¡Colores!; 1504; Tony Hillerman's New Mexico

Partial funding for the production of this program was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico and by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Office of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. My agent was the same thing when I sent her the lesson way she said, I called her, had any luck with it, no, and I said, why not and she said, bad book, save a lot of conversation done. Next, on Cholores, it was the same incredible cloud in the sky, my dream again, I couldn't see it.

Meaning a tone to speak out, to be heard. It's an August afternoon, years ago, I'm headed for San Francisco on what used to be called Santa Fe Chief, climbing up nine mile hill out of the river Van Valley and I run up the stair to get into the observation car because I know we're going to see that wonderful view from that ridge westward. I'm sent next to three businessmen from somewhere in the east. I'm eavesdropping and all of a sudden we're over the ridge and there it is. The zoony buttes and Mount Taylor and the whole world out there, maces and ever color in

the universe and the sky is full of wonderful monsoon, thunder clouds, little bit of lightning, verga from a couple of clouds. And this conversation beside me stops right mid-sens and these three men are looking up at the very landscape I'm looking at, a scene that has lifted my heart and caused all my worries to fall away. And one man says to the other, my God, why would anybody live out here? There's a moment of silence and I'm thinking, my God, why wouldn't everyone love to live out here?

The first question authors get when at book signings is... Where do you get your ideas? In my case, the second question is, how do you, a white man, seem to know so much about an apple of culture? And answering that requires a brief biography. Born in 1925, Tony Hillman was the youngest of three children.

He was raised in the white open spaces of Eastern Oklahoma in a little town called Sacred Heart. Imagine if you can to town, it was only 38 people. You knew everybody, you knew everybody knew you and you knew their dogs and then knew your dog and you knew which one could whip you and which one couldn't. And I think about my dad, I think about a guy, it all worked seven day a week. It was a depression, a dust bowl depression. Making a living was very, very tough going. My dad had a peculiar way of enforcing discipline. He never, ever touched one of us kids in hostility and he never spoke harshly to us. His worst penalty was to call us in and tell us that he was disappointed.

And that was a devastating blow to disappoint papa. My mother had died in childbirth, but even so, she was afraid of nothing. And she taught us kids two things in ever bulls, you're going to be born, that's one, you're going to die, that's two. What matters is what's between. We went to the boarding school for girls, a boarding school for part of why to be Indian girls, or Indian girls in general, but a bunch of us farm boys lived around there and farm girls, and so we could go to school there too. What I guess I learned there that was most obviously important was growing up knowing that Indian are just like everybody else. You grew up without us and them attitude about other races.

We were all members of the same species. We had an us and them, of course, but to us was the pantawattimizin, the seminoles, and the other farm kids. They them was the town boys, the town boys had were low-clutch shoes, they had money, so there was a class relation between us and them, right? Which I've lived with all my life. As World War II loomed, Tony found himself running a ruined farm in Dust Bowl, Oklahoma. To find a raise alfalfa, he ended up with acres of weeds. I was draft exam because my dad had died when I was 15.

My one goal in life was to get off the farm, which I promptly got drafted. There I was in the private and the army. Happy as a large, I thought. From 1943 to 1945, Tony served with Charlie Company, 410th Infantry, 103rd Division, and saw combat in France. Well, I'll admit, I had a moment or two, notably one, where I seriously considered quitting, calling the whole war all. We had captured Villa, a railroad junction, town in France, and it would have been a miserable time getting there. There we were, we were in a warehouse, we were going to get dry again and get something to eat. But instead, here comes the second lieutenant, and he says, all right, guys, fall in, we got to go again.

So we go back out into that cold rain, and we're going down a steep slope, and I'm remembering my days at being a teenage war lover, and remembering how I showed kids how the Peric Troopers landed when they made high jumps. I jumped out of our barn loft as a demonstration and wrecked my right ankle, and it was still weak. So I'm going down this slope and I think, all I've got to do to surrender, so to speak, is jump on that right ankle and I'll be out of it and get dry and fed. I finally thought, no, I don't want to miss the last chapter. This is too much excitement to lay ahead, so I became a Patreon again. Seriously wounded, Tony's legs, foot, and ankle were broken, and he had facial burns and temporary blindness. He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oakleaf Cluster, and the Purple Heart.

