The Dark Wind is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the fifth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, published in 1982.
Reviewers found this to have a "classic Hillerman plot", involving a plane crash, possibly illegal drugs, and a vandalized windmill on the Joint-Use lands.
[1] It is "relentlessly introspective" and "with Hillerman's moodily fine prose in full Southwest regalia", as the Hopi and the Navajo ways are contrasted, and Chee explores a white man's motivation, of revenge.
[2] Jim Chee is assigned four cases to solve by Captain Largo, his new boss at the Tuba City, Arizona office of the Navajo Tribal Police.
One is to ascertain who stole jewelry from the Burnt Water trading post, and to find the paroled man suspected of the thievery, Joseph Musket.
The airplane was carrying illegal cargo, likely drugs, and the DEA agents, in particular T. L. Johnson, are possessive of their law enforcement turf.
Later, Albert Lomatewa provides the exact date of death and how the corpse looked, hands and feet flayed as if by a Navajo "skinwalker", or witch.
Chee meets Jake West, owner of the Burnt Water trading post, where the jewelry theft was reported, and briefly the employer of Musket.
Chee presses Cowboy Dashee to arrange an interview with the Hopi elder responsible for a shrine near the windmill.
From the pilot's sister, Chee learns a meeting is set up for transfer of the drugs during a private Hopi kachina ceremony.
Chee arrives at Sityatki, the old Hopi village, having retrieved the two aluminum suitcases filled with cocaine from their hiding place in the sand at the crash site.
As this encounter unfolds, a rare intense rainstorm breaks the long drought, rapidly making dangerous rivers in the usually dry arroyos.
Not wanting to be criticized, Chee hurls the other suitcase full of cocaine into the raging river, all other active cases having been solved.
Strongly atmospheric but far less suspenseful than People of Darkness, this second case for Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police (who's also an apprentice Navajo chanter/shaman) moves into the neighboring Hopi culture on the joint Southwest reservation--as Chee ponders possible connections among a quartet of simultaneous cases.
A few nice twists, with Hillerman's moodily fine prose in full Southwest regalia; but this time the darkness is murky almost as often as it's chilling--in the slowest, most relentlessly introspective case yet for the Navajo Tribal Police.
This is a long-standing dispute, and even the resolution mentioned in the story, a 1974 public law and following court cases assigning one large area for the Hopi, requiring thousands of Navajos to move, did not resolve the issue.
Further, the people of each tribe have different patterns of settlement (Navajo are dispersed over larger amount of land, originally from their occupation as sheepherders, while the Hopi are generally settled in villages, raise corn, make art and jewelry).
"[7][8] 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 63 geographical locations mentioned in The Dark Wind.
[11] It starred Lou Diamond Phillips as Jim Chee, Fred Ward as Joe Leaphorn and Gary Farmer as Cowboy Dashee.