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The ultimate act of disaffiliation isn’t littering or fraud, of course, but violence against your own people. When the Navajo Nation—the Diné, in their language—were rounded up and confined to a reservation in the 1860s, a terrifying phenomenon became more prominent in their culture. The warrior skills that had protected the Diné for thousands of years were no longer relevant in this dismal new era, and people worried that those same skills would now be turned inward, against society. That strengthened their belief in what were known as skinwalkers, or yee naaldlooshii.

Skinwalkers were almost always male and wore the pelt of a sacred animal so that they could subvert that animal’s powers to kill people in the community. They could travel impossibly fast across the desert and their eyes glowed like coals and they could supposedly paralyze you with a single look. They were thought to attack remote homesteads at night and kill people and sometimes eat their bodies. People were still scared of skinwalkers when I lived on the Navajo Reservation in 1983, and frankly, by the time I left, I was too.

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Virtually every culture in the world has its version of the skinwalker myth. In Europe, for example, they are called werewolves (literally “man-wolf” in Old English). The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. Modern Anglo-American culture doesn’t recognize the skinwalker threat but has its own version. Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006. Rampages are usually defined as attacks where people are randomly targeted and four or more are killed in one place, usually shot to death by a lone gunman. As such, those crimes conform almost exactly to the kind of threat that the Navajo seemed most to fear on the reservation: murder and mayhem committed by an individual who has rejected all social bonds and attacks people at their most vulnerable and unprepared. For modern society, that would mean not in their log hogans but in movie theaters, schools, shopping malls, places of worship, or simply walking down the street.

 

Based on that definition, here is a chart showing the number of skinwalkers and their mass shootings in the US over the last 30 years. Note that from 1995 through 2004 there were 29 mass shootings; from 2005 through 2014 there were 57, almost double this earlier rate. And from 2015 through 2024 there were 87, over 3 times that earlier rate. Note that these 30 years coincide with the advent of the digital age, the internet and social media. So, why does it appear that over the last 30 years our society is generating a sharp increase in skinwalkers, individuals committing murder and mayhem who have rejected almost all social bonds and attack people at their most vulnerable?  The answer lies on the impact of social media on society, and as Junger states, this “shows how completely detribalized this country has become.” Our neurological genetic predisposition, the tribal ethos, is no longer relevant in modern life. Social media keeps our eyeballs on the screen and in our silos, and makes big money doing so. But as individuals in modern society this isolates and divides us. We are now very far from our evolutionary roots.

Chapter 16

Skinwalkers

The following three paragraphs are direct quotes from the book Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger, May 2016, page numbers added for reference.

Video Summary

5 minute video

6 minute read

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States