Native American mythology and alien abduction mythology are juxtaposed in the episodes of the television series 'The X-Files' entitled 'Anasazi,' 'The Blessing Way' and 'Paper Clip.' Their juxtaposition and these three episodes, which are evaluated within the context of the television series as a whole, represent what could be considered a combination of social critique and aesthetic complexity which challenges the logic of mainstream television and has made 'The X-Files' one of the most controversial and most popular series of the 1990s.
Whenever you can have an episode that has a white buffalo and a spaceship in it, it's got to be wonderful. and this one works in strange ways.
- Chris Carter, on "Paper Clip"
Chris Carter's comment about The X-Files episode "Paper Clip" is typical of X-Files discourse: playful, possibly a joke, possibly a defense of the series, and possibly an allusion, in this case to the famous definition of surrealism in which a sewing machine and an umbrella meet on an operating table. It is also a reference to the juxtaposition of Native American mythology and alien abduction mythology that takes place in "Paper Clip" and the two episodes that precede it. The white buffalo represents the construction of Native American identity in those episodes, loosely based on Navajo culture but grafted from many sources. The spaceship represents the trope of alien abduction, symbolizing the threat of colonization and conspiracy, as well as a whole series of discursive "extreme possibilities." Their juxtaposition represents what I will label "X-Files postmodernism," a combination of social critique and aesthetic complexity that challenges the logic of mainstream television. making The X-Files one of the most controversial, and most watched, television shows of the 1990s. By consistently undermining audience expectations and finding new ways to make the familiar strange, The X-Files creates a space in which to rethink the representation of Native Americans.
In this article. I will examine the "Anasazi" episode arc consisting of "Anasazi," "The Blessing Way," and "Paper Clip"' Focusing on those episodes in the context of The X-Files as a whole. I will explore some of the issues that have made them so fascinating to viewers: the combination of Navajo mythology and X-Files mythology, the portrayal of the Navajo reservation, and the focus on translation as a cultural exchange. I will argue that the postmodern nature of The X-Files enables it to move beyond the stereotypes that dominate the representation of Native Americans on television. In the "Anasazi" arc, the Navajo, as word healers, represent the power of the oral tradition as an antihegemonic force; their ceremonies offer viewers an alternative to the "false history" of file U.S. government, a space in which to seek the truth without the threat of government violence. As code-talkers in the series, they are complicit with America's struggle for world domination, bearers of a language in which the government's most dangerous secrets are written.
X-Files Postmodernism: The Truth is Out There
In "Postmodern Introductions" in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Gerald Vizenor claims that "*[t]he word postmodernism is a clever condition: an invitation to narrative chance in a new language game and an overture to amend the formal interpretations and transubstantiation of tribal literatures" (4). The fact that "postmodernism" is such a problematic term. changing definitions every time it is used, makes it an appropriate vehicle for the discussion of the Native American trickster figure, the "comic holotrope" who defies categorization and fixed meaning. Although The X-Files is clearly not a Native American text, its postmodern nature enables it to allow openness, chance, contradiction, and play in its representation of Native American characters and subjects and to exceed the sympathetic, liberal perspective in which "[t]ribute to the tribes has seldom been much more than postcolonial and racial overcompensation with smooth adjectives" (Vizenor 193). Keeping my definition of "postmodernism" loose and transformative, I will explore some of the ways in which the presence of Native Americans in the "Anasazi" arc is informed by, and informs, The X-Files's deconstruction of hegemonic forces and master narratives.
