Back in Februrary, we warned you about Tim “Nasdijj” Barrus’ claims he’d been talking to Esquire about how he lied to them about being a Native American, won an award for the resulting article, and then got himself a book deal. Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day, or something like that, which is to say the Esquire feature is up and running. Andrew Chaikivsky lets Barrus spin a semi-mystical tale about how a spirit “came to him” as he was driving past an abandoned Navajo settlement, although the literary ghost’s name apparently came a bit later:
“One afternoon, Barrus tells me about the first time he came across the word nasdijj. He says he heard it from a young Navajo man he met while doing laundry at a trading post on the reservation. Then the tale hops to the public library in Gallup, New Mexico… ‘It was an old Navajo text from back in the 1890s,’ he says. ‘I found the word nasdijj, and it meant to become again. And that confirmed it for me.'”
Too bad Chaikivsky doesn’t quote any of the experts who have countered—and this goes all the way back to the original LA Weekly article—that nasdijj isn’t even a real Navajo word.