringe culture supernatural obsessions. UFOs. Interdimensional vortices. Sasquatches. Psychic disturbances. Cattle mutilation. Glowing orbs. Ghostly apparitions. They’re all present and scientifically unaccounted for in one dusty, northern corner of the Beehive State.

It was investigative journalist George Knapp, best known for his frequent presence on talk radio’s paranormal mecca Coast to Coast AM, who first called “Jinkies!” on Sherman Ranch. Likewise, it was Knapp who invoked the Skinwalker legend in explaining some of the area’s countless tales of things that make any variety of ridiculous onomatopoeias in the night (for example, I have no idea what a “large humanoid creature” crawling out of a “glowing portal” sounds like). Knapp’s resulting two-part 2002 newspaper feature “Path of the Skinwalker,” which appeared in Sin City’s alt weekly “the Las Vegas Mercury,” is thousands of words worth of largely anonymous testimony (such as that of “a scientist” who has “a long list of peer-reviewed papers about cutting-edge scientific concepts”), grossly subjective reporting and references to the movie “Predator.”

What does any of this have to do with Skinwalkers? Well, according to Junior Hicks, helpfully identified in Knapp’s article as “the area’s unofficial historian for all things weird,” the local Ute Indian tribe believes that the ranch is cursed by evil Skinwalking Navajo spirits, who have turned the area into a dimensional base camp for their malevolent magical shenanigans. Hicks, the only source cited for Knapp’s Skinwalker info, goes on: “The Utes say the ranch is `the path of the Skinwalker.’ Tribe members are strictly forbidden from setting foot on the property.”

Okay… but ghosts, aliens and the Predator? What does any of that have to do with Skinwalkers? For the sake of progressing, let me rephrase: why, given all of the various phenomena reported at the ranch, did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article? The Ute story is mentioned all of two times, and even Knapp concludes that it fails to explain most of the mysterious happenings.

Wednesday’s post covered my thoughts on some of the larger socio-cultural ramifications of the larger proliferation of the Skinwalker legend. Self-hating white liberals reductively correlate Native American tradition with nature, spiritualism and, most condescendingly, innocent simplicity, brand it as “true” American heritage, sell it to other self-hating white liberals and think of it as reparations. The resulting mysticism Americans associate with Native Americans is once removed from their own cultural experience in a way that Bigfoot or crop circles aren’t. In the end, the same people who wouldn’t even skim a story called “Path of the UFO” will devour a narrative piece that has the slightest glaze of exaggerated indigent tribalism.

But none of that is Knapp’s fault. Homeboy’s just making a living. Obviously, Knapp, who would probably make a better salesman than he does a journalist, understands that the Indian curse angle is more compelling to most people than the psychic vortex angle, accuracy be damned. (On a side note, I always thought it was funny how paranormal researchers always try to back up their claims using the legends of primitive cultures. “We’ve got historical evidence! See, these scientifically ignorant superstitious guys who worshipped trees drew pictures of UFOs! If we made up UFOs, how did these people who thought lightening was a demon know about them?”)

Anyway, I want to end this week on a positive note. So, why did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article?

Because Skinwalker is an awesome word. Seriously. Even deprived of all cultural associations. It’s an unfamiliar pairing of two familiar concepts that induces an evocative mental image. Skinwalker. Totally wicked!

Though, I can’t help but think that conclusions like these are why the Navajo don’t like to talk about Skinwalkers.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers – especially with monster-obsessed whiteys who invariably convert rich oral tradition into airport-ready supernatural thrillers (Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers”) and straight-to-DVD horror flicks (James Isaac’s “Skinwalkers”). That means that, assuming the four or five template-based paranormal blogs that feature excitable Skinwalker posts aren’t written by defecting Navajo tribesmen (a fairly safe bet), it’s difficult to separate the authentic Skinwalker lore from the hyperactive Native American fan fic of cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes. For every believable, richly folkloric Navajo Skinwalker legend, there are two or three stories about this one time really late at night when a crazy manimal totally attacked someone (I swear, it happened to my cousin’s friend).

According to some (supposed) Navajo legends, during the Long Walk, when the U.S. government forced over 9,000 Navajos to take a 300-mile trudge to newly established reservation land near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Skinwalkers were the first to reach the destination. As Navajo women keeled over in the heat, and exhausted men struggled with unconscious children, Skinwalking witches simply transformed into coyotes and crows, which easily sprinted or flew all the way to the reservation. Despite the Skinwalkers’ traditionally evil nature, they are distinctly Navajo and, therefore, proved vital to the preservation of Navajo heritage in the wake of the cultural upheaval brought on by external forces.