The plot of the episode arc begins with "Anasazi," in which a teenager, Eric Hosteen, on a Navajo reservation discovers an alien body, and an anarchist called "The Thinker" successfully hacks into the U.S. Defense Department's MJ files, which contain top-secret evidence of the U.S. government's involvement with alien technologies. FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully receive the files and discover that they have been encrypted in Navajo. To escape the danger posed to them by the government, they retreat to New Mexico, where they meet Eric's grandfather Albert Hosteen, who was a Navajo code-talker in World War II and who may be able to translate the files. Mulder discovers a pile of alien bodies in a buried boxcar and is nearly killed: In "The Blessing Way," Mulder is restored to life by the Navajo Blessing Way ritual: meanwhile, Scully discovers a computer chip implanted in her neck and undergoes hypnosis to try to recover the memory of her abduction experience (chronicled in the episodes "Duane Barry" and "Ascension"). In "Paper Clip" the two agents track down Victor Klemper, a Nazi scientist involved in the conspiracy. Klemper leads them to an archive of government files in an abandoned mine in West Virginia, where they find files containing tissue samples from every American born since the 1950s, and where Mulder sees a spaceship lifting off into the night sky. The episode ends with a confrontation between FBI Assistant Director Skinner and the so-called Cancer Man, who is the head of the international conspiracy that created the MJ files. Although he is forced to surrender the files to Cancer Man, Skinner claims that Albert Hosteen has memorized and disseminated their contents among the Navajo people, thus foiling the conspiracy's desire to have the evidence destroyed.(1)
The plot represents several aspects of X-Files postmodernism, with its dramatic shifts between serious subjects and campy humor, its overwhelming complexity and web of intertextual allusion, and its layers of meaning that are directed toward many different levels, depending on viewers' familiarity with the series. Some episodes, such as "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and "Humbug," push the postmodern envelope so far that the authors of "Rewriting Popularity: The Cult Files" call it "the first truly post-postmodern television show" (Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein 35). The X-Files parodies its own parodies and alludes to its own allusions. Viewers may need to watch the pre-credits sequence of "Anasazi" several times before they hear the reference to Roswell, New Mexico (the site of a supposed UFO crash and the beginning of UFO mythology in the United States), in the weather report playing in the Hosteens' kitchen. or see the title of the book 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, which "The Thinker" is reading. Unlike series that focus on the historically documented evils of the government in documentary style (which ultimately supports audience assumptions about power and authority), The X-Files combines sincerity with parody and high drama with camp until it blurs the distinction between "the real" and the absurd. The series is remarkably heterogeneous, containing ambiguous, politically subversive "conspiracy" episodes as well as relatively straightforward "monster" episodes; however skillfully disguised as a mainstream television show, The X-Files "defies casual viewing" (Flaherty and Schilling 38).
These aspects of The X-Files connect it to the Native American trickster figure, who "transforms, or deconstructs, any definition of him even as he provokes one into making a definitions." Trickster texts "function to evoke richness of meaning not reducible to any unified 'icon,' An intrinsic, essential heterogeneity explains tile endless proliferating of the stories: there can always be more because a Trickster-Transformer cannot come to any rationally conclusive end" (Kroeber 78). Of course, there are many crucial differences between a Navajo myth and The X-Files, but their creative juxtaposition challenges viewers to explore connections between them that are not often initiated by prime-time television shows, in which Native American traditions are usually reduced to one unified icon with a single, explicit function. Although The X-Files is certainly guilty of romanticizing and stereotyping the Navajo in the episodes. the series' postmodernism evokes a "richness of meaning" in which no single representation is fixed.
The following dialogue between Mulder and Albert Hosteen suggests some of the ways in which those issues are played out in the "Anasazi" arc. Albert, the enigmatic code-talker, functions as a trickster figure, continually frustrating Mulder's desire for a simple explanation of the mystery of the Anasazi. Having come to New Mexico to seek the truth about the MJ files, Mulder seeks Hosteen's perspective only to become more confused:
HOSTEEN: You are prepared to accept the truth, aren't you? To sacrifice yourself to it?
MULDER: I don't understand.
HOSTEEN: There was a tribe of Indians who lived here more than six hundred years ago. Their name was Anasazi. It means "the ancient aliens." No evidence of their fate exists. Historians say they disappeared without a trace: They say that they will not sacrifice themselves to the truth.
MULDER: And what is the truth?
HOSTEEN: Nothing disappears without a trace. [Pause]
MULDER: You think they were abducted?
HOSTEEN: By visitors who come here still.
Further questioning leads Mulder nowhere: "What's buried out there?" he asks, and Hosteen answers, "Lies. You will see for yourself." This conversation, in addition to providing some background to the mystery of the Anasazi, introduces several crucial themes of the "Anasazi" arc: the truth, aliens, and the "trace."
