Case file · Non-fiction & research literature
'Some Kind of Power' (Brady, 1984)
Folklorist Margaret K. Brady's University of Utah Press study of the skinwalker stories Navajo children tell one another.
1984 CE · 35.67, -109.06 · status: account
The account
Brady found that children's stories range from full life-and-death struggles to partial encounters that end in a stand-off or with the skinwalker scared away from the hogan. She also noted that non-Native retellings tend to become roadside chase stories, and that Navajo children sometimes recast European scary stories with skinwalkers in them.
The sceptical view
Brady studies storytelling and what it does for children and communities; she does not argue that skinwalkers physically exist.