8
" It had occurred to Leaphorn earlier that Baker was not, in fact, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He didn’t look like one. He had bad teeth, irregular and discolored, and an air of casual sloppiness, and something about him which suggested a quick, inquisitive, impatient intelligence. Leaphorn’s extensive experience with the FBI suggested that any of these three characteristics would prevent employment. The FBI people always seemed to be O’Malleys — trimmed, scrubbed, tidy, able to work untroubled by any special measure of intelligence. O’Malley was still talking. Leaphorn looked at him, wondering about this FBI policy. Where did they find so many O’Malleys? He had a sudden vision of an office in the Department of Justice building in Washington, a clerk sending out draft notices to all the male cheerleaders and drum majors at USC, Brigham Young, Arizona State, and Notre Dame, ordering them to get their hair cut and report for duty. "
― Tony Hillerman , Dance Hall of the Dead (Leaphorn & Chee, #2)
17
" The big man glanced at him, a friendly look. Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was accepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male — giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan — recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake “a shovel handle wide” and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. “When you are a man,” she had said, “you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time.” Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured. "
― Tony Hillerman , Listening Woman (Leaphorn & Chee, #3)