Some critics of The X-Files claim that its now-famous slogan contradicts its subversive elements: "The assertion that 'The Truth is Out There' runs counter to postmodernism's doctrine of disbelief" (Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein 35). Although it is questionable that: postmodern texts are necessarily cynical and nihilistic, I would argue that the slogan has become increasingly ironic as the series has developed, giving way to slogans such as "Trust no one," "Believe the lie," "Apology is policy," and "Deceive, inveigle, obfuscate." The original slogan has also been revised within the series through stroh statements as "the truth is in there" and "the truth is in you." "Paper Clip" ends with a typical exchange: Sitting by Scully's sister Melissa's empty hospital bed, Mulder says, "I believe that what we're looking for is in the X-Files. I'm more certain than ever that the truth is in there." Scully cynically replies, "I've heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want am the answers." Like every other aspect of The X-Files, the slogan "The truth is out there" has multiple meanings, from the most explicit to the most subtle, which are teased out by dedicated viewers whose ideas have affected the series on every level. Grace Lee, a Ian on an X-Files e-mail discussion list, recently responded to the episode title "Post-Modern Prometheus" with the following statement about the role of "the truth" in The X-Files: "And if you want to get into the 'post-modern' aspect of the title, we can go back to the object - or 'truth' - which, in the most simplistic terms of post-modern angst: there is none. Everything is filtered in true way or another - through history, through perceptions, through agenda." Her description of postmodern angst in The X-Filex represents what many fans now believe about the series and its message: Rather than one truth, however "out there," The X-Files posits multiple truths based on cultural, racial, and gendered perceptions.
In this context, Hosteen's assertion that "nothing disappears without a trace" is a defense of the truths that have been filtered out of history - a challenge to viewers, through Mulder, to examine the process through which certain truths have been erased and to attempt to recover them. As such, it is part of The X-Files' sympathetic approach to Navajo culture. However, Mulder will not find the truth; at most he will merely recover its trace. The pleasure of the text is based on a frustration of the audience's desire to know and an underlying assumption that what can be known is too complex to be revealed on the FOX network. The show trains viewers to read between the lines. to "trust no one," and to recognize the subjective nature of "the truth." The next time we hear the words "nothing disappears without a trace," their meaning will have completely changed: they are spoken by Cancer Man as he attempts to kill Mulder, a context that seriously undermines their status as "the truth" about Navajo experience. Under close analysis, even Hosteen's words reveal a profound contradiction: The truth is in the alien bodies buried "out there," yet Hosteen characterizes the bodies as lies.
Just as the slogan "The truth is out there" is troubling to many critics of The X-Files, the association of the Navajo with aliens can be interpreted as all example of the cultural "othering" that has always taken place on television: The Navajo are "alien" because they are not like the majority. Yet aliens in The X-Files play a complex role that exceeds that of cultural other: they are always both "predator and prey, colonized and colonizer" (Badley 151). Symbols of the discursively inexplicable, aliens in The X-Files represent a "culture" that we cannot successfully read, as well as a "culture" that is reading us. Even the alien bodies that are buried on the reservation retain the power to trailsform themselves and to frustrate scientific categorization. which is associated with the Trickster. When Mulder interprets Hosteen's cryptic statement. "Nothing disappears with a trace," as a statement about alien abduction, he multiplies its potential meanings.
The fact that the Navajo recognize the alien bodies and the more compelling fact that visitors "come [to the reservation] still" indicate a direct connection between the alienated culture and the alien culture that Mulder longs to see. Yet Hosteen's comment complicates the issue by associating the alien bodies with the government; they are not Native American bodies but government secrets, evidence of the genocide of native peoples. Rather than explicitly alluding to the government's oppression and destruction of the Navajo people, the "Anasazi" arc relies on holocaust-like images of alien bodies, implicating the government in a history of violence against the Navajo without relying on the cliched portrait of the "doomed Indian" or noble savage.(2) In fact, we are left knowing very little about Hosteen's relationship to the government or to the "visitors who come here still," leaving Hosteen a mysterious agency in contrast to Mulder's vulnerability and lack of information.
