The Ghostway Analysis

The Ghostway has a mysterious, secretive plot that keeps the reader’s interest. One of them is the ongoing tension between the Navajo Tribal Police and the FBI. Neither law enforcement group trusts or respects the other. The Navajo police thinks that the FBI is a lying cheating no good organization. The FBI thinks they don’t have to take orders or listen to Indian police to solve a case, throughout this story between these two organizations there is nothing but lies and secrets whether it was finding clues, discovering missing bodies or finding incorrectly done ceremonies. The FBI won’t tell the Navajo police about crime and murders in their own town. All of these secrets are kept throughout the story until they realize that under circumstances

change when Gorman gets killed and now the FBI and the Navajo police have to set aside their differences to find the murderer.
In this story The Ghostway is the set of Navajo religious traditions. One of them is the ritual for preparing someone for death, and for preparing a corpse for burial. Both rituals play a role in the novel, The Ghostway that’s a ritual cleansing ceremony for those who’ve come in contact with a chindi, or malevolent ghost. Navajo beliefs about death are an important part of their burial rituals and the Ghostway ceremony. In This Chee finds bodies that have correctly done ceremonies which tells him that a Navajo might be behind this.
Connected with this is the conflict Chee feels about his identity as a Navajo (he’s even studying to become a yata’ali, or Navajo “singer” – a healer/shaman).

He’s committed to his identity and proud of it; he lives as a traditional Navajo and he takes pride in Navajo ways. On the other hand, Chee is practical enough to see that many Navajos live in poverty, and that his own career could be much advanced by leaving the Reservation and living in the larger, dominant-culture world. Matters are complicated by the fact that Chee’s girlfriend, Mary Landon, is a white woman. For much of their relationship, she envisions Chee leaving the Reservation and taking a position with the FBI or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so that they can raise their children in the “white world. There are a few FBI agents, some members of the Los Angeles Police force and a mentally twisted paid assassin who aren’t particularly engrossing. Margaret Billy Sosi, the Navajo teenager who runs away to find her grandfather and shows more quick thinking bravery than the other characters. They hold clues to the mystery surrounding him, and what’s especially interesting is that at first, no-one wants to listen to them because they’re elderly and some of them are not always

coherent.