The Blessing Way is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the first in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series.

Anthropologist and professor Bergen McKee comes to the Navajo Reservation to research tales of witches and visit his college friend, Joe Leaphorn.

McKee and his colleague, J. R. Canfield, begin a joint field trip in the Lukachukai Mountains,[5] the canyons of the west slope.

From Horseman's aunt Old Woman Gray Rocks he learns the Navajo Wolf is believed to be an outsider from another place.

The Tsosie family hosts a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony[7] to deal with depredation of their livestock, which Joe Leaphorn attends.

A man wearing a wolf skin and holding an automatic weapon walks into the campsite, then into the tent to read papers there.

McKee cuts off the insulation and uses it to make a catapult with a sapling, to throw a sharpened pine stake, right into George the Navajo, whose gun sight obscured his view.

Hall was collecting radar data about missiles under test from a federal facility, hoping to sell his information for a huge fee.

From the federal perspective, George and Eddie did not exist; Dr. Canfield and Hall were killed in a car accident, which injured Ellen Leon and McKee.

Anthropologist Bergen McKee draws Leaphorn into the story as an old friend and colleague with whom he consults on Navajo witchcraft culture.

[8] This story has a strong theme of the Navajo philosophy of keeping peace in life, setting priorities and living by them, against the greed for money represented by Hall and his two hired helpers.

Hall is driven to make a million dollars (a lot of money in 1970) and turns to illegal means to do it, hiring one notable criminal (George) and his lesser known ally, both eager for their share if the scheme had worked.

[10] Marilyn Stasio described the history behind The Blessing Way in The New York Times: In the late 1960s, [Hillerman] said, he began to “practice” writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M.

He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins.

[10]In his 2011 book Tony Hillerman's Navajoland: Hideouts, Haunts, and Havens in the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mysteries, author Laurance D. Linford has listed the following 40 geographical locations, real and fictional, mentioned in The Blessing Way.

[11] Kirkus Reviews wrote that "authentic anthropological details; the self-effacing courage of McKee; and a particularly exciting entrapment in the canyons of this no white man's land make this an unqualified success.