Hosteen's statement that "nothing disappears without a trace" also inevitably recalls the role of "the trace" in post-structural criticism, suggesting that Mulder will seek the truth in the nature of (Navajo) language as well as in the boxcar on the reservation. In his book Forked Tongues, David Murray uses the concept of"the trace" to describe Native American sign languages, which have baffled all attempts at translation: "It is hard to think of a better example of Derrida's idea of 'the trace,' of writing whose presence actually depends on the absence of that which it stands for, and yet contains within it the implication that it is a part of what it represents" (21). Kroeber connects Native American picture writing to the trace through Derrida's concept of the absent author:
Derrida's "trace" . . . could be physically illustrated by archaeological hypotheses about mysterious carved signs of a lost civilization. It is by regarding all writing as inscriptions by people who have disappeared, by detaching words from the culturally specific context of a single "living," i.e. spoken, language among many, that the deconstructionists argue against any unitary meaning to a text. We call only construct provisional readings, as fragmentary as the inscription itself. (77)
Such provisional readings challenge the stereotype that Native American language is immediately accessible to white ethnographers and translators due to its "primitive" nature. Instead, Native American language is revealed to be provisional and fragmented, even quintessentially postmodern. Hosteen's reference to the trace of the Anasazi, then, foregrounds his role as the translator of Navajo language and culture who consistently frustrates Mulder's desire for easy answers. As a trace, the Anasazi will continue to signify that which defies the assumptions of Western historians as well as the impossibility of finding "the truth."
My claim that Albert Hosteen functions as a trickster within a trickster text departs froth Annette M. Taylor's perspective on Native American portrayals on television. Although Taylor believes that the series Northern Exposure deconstructs some of the most harmful myths associated with Native Americans, she argues that the series' failure to represent the diversity of Alaskan native cultures undermines its positive elements: "The series has diluted these cultures and glossed them with the Hollywood stereotypes that Alaskan Natives had long managed to escape" (240). Taylor argues that
[The] openness of the text, which allows what John Fiske calls "guerilla readings," in turn makes accessible the opposing codes of native people's inevitable annihilation. It is ironic, therefore, that the dominant ideology of Northern Exposure, which tends to counter the negative stereotypes of Native American culture, is vulnerable to contradictory meaning and validates the messages it seeks to supplant. (230)
The X-Files is also guilty of conflating diverse Native American cultures, most explicitly in the white buffalo sequence in "Paper Clip." Despite Chris Carter's assertion that he spent time with the Navajo to "pay attention to things that were really representative of their culture," he also states in the "Paper Clip" video interview that he used the white buffalo story "even though it wasn't Navajo... because I thought it was so powerful that all Native Americans might believe in it" (Carter, Paper). Despite the fact that the "Anasazi" episodes contain complex and often nonstereotypical representations of the Navajo, Carter's comments, based on a naive sense of cultural representation, reinscribe the essentialist viewpoint that all native cultures are alike.
It is impossible, however, to designate the "dominant ideology" of The X-Files in the way that Taylor does with respect to Northern Exposure: the fact that The X-Hies contains within its structure the possibility of radically divergent readings is an important aspect of its postmodernism. Through the "openness" of its text The X-Files complicates the traditional representation of the Native American "only in terms of their dying language" (Taylor 140), just as the "Anasazi" are challenges Taylor's claim that popular culture "generally avoids contemporary real-life Native Americans and Native American issues because of collective guilt about government policies of genocide" (240). By foregrounding the issue of genocide through a serious critique of the government. The X-Files enables its audience to perform "guerilla readings" that reconfigure the relationships between marginalized cultures and those in power.
Mythologies: Guerilla Readings of the National Narrative
One of the most compelling aspects of the "Anasazi" are is its representation of X-Files mythology and Navajo mythology as alternatives to the national narrative in which all traces of government misconduct and cultural genocide are always erased. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha claims that for a national narrative to be formed. "[t]he scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture" (145). Bhabha argues that marginal cultures resist that process, since they exist in performative time, unrelated to the concept of "history" as a linear trajectory: "The present of the people's history, them is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a 'true' national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype" (152). Although The X-Files is implicated in the problematics of both realism and stereotypes, its mythologies also represent "the present of the people's history," which resists this reification.