Granted, there are plenty of Navajo tales that portray Skinwalkers in a more traditionally antagonistic light. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Native Skinwalker story that offered anything but a watered-down cocktail of mystery and terror. They essentially play out like this:

One night a New Mexico state trooper was patrolling the desert around a Navajo reservation. Suddenly, he noticed a strange shape rushing up

alongside his car. The shape resolved into a hideous creature that ran as fast as the officer’s sedan could accelerate. The monster kept pace with the trooper for miles before finally dropping back and disappearing into the darkness. To this day, the officer refuses to patrol that accursed stretch of land.

The same non-native America that repackaged Native American art as kitschy fetish crafts and airbrushed paintings of wolves has turned Skinwalkers, who have a uniquely dynamic relationship with their origin culture, into generic monsters that lurk in the shadows and jump out at passing victims.

And I don’t think that’s a negative a thing.

For decades Native Americans have fought to retain their unique heritage and identities in the face of an ever homogenizing American culture. For most countries – countries with separate and independent geographies – it’s a low stakes game. Germanic tradition, for example, can be assimilated into America’s aggregate culture without losing its physical roots in Germany, or its emotional and intellectual roots in the Germans that still reside there. Native Americans only have America, and most of that was taken from them. The borders they do have – both geographical and cultural – are shrinking. The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes think of the beings as mystical native werewolves – feral and savage, or magic and prescient, or sexy and strong. Cold. Uni-dimensional. Non-dynamic. Inhuman.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the Fox Mulder wannabes are ignorant and xenophobic and maybe even mildly racist. But these things – ignorance, xenophobia, racism – build boundaries between people and cultures. These things strengthen borders.

During the Long Walk, the white men let the Skinwalkers charge on, unmolested, toward Fort Sumner because they saw them as animals. Because they didn’t recognize them for what they truly were – scouts and emissaries; patriarchs and magicians; Navajo. Perhaps today the Native Americans depend on white men to sell cheap headdresses and inauthentic drums and synthetic dream catchers, to make terrible straight-to-DVD horror movies, so all eyes are looking down at cash registers or through camera lenses while, unnoticed, a flock of crows passes by overhead.

In European legends, the bite of the werewolf involuntarily turns a hapless victim into a fuzzy-wuzzy killing machine. In American pop culture, zombies prey on the flesh of living innocents who then become skulking face gnawers themselves. In mother Russia, clock punches you. All of these contemporary Western tales portray human atrocities committed by victims of circumstance – upstanding citizens who happen to get cursed, infected or punched by clock, and then go on to act as involuntary proxies for the new and accidental darkness inside them. According to certain Navajo lore, Skinwalkers – dark witches who possess the ability to, among other things, transform into animals – are former high priests who have murdered blood relatives. In other words, it’s a story of active unholy transformation knowingly catalyzed by conscious decisions.

Remember the Algonquian story of the Wendigo – the man who engaged in cannibalism and, as a result, turned into an eternally suffering flesh-craving beast? Skinwalkers are similar in that they are men (occasionally women) who undergo a monstrous transformation by way of a culturally forbidden act (in this case, intra-familial murder). (Granted, there are versions of the story in which Skinwalkers are simply Anakin-esque flock strayers who end up on the wrong side of the force, but I would assume that that’s equally frowned upon.) Whereas the Wendigos are forever damned to tormented lives of feral scavenging and desperate murder, Skinwalkers are powerful, deliberate and feared. Both legends, however, use the threat of once-human monstrosities to demonstrate the corruptive power of sin (“sin” meaning, in this case, culture-specific social malfeasance).

Lots of folks think that Skinwalkers are kind of like Florida’s Skunk Ape – culturally variant analogs of a familiar supernatural beasties – and regard them as Native American werewolves, but that’s totally not even close to right. Unlike werewolves, Skinwalkers transform at will, and can change into any animal of their choosing. These transformations allow Skinwalkers to travel swiftly and easily elude capture. Their shapeshifting abilities even extend to their voices, which can mimic any animal or human sound, up to and including “Sky Pilot” by human band “The Animals.” They can read thoughts, and, in some versions of the legend, even project themselves, by way of a hypnotizing stare, into their victims’ bodies, which then become mere skins in which the monsters walk (though the name “Skinwalker” actually [boringly] comes from their proclivity toward animal skin attire). As acolytes of the Witchery Way (a form of Navajo magic centered on death and corpses), Skinwalkers can use enchanted bone dust to paralyze, or even kill, their chosen victims.

Mostly, though, Skinwalkers are scary because they are self-aware, they are clever and they are malicious. They are monsters because they chose to become monsters. This Navajo legend holds individuals accountable for bringing evil into the world; werewolves and all those other stories? The excuses of desperate children pointing their guilty fingers toward the darkness of caves and the mystery of nighttime forests.

Wednesday: The boys (and girls) who cried, “Skinwalker!”