As charged in 1945, he found himself back in Oklahoma. When I did finally get home, I wasn't really home, it was Oklahoma City, and I went down to the USO and met a very pretty red-headed girl whose father was an independent oil man, and he needed somebody to drive a truck with all-field equipment in and out to the reservation to reopen a well. During that trip, outside of Crown Point, New Mexico, on the Navajo Reservation, Tony witnessed a Navajo cleansing ceremony. A Navajo clan was welcoming home members who had served in the war, restoring them to harmony with their people. When he unloaded the equipment, I asked a guy, a rancher there, about what I'd seen coming in, and he told me what it was, and he said, they wouldn't mind me going and watching

if I'd stay sober and behave myself. So I did both, and I watched some of this animal waste ceremony and a very impressive piece of work. That was my introduction to the Navajo culture. Then, Tony met the love of his life, Marie Elizabeth Unsner. I'd just become 21 years old, and I was feeling very depressed by all that wasted my youth. Here I was a certified male human being, didn't have a girlfriend, I was loaned some animal friend came by and said, why don't we go by the Newman Center, they're having a dance

there. I was still limping, but I was watching them dance, and I saw this charming, beautiful, groomed that dancing, and I thought, well, she looks like she might not mind if I am clumsy and limping, and sure enough, tap the guy on the shoulder, and I told him I wanted to go there, and she was willing. I'll never forget that evening, and it led to 54 years of happy married life. During the war, Tony's mother shared his letters with Beatrice Stahl, a feature writer for the Daily Oklahoma newspaper. Impressed, Ms. Stahl told Tony he should be a writer, thus the seed was planted. Tony earned his degree in journalism. All of a sudden, things have changed, instead of being anybody alive who get a job, all of a sudden all these guys were flooding out of the colleges, and it was hard to get

a job. Then I got a call, and the border news hailed. The carbon-black capital of the world up in an oil patch town in the Texas Panhandle needed a reporter. What are you offering? We're offering $55 a week, that's for a six-day week, which was $5 above the standard. So I took it right there, drove out there, and started working as a police reporter. The district attorney told me this, he said, this is a great place to start your career. He said, if you'll pass a crime and bond report, that we in this town, in this little town, we have ever crime that's mentioned at either the old or the New Testament, and they did. That's where I got the idea for Joe Leaporn, one of my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

I had a great share of there, a, a young fella, good looking, smart, and humane. I wanted to work on a state capital newspaper, so where you can cover politics, see, and anyway, we came to Santa Fe, and then I was UP, Santa Fe. I was in charge of a whole state, me and one other guy. I was boss, he was the guy I bossed, right? Santa Fe was an interesting gathering place for some of New Mexico's most colorful characters. But one of the more dignified people in the state that caught Tony's attention was Tom Popejoy, the visionary president of the University of New Mexico. I was editor of the New Mexican, and I wrote a editorial praising him to the sky.

Long time later, the chairman, the old chairman of the university, the journalist department came to see me. He said, why don't you come down here and get a master's degree, while I'm getting ready to retire, and he said, Tom Popejoy will give you a part-time job. Tom Popejoy gave me a part-time job as sort of a doer of undignified deeds. I didn't have any authority, but made sure the faculty didn't know it. I'll give you an example. We were trying to get a bill passed to authorize the University of Mexico Medical School. So, he called me, he says, Tony, you're going to get a call from the Santa Valt County sheriff. He said, he needs some help. See what you can do for him. What I need, Tony, is I need a bunch, I need 13 mattresses, so then we were running up an outward-bound school for some project, and they had a whole placement full of mattresses, so he said, he's picked up truck over it, took 13 of them and disappeared with him.

Then, up at the Senate, here comes his brother, I'm up there trying to lobby. What do you need, Hillary? I said, what do you mean, I said, well, you got my eye on you, and I said, well, you gave my brother those mattresses. I said, well, the only vote we're really bad they need is a vote in the Senate Properations Committee for that Medical School Bill. Turns out, when the vote came, you voted yes, so you can credit that medical school to have 13 old worn out mattresses. We wanted to have children. We had Anne, and we weren't able to have any more. So we thought, well, we'll adopt children, and we did. This is from an essay I wrote about growing up in a family with adopted brothers and sisters.