Chris Carter's discussion of paranoia in a recent issue of Rolling Stone suggests that X-Files mythology is intended to encourage the audience to reimagine the relationships between narrative and power. Early in the interview, Carter locates the source of the alienations explored in The X-Files in the "fear of the other" that he has witnessed: "Most of the people I went to high school with still live in that same town. Fear of the outsiders, fear of the other. was very, very real and powerful in my town. . . . That's what people are afraid of. It's the scary thing about foreigners; it's the scary thing about aliens" (Lipsky 39). Later, Carter discusses the social possibilities of paranoia:
There's an interesting quote that one of the editors keeps on top of his key board: "Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness." I think if I'm adding static to the collective awareness, that's a good thing. Paranoia is a good thing. It creates smart people. Rather than complacency: it makes people think. If people are around water coolers talking about The X-Files, I think it's because the show has that spiritual foundation. It's talking about the unknown: it's talking about possibilities. . . . (Lipsky 40, 83)
Through X-Files mythology, the overarching narratives of conspiracy and colonization that underlie the monster-of-the-week episodes, Carter attempts to replace the "fear of the other" with a more productive fear of the national self. As trickster figures, the members of the conspiracy in the series "serve. above all, transformations of mythical into historical reality" (Kroeber 74). Shadowy, nameless, and obscure, they also represent the invisible workings of ideology itself.
The challenges that The X-Files poses to the national narrative are available to every viewer, even those who continue to read the series as nothing more than a good cop show. There is nothing subtle about Mulder calling Cancer Man a "black-lunged son of a bitch" or of Skinner telling Cancer Man, "this is where you pucker up and kiss my ass." The revisionist histories of the Lone Gunman (Mulder's three conspiracy theorist friends, Langly, Byers, and Frohike) typify the explicit criticism of government authority with which The X-Files seeks to disrupt hegemony from within the unlikely space of prime time television. When Scully asks about Victor Klemper's involvement in Operation Paper Clip, she is given a list of offenses that implicates the U.S. government as well:
LANGLY: Experimented on the Jews. Drowned them, suffocated them, put them in pressure chambers. All in the name of science.
BYERS: Together with Von Braun. Klemper helped us win the space race. Using his scientific data on the effects of high altitude flying. we were able to put astronauts on the moon before the Soviets.
LANGLY: One giant step for mankind.
Langly's ironic recontextualization of one of the catch phrases of the national narrative is typical of the conspiracy episodes, and of the role of the Lone Gunman ill the series. In the "Anasazi" are, however, that kind of dialogue is enhanced by the Native American presence in the text and by the critique of history performed by Hosteen.
Hosteen's voice-over at the beginning of "The Blessing Way" distinguishes the FBI's "false history" from tile Native American "memory":
There is an ancient Indian saying, that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable, while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who would douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men, for they are dangerous themselves, and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember, and of those who seek the truth.
On one level, the voice-over replicates the stereotype of the Native American as noble savage enjoying an unmediated relationship to the truth, and it implicates The X-Files in a nostalgia for a master narrative in the age of "postmodern angst." That nostalgia is represented by Hosteen's claim that the Blessing Way "has been passed down by our ancient Navajo ancestors. Its songs and prayers must be followed just as they have been for centuries, the holy people will not he summoned." In the context of episodes' explicit critique of the government, however. Hosteen's speech represents Native American mythology as antihegemonic, challenging the ideology that has written the Navajo out of U.S. history.
As rebellious figures within the government, representing a liminal position between the FBI and the Navajo, argents Scully and Mulder are associated with memory rather than history. Through the parallel experiences of Mulder's Blessing Way ritual and Scully's regression hypnosis, the two seek a more personal, subjective version of their own pasts than the government has provided for them, After Scully discovers the computer chip in her neck. her sister Melissa pleads with her to find its purpose: "I'm talking about access to your own memory. I mean obviously you have buried this so deep you can't consciously recall it." The image of burial, recalling Mulder's burial in the boxcar as well as the government's burial of the evidence of cultural genocide. returns in Bill Mulder's speech in "The Blessing Way": "The lies I told you are a pox and poison to my soul, and now you are here because of them, lies I thought might bury forever a truth I could not live with. . . . You are the memory, Fox. It lives in you." Embodied in a white man who carries a government badge, as well as through the marginalized figure of the Navajo code-talker, memory offers an alternative to the national narratives that Bill Mulder characterizes as "lies."
