Hillerman is, at least in the fiction department, the best I've come across on the Navaho...
From some Lit. Crit./Bio. resources (Gale's):
(Hillerman) has been honored by organizations ranging from the Navajo Tribal Council to the Mystery Writers of America. . . Sympathy alone, however, is not enough. Indeed, Hillerman knows that sympathy unchecked by rigor is condescension. He works hard to make his descriptions of Navajo culture as accurate as possible. In Carol Cleveland's entry in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1985), Hillerman notes:
I think the setting must be genuinethe reader must be shown the Indian reservation as it is today. . . . More than that, the details must be exactly accuratefrom the way a hogan is built, to the way a sweat bath is taken, to the way it looks, and sounds, and smells at an Enemy Way Ceremonial at 2:00 A.M. on a wintery morning.
Some of that accuracy can be achieved through research. I think I've read everything that's been written about Navajo history, Hillerman said in a 1987 interview with Betty and Riley Parker. I read the proceedings of the Smithsonian Institute, minutes of tribal council meetings, The Navajo Times, The Hopi Weekly. At other times, fieldwork is necessary: I cross-examine my Navajo friends, he reported to Bulow, and hang shamelessly around trading posts, police substations, rodeos, rug auctions, and sheep dippings. Although Hillerman has committed his fair share of factual errors, and although he limits his use of setting to insure that his descriptions of Navajo customs and values are germane to the plot, his general sense of Navajo culture is accurate. Little wonder, then, that in 1986 the Navajo Tribal Council honored him for his sensitive portrayal of the strength and dignity of traditional Navajo culture. As the award declares, he is truly a Special Friend of the Dineh, a writer of mystery novels who is as serious about setting as he is about plot, as interested in culture as in crime. (Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Gale Group, 1999)