Because there were six children in my family, me and my five adopted siblings, the holidays always brought joyful chaos to our house. My parents said, congratulations, you're the big sister. Janet, Tony, Monica, Steve, and Dan joined our household. My parents stressed that their adoption made them special, much loved, chosen children. In the throes of hormonal adolescence, I decided I would have been happier as an only

child. I could have had a pony for Christmas. But now, when I sit down to Christmas dinner, joined by my five brothers and sisters, our parents and our own children, I'm thankful for my real family. One dreadful day when I was still a professor at the university, I had delivered a lecture that was so bad that even I recognized boring, and I decided to quit teaching. I knew I wouldn't miss administrative details. I thought I'd miss teaching, and I did for several years, but pretty soon I realized that I enjoyed writing a lot better than I did grading papers. For years, Tony struggled to find a niche for his fictional work.

In 1970, he broke into the literary world with the best seller, the blessing way. My agent was the same thing when I sent her the blessing way, she said, I called her, had any luck with it, no, and I said, why not? She said, it's a bad book, saved a lot of conversation, doesn't it? She thought it fell between the stools. It was neither a literary novel or a genre novel, mystery novel. It was halfway between bookstores, wouldn't have the slightest idea what she had to put it on. And if I re-wrote it, I thought, well, she wouldn't get rid of all any of the stuff she said. You know, that slows it down. I thought I didn't want to do that. And here's a glimpse of why I, and a lot of the rest of us love Navajos, a party.

The young matron who went to Barnard College and read a book once is explaining to the Valenshiet County Woolgrower, and to me, about Navajo mythology. Snake was one of the holy people that came up to the Earth's surface world with first man and first woman, she tells us, which is why Navajos won't kill snakes. Valenshiet County Woolgrower stops poking at the olive in his martini glass. One time he says, I got old man, madman, to get some of his son-in-law and build some fence for me over there by Redondo Mesa. I warn him about all those rattlesnakes out there in a mile pie, and he says, that's all right, snakes are friends of Navajo. So the next day, I haul some wire out there, and dead snakes are laying all over that lava rock.

So I says, hostage, madman, how come you told me rattlesnakes and Navajos are friends? And he kind of grants, and he says, we friends, but we had so damn many friends around here, we couldn't get that wire strong. I love that, a mixture of practicality and humor and all that. And I think the Navajo religion is very interesting, and I like their value system, and I like a lot of things about them. Because they're very much like the people I grew up with, they're country people. They live a long way from town, as I did. They have a tremendous sense of humor. They're very friendly and very hospitable. I like their culture because it is family oriented, people oriented. If you look at the Navajo religion, it's based on trying to keep the human being in harmony

with circumstances, with the environment, with the ecology, with the nature, with these neighbors, with the weather, with what's surrounding him, with what's coming down, with the bad luck he just had. So he is content, so he is happy, so he's in harmony. So whole's role is maintained, the beauty of life. There's something notable about that. And when you introduce yourself, you don't say, I'm a novelist.

You say, I'm the son of Lucy Grove, and my, of Potawatomi County, Oklahoma, and my father was Gus Hillerman. He came out of Missouri. You identify yourself with your, who you are in the family. Tony Hillerman's books have received international acclaim and have been awarded with the Edgar Award, Mystery Riders of America Grant Master Award, and the National Media Award to name a few. Don't do it unless you like to ride. I mean, don't do it thinking you're going to make any money out of it, because the hardest way in the world and the most risky to try to make money. Always write for yourself and the reader. And always remember, the reader is probably better educated and better informed than you

are. Don't write down to it. Only thing you know anything about it, he doesn't have a plot in your character, see. Keep those in mind. Part of your ability to ride is, is a moot you're in. Another old-time writer once told me that the writer's block, the famous writer's block, is really a four-letter word, called L-A-Z-Y. You got to force yourself to do it. I finally learned that. If you're in a bad mood right anyway, it sounds terrible now, but when you, later, when you read it, it sounds about as good as anything else you've read, you know. I hope that I have made Americans aware that it's not such a problem in New Mexico, but it's such a sort of an invincible ignorance. A lot of places about Native American cultures.

I'd like to make people understand it as a lot of richness and depth and value in these cultures. The years have been far better for me than anyone deserves. Two-thirds of them were brightened by Marie, who rarely saw a disaster in which she couldn't find something to laugh about. And a lot of them may tense and nerve-wracking and interesting and joyful by what happens when you're bringing up six children. My three-fourths of a century to sum it up have been notable for fortunate outcomes and

rare disappointments. This coloris program is available on Home Video Cassette for 1995, plus shipping and handling. To order, call 1-800-2856-63.