Of course, the two FBI agents' access to memory is complicated anti ultimately frustrated by their liminal position: Scully is unable to remember more than a few vague details of her abduction experience, and Mulder discovers that the "dull clarity of the dead" obscures as much as it reveals. These failures are contextualized by Scully's revelation that the computer chip implanted in her body is recording the memories that she cannot recover. possibly for incorporation into the MJ files themselves. She tells Mulder that "my name is in those files." In this context, the distinction between individual or cultural "memory" and the written by the government conspirators in the series begins to blur. Although Albert Hosteen claims that "memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable," Scully's experiences suggest that memories are vulnerable to ideological co-optation."Anasazi" ends with the image of flames devouring the alien bodies, the boxcar, and (ostensibly) Mulder himself, reminding the viewer that lies. as well as truth, are it "dangerous fire." Rather than encouraging viewers to immediately embrace Hosteen's description of Navajo memory, the are represents Navajo memory as a phenomenon too complex to be appropriated by white FBI agents after a few weeks on the reservation.
Postmodern Reservations: Border Crossing and Cultural Liminality
Although the "Anasazi" are is not as explicit about border politics as the episodes "Shapes" or "El Mundo Gira," it is significant that Scully and Mulder travel to the reservation, crossing and recrossing a series of highly significant geographical borders, in search of a translation of the MJ files, Michelle Malach argues that Scully and Mulder, like Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks, represent "a changing definition of the (FBI) agent in terms of her or his traditional function its both literal anti figurative boundary restorer. the agent who polices both state lines and the boundaries of desire" (70). Asking each other "Where are you?" every time they communicate by cellular phone, Scully and Mulder negotiate their agency in a landscape of shifting borders and liminal spaces, represented in the "Anasazi" arc by the Navajo reservation.
Initially, the reservation seems to be the ultimate "out there" where the truth resides. Represented as a blank space on U.S. maps, the reservation seems to exist outside of government authority and discourse. As Mulder remarks, "You'd be surprised what's not on the map in this country. and what our government will do to keep it that way." Initially, Scully takes Mulder to the reservation as an act of rebellion against the FBI power structure. risking her job in an attempt to find Hosteen and the truth. In the first few minutes of "Anasazi," many clues suggest that she will be successful. Mulder has searched for years for alien bodies, always to have them slip out of his grasp, but Eric Hosteen discovers one simply by digging into the ground. Later, Hosteen and his family will be led directly to Mulder's dying body by buzzards, which know that the bodies are alien long before Mulder does. The earthquake at the beginning of "Anasazi" suggests that the land predicts the future as well as unearths the secrets of the past; when Mulder and Scully arrive, Hosteen is waiting for them, explaining that "last week we had an omen." Hosteen claims that "in the desert, things find a way to survive. Secrets are like this too - they push their way up through the sands of deception so men can know them." His comment explicitly links the reservation to it secret which can be discovered, echoing Scully's well-known comment from "Little Green Men" that "everybody has a story to tell." As a geographical body, the reservation promises that an investigation beneath its surface will solve the mystery.
Even Mulder appears to enter into closer contact with "the truth" through his Blessing Way visions. Appearing to Scully in a dream, he claims that "I have been on the bridge that spans two worlds, the link between all souls by which we cross into our own true nature." Whether we understand the worlds as life and death or as the cultural worlds of the FBI and the Navajo reservation. Mulder's ability to cross boundaries clearly enables him to find access to his spiritual fathers. In "Anasazi" Mulder, wounded and unconscious, crosses the border into New Mexico in the back seal of Scully's car: in "The Blessing Way" he enters the Indian hogan in the arms of the male community of the reservation. Those vulnerable positions, so subversive typical macho heroism, can easily be read as examples of "Navajo" nature, his ability to find the truth by sacrificing himself to it.
Despite these clues, Mulder and Scully learn that the reservation c lapses inward and expands outward to reveal multiple spaces that are even farther "out there," yet fail to provide access to the truth. By the end of "Paper Clip," both agents realize the consequences of their border transgression:
SCULLY: We're operating so far outside of the law right now we've given up the very notion of justice. We've turned ourselves into outsiders, we have lost our access and our protection. MULDER: What makes you think there's any such thing as justice, Scully.
The boxcar in which Mulder discovers the alien boolies. with it, mysterious tunnels to the surface. and the Blessing Way ritual. with its links to the afterlife, represent the danger and futility of border-crossing even as they function as sites of healing and resurrection. Like the episode "Teso Dos Bichos," the "Anasazi" are begins with an investigation under the surface of the landscape. a symbolic archaeological dig that unearths the trace of Native American history but suggests the violence and futility of the process. On one level. the buried boxcar represents possibilities for cultural exploration, as a liminal space signifying several historical moments as well as the border between the second and third seasons of The X-Files: Yet by entering that space Mulder risks his life and causes the "evidence" that he has discovered to be destroyed. Eric Hosteen must unearth Mulder's body at the beginning of "The Blessing Way," .just as he unearths the body of the alien at the beginning of "Anasazi." By digging too deeply into the reservation landscape. Mulder embodies the irony of archaeological exploration: He is able only to uncover himself.
The Blessing Way ritual is an equally ephemeral and shifting space within tile reservation landscape, represented by the sand painting that Hosteen constructs and then destroys. Hosteen emphasizes that the Blessing Way forms a bridge between physical and psychological geography, like Scully's hypnosis experience, in which she is encouraged to travel mentally to a "safe place":
MULDER: During my fever I . . . I left here and traveled to a place.
HOSTEEN: This place, you carry it with you. It is inside of you. It is the origin place.
MULDER: It wasn't a dream? HOSTEEN: Yes.
Hosteen's ambiguous answer marks the Blessing Wily as a geographical space that defies the rules of Western geography, which exists in the mind rather than the physical landscape. Like the boxcar in "Anasazi," the Blessing Way is the most significant space of the episode, linked in some way to all other important spaces. From within the Blessing Way, Mulder has a vision of the live aliens being thrown into the boxcar, which refigures the boxcar as memory as well as history, a psychological space as well as a physical space. In another sequence, the image of the starry sky of Mulder's dream vision fades into the stars on an American flag and then to the stars painted on the floor of the FBI building, suggesting that the borders between the Navajo hogan and Washington, D.C., have been blurred by the ritual.
As inhabitants of that shifting space. the Navajo are associated with cultural liminality. Eric Hosteen wears blue jeans, drives a motorcycle. and does not understand the Navajo that his grandfather speaks or know the legend of the Anasazi. yet he discovers the first alien body and refuses to talk to Cancer Man even when his family is beaten, revealing his connection to the reservation and to the aliens buried there. Albert Hosteen is also a border figure, appearing inexplicably in the hospital room where Melissa Scully lies dying, praying among tile machines and narrating the story of the white buffalo, which takes place hundreds of miles away. Elizabeth Kubek reads Hosteen as "an Other who has come to be very important of late in the cultural imaginary: the spiritual man" (194). I would argue that his presence is more complex. As Scully's representative at Melissa Scully's deathbed, Hosteen is not entirely other, but a by-then-familiar presence who mediates between characters and interprets the events that take place. His final appearance in Skinner's office reveals that he is an "insider" whose history with the FBI is never fully revealed; he is not merely an other, a stereotype of the spiritual man, but an ambiguous part of the conspiracy itself.
Translating the Files: Ei Aaniigoo 'Ahoot'e
As a site of cultural liminality and border transgression, the MJ files are as important as the Navajo reservation and function in similar ways. When Mulder and Scully discover that the MJ fides are encrypted in Navajo, they believe that they can simply crack the code and achieve unmediated access to the truth about the conspiracy, the past, the role of aliens in history, and the role of the Navajo in the conspiracy. Like the reservation, however, the MJ files frustrate those expectations, failing to reveal a single, authoritative meaning that can be used as "proof." Initially written in English, in military jargon, and then translated into a code based on spoken Navajo, the MJ files resist translation, drawing their translators into endless layers of signification rather than