Tracking Bear is the ninth book in the Ella Clah series. I’ve been reading the series from the first one, Blackening Song. During the process I’ve gained insight into the Navaho worldview. This is a good thing for me, because I grew up in Northern Arizona and went to school with a number of Navaho children who had been taken from their families in order to receive an “education.” I’m starting to realize how difficult it was for these children who were my classmates, but didn’t quite fit in.
Ella Clah is a Navaho Tribal Police Officer, in charge of the Special Investigation unit located in the northeastern corner of New Mexico. She was trained by the FBI and gave up her job as an FBI agent to work for the Navaho Nation.
Ella is constantly torn between roles. She is a Navaho woman, a single mother who is about three in this book, a daughter of a traditional Navaho woman, a police officer with both special training and special insight. She often has to stretch herself to accommodate all of these roles.
In Tracking Bear the murder of a police officer and two tribal representatives require Ella to use all of her experience and intuition. The background story is one of decreased revenue for the Tribe and therefore decreased funding for the police. An opportunity to develop a nuclear power station that could provide funds for the Tribe for many years has split the Tribe between the pro-nuclear people who see the money the project offers, and the older, more conservative members of the Tribe who remember the devestation caused when the Tribe let outsiders mine for uranium in the 1970s. Ella’s investigation leads her right into the center of this controversy.
Like all of the Ella Clah books, I like this one. The characters have developed over the nine volumes and I find myself looking forward to finding out more about them in the next volume. I highly recommend this book and the entire series.
Rating: 8