Dallin
A Conversation With Braidy Chee: Heritage, Respect, and What This Paper Won't Print
DALLIN. Every October, Detective Braidy Chee says the same question finds her, usually from someone new to town or in for the festival. She's Dallin PD's detective, she's Diné, and by now she has a practiced answer, and it's about respect, not folklore. The Chronicle sat down with her this week to talk about it directly, and about where she comes from.
You get asked this a lot?
Every year, usually right around now. People mean it as a fun question. I don't think most of them have thought about where it actually comes from, or that it's not really theirs to ask about.
Before we get there: tell us a little about your own background. Where'd you grow up?
Partly here, partly on the Navajo Nation, down near the Arizona line. I spent most of my summers with my grandmother. My clan comes through her side of the family. That's how it works for us, your identity passes through your mother, not your father. She's the one who taught me most of what I still carry with me, more than school ever did.
What's something from that upbringing you still carry with you day to day?
Small things, mostly. A handful of words in Diné bizaad my grandmother refused to let me forget, even after we moved. The habit of introducing yourself by your clans before anything else. Who your people are matters before your job title does, and I still think that way even standing in a Dallin PD interview room. And a real sense of what gets talked about openly and what doesn't. That last one's relevant to why we're having this conversation at all.
That's a good place to land it. What do you tell people who ask about skinwalkers?
That it's not a story I'm going to tell them, and not because I'm being cagey for effect. Some things belong to a specific people and a specific faith, and they're not entertainment, especially not Halloween entertainment. I get to decide what I share about where I come from. Most of it, I don't share outside my own family, and that's not a mystery. That's just respect.
Does it bother you when it comes up?
Less than it used to. Mostly it just tells me something about the person asking. I'd rather talk about almost anything else: my actual job, for instance, which is right there and a lot more interesting than people assume.
The Chronicle asked you to talk to us directly this issue instead of writing something on its own. Why'd you say yes?
Because I'd rather a paper ask me than guess, or run with it anyway because it's spooky and it's October. Most papers wouldn't have made that call. Jude gives me grief that the one thing I've brought to this relationship is standards. I'll take it as a compliment.
Anything you do want people to know, this time of year?
That Dallin's got plenty of its own stories: the lights out at the crossing, the hoodoos, all of it. They belong to all of us here, together. Start there. There's enough mystery in this town without borrowing someone else's.