PERSONAL NARRATIVE: HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER, JR.]
NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR:
Spirit of Mt. Katahdin By John R. Salter [Frank Gray]
Hunter Gray / Hunter Bear - Organizer
[Mi'kmaq/St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk]
AT OUR FAR UP HOME IN EASTERN IDAHO
CONTEMPORARY PHOTO BY THOMAS GRAY SALTER
Regularly Updated. I was born from the Four Directions -- as John Randall Salter, Jr. I grew up in wild and rugged mountains and canyons at and around Flagstaff, [Coconino County] Arizona. It was a quasi-frontier atmosphere where you learned early on how to fight -- and fight effectively. You also learned and appreciated the sensible use of firearms.
My father, a full-blooded American Indian originally from the Northeast (Mi'kmaq/St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk), was born Frank Gray but, as a child, was adopted and partially raised by William Mackintire Salter and Mary Gibbens Salter, very prominent New England liberals, who changed his name to John Randall Salter. My mother, an Anglo, was from an old Western "frontier" family.
William Mackintire Salter, trained in Philosophy, and initially a Congregationalist, was, with Felix Adler, a founder and major leader of the Ethical Culture Society [American Ethical Union.] He was a strong and courageous advocate for the Haymarket anarchists and their families; with his social justice colleague, Jane Addams, a signer of the Call to Organization of the NAACP in 1909; and he was among those who sparked the development of what became the American Civil Liberties Union. And for many years, from at least 1894 to about 1916, he was extremely active in the Indian Rights Association -- an almost all-Anglo liberal group which, at that point, had, among its goals, the adoption of Native children by whites and, it was mistakenly assumed, the eventual cultural assimilation of the Indian children. This was a very unfortunate approach indeed! William Salter's wife was Mary Gibbens, from a family closely associated with the historian Francis Parkman. Her sister was Alice Howe Gibbens, who married the great American philosopher, William James of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard, and Chocorua, New Hampshire.
The Salters had a particular interest in the small child, Frank Gray, who eventually became my father. Strong among Dad's several ancestral Native rivers was the Annance family line: a prominent St. Francis Abenaki family [Odanak, Quebec] with many Mohawk roots and connections. Several members of the family had left Catholicism for the Anglican faith and one of these, Louis (Lewis) Annance -- who, as had others in the family, attended Dartmouth -- then became a Congregationalist and eventually a Mason. [Most members of the family and their connections, however, remained Catholic.]
Lewis Annance, who lived in Northern New Hampshire, eventually relocated to Maine and became its most prominent Native guide [Moosehead Lake and Northern Maine generally.] He was a close friend of the Francis Parkman family. He was too, through his Congregationalist affiliations, well known to William M. Salter. The Salters maintained a large summer home at Silver Lake in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, as did William and Alice James in that vicinity -- though both families were primarily based at Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Salters also lived at Philadelphia and Chicago. In Maine, the ever hospitable Lewis Annance, the academically very well educated St. Francis Abenaki guide, raised many and varied Annance-related children of several generations and branches -- including my grandmother. Several Annance women worked for the Salter and James families. William and Mary Salter knew my father and his background very well indeed and, when they moved to adopt a Native child, they chose him.
For much additional information on our Native American genealogy, see the pages on the Gray line [Mohawk] as well as the Annance connections and related lines http://www.hunterbear.org/family_stuff.htm
On William James and William M. Salter grappling with race and ethnicity in the context of our Native relatives and Dad's adoption, see The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father] http://www.hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
and also an account of Gray family activism in the Far Western fur trade http://www.hunterbear.org/GRAY%20LANDS%20AND%20GRAY%20GHOSTS.htm
But, for a number of reasons including the unfortunate goal of assimilation, the adoption was not a particularly happy one at all. For all of his vigorous and courageous liberalism, fatherhood was not William M. Salter's strong suit. Mary Gibbens Salter was certainly a very kind and caring person. A major asset to my father was William James who spent much time with Dad, taking a special interest in Dad's incipient, developing abilities as an artist. [Among the many talents of James himself were those of an artist.] In 1910, at Chocorua, New Hampshire, Dad and William M. Salter visited William James a day before James' death. In 1913, at age 15, Dad left the Salters and, although he returned at various points, it was never to stay. Many, many years later, money from the estate of William James provided the basic funds which put my father through the Chicago Art Institute and launched his successful career as an artist and professor.
Although my father -- never assimilated and always aware of his tribal background and connections and affiliation -- resented the name Salter, he never got around to changing it back to Gray before he died. I did change my name: Gray from the Mohawk portion of our Native side; and Hunter, from my Mother's Scottish-American old Western frontier family -- full of colorful and sometimes violent land-hungry entrepreneurs: Dakota Territory, Kansas Territory, Indian Territory [Oklahoma], Idaho. Her family was also heavily sprinkled with Abolitionists, Populists, and red Socialists.
On my mother and her family: http://hunterbear.org/mother.htm
My special relationship with the Bear has been literally lifelong. The role -- the calling -- of a Hunter has been designated from very early childhood.
I've been a social justice agitator all my life and I always will be one: a radical.
See the Special Tribute to me of 2004/2005 with a great many background and contemporary statements and photos and more: http://www.hunterbear.org/special_tribute_page_for_hunter.htm
See the 2005 Elder
Recognition Award -- honoring me. From
Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and
Storytellers. This is one of several awards voted by
the Caucus [board] of this organization of writers,
storytellers, film makers, and journalists.
[The last recipient of the Wordcraft Elder Recognition
Award was Maurice Kenny, Mohawk, teacher and playwright and poet, who received
it in 2000.]
http://www.hunterbear.org/elder_recognition_award_for_2005.htm
Regularly updated.
I started doing fully adult work as I entered my teens -- many tough jobs across the Far West as those earlier years moved on: among them, much forest fire fighting, agricultural laborer, trapper, development miner. [And, since I was a big kid, I had no problem at all representing myself as being a good deal older than I really was!] I learned very, very soon the critical importance of solidarity with one's fellow workers: "An injury to one is an injury to all."
I consider myself a Real Red: In addition to being an American Indian, I belonged, in the 1950s, to the last of the really old-time Industrial Workers of the World and I was also an International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers man.
I've organized all over -- the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Deep South, New England, Chicago, Midwest, Up-State New York, Northern Plains, Rockies. [See, in the final portion of this Narrative, a summary of my activism -- to date -- from Civil Rights Movement Veterans website.]
Trained as a sociologist, I've taught in a number of colleges and universities: Wisconsin State, Superior; Tougaloo Southern Christian College; Goddard College; Coe College; University of Iowa; Navajo Community College [now Dine' College]; University of North Dakota -- and part-time at University of Washington; Seattle Community College; Roosevelt University; Southeastern Community College / Iowa State Penitentiary [Native inmates].
Sometimes it's been full-time organizing and part-time teaching; or full-time teaching and full-time organizing; or simply organizing (which can be double-duty work in its own right!) I've worked with grassroots people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds in militant and democratic organizations and movements. A bio of me appears in the Encyclopedia of American Indian Civil Rights (Greenwood Press, 1997). The author of this bio, Professor Roy Wortman of Kenyon College, later did a very extensive essay on my life and times: "I Consider Myself a Real Red:" The Social Thought of American Civil Rights Organizer John R. [Salter] Hunter Gray." Published in the Journal of Indigenous Thought [Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Regina, Winter 2001], it's also available on this website at http://www.hunterbear.org/Red%20essay%20on%20Hunter%20Gray.htm
From the Editors' comments, Journal of Indigenous Thought:
Dr. Wortman's pieces, "Telling Their Own Stories, Building Their Own
Strength: Dr. Dave Warren on Framing and Imparting American Indian History" and
" 'I Consider Myself a Real Red' : The Social Thought of American Civil Rights
Organizer John (Salter) Hunter Gray" explore the work and lives of two prominent
Native Americans. Wortman in the two pieces engages in a thoughtful dialogue
with both Warren and Gray with neither being an "informant" or an "object of
research." Rather, the words and thoughts of both are conveyed through the
interviews which have been skillfully edited by Wortman. Furthermore, the
interviews are placed within a larger interpretative framework with references
to other contexts and situations which amplify the words and contributions of
both Warren and Gray.
In the essay, " ' I Consider Myself a Real Red'," important points of contrast
are drawn between the experience of Black Americans and the civil rights
movement and the attempt of Native Americans to hold on to their identity in the
wake of the pressures of assimilation: "Where Black Americans sought to become
part of the broader United States society, American Indians sought to remain as
much as possible apart from that sphere because of their historical and legal
traditions based on treaties" (p. 7). The achievements of Gray demonstrate the
challenges of trying to balance the need to maintain identity within the rubric
of collective minority as well as the need to participate within the larger
society. Perhaps, it is through ambiguity that emerges in this attempt to
navigate various cultural and political frameworks, that Gray denounces
essentialism. Instead, Gray holds that cultures are essentially an organic,
fluid activity, but at the same need a real material/ physical grounding such as
that found in Treaty rights (e.g. access to land base) and of the economic
contexts that people find themselves in.
And see this very long and detailed interview done with me by Bruce Hartford, Civil Rights Movement Veterans, in July 2005. It contains much personal information. http://www.hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm
Also, Outlaw Trail: The Native as Organizer http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm
My papers -- a vast array -- are held in two essentially similar collections: The Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson; The National Social Action Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. They are concurrently listed under John R. Salter, Jr., John Hunter Gray, and Hunter Gray. I've done a number of oral histories which are held in both collections. Each collection also contains copies of my very voluminous F.B.I. files -- 3,000 or so pages -- obtained in the 1980s under FOIA/PA. [The F.B.I. put me on several of its high-priority "agitator" lists: Section A of the Reserve Index/Security Index and Rabble Rouser Index.]
I've written and published for decades on social justice issues. Most of this has been non-fiction, some short story fiction. A good number of journals have published several pieces of mine. Anyway, my stuff has appeared in such publications as Argosy, Industrial Worker, American Socialist, Mainstream, Student Action, Mississippi Free Press, North Jackson Action, Southern Patriot [SCEF], The Carolinian, The Carolina Times, Native American Publication, The Movement (Chicago), The Catholic Courier (Rochester), Integrated Education, Equity and Excellence in Education, Third World Socialists, Sojourners, Klanwatch, Religious Socialism, Freedomways, New Perspectives (World Peace Council), The Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota), Liberty: A Magazine of Religious Freedom, Pacific Historian, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Labor Notes, Labor History [review/essay], North Country, Wisconsin Magazine of History [review essays], Contact Forum, Against the Current, The Montana Standard (Butte), One Big Union Annual, Northwest Ethnic Voice, Our Struggle/Nuestra Lucha, Democratic Left, The Socialist, Dialogue and Initiative, antithesis, People's Weekly World, Michigan Sociological Review, Independent Politics News, The November Coalition, Oregon Socialist, Michigan Citizen, Left Hook, Socialist Viewpoint, Piikani Sun, Solidarity Discussion, Labor Net, Niederngasse [Zurich], Political Affairs [The Destroyers short story], Akha Journal, Fist and Rose [SPUSA], Lupus News, My Town, Outsiders, The Heretic, We! Magazine, Portside -- and much more. Bio essays of mine are carried in The Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990). I've done a number of very extensive oral histories [e.g., Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi State University John C. Stennis Collection, Southern Regional Council. And I've done a myriad of book reviews.
I have written chapters in such works as Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, North River Press, 1979; The Gun Culture And Its Enemies, Merril Press, 1990; Current Controversies: Gun Control, Greenhaven Press, 1992; When Cosmic Cultures Meet, Human Potential Foundation, 1996; Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: An Anthology Of The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Black Belt Press, 1999; Celestial Healing: Close Encounters That Cure, Signet/Dutton, 1999.
My book is Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle & Schism (1979 and Krieger, 1987 ); and I've done a number of short monographs on various social justice and related topics. Representative reviews can be found at
In addition to a great deal of conventional print writing/publishing which carries to the present moment, I've done much Net writing in recent years for various human rights web sites.
I am presently [2009] very well along in the process of an essentially autobiographical work which incorporates selected previous writings of mine with mint-new material. The primary focus involves my formative experiences and my practical activism on behalf of Native rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and union labor. There will be a substantial dimension involving down-to-earth grassroots community organizing.
At this point, 2009, many substantial social justice articles of mine have just appeared in print and others are in the very process of doing so. And I have additional pieces well on the way.
Again, 2009, essays of mine are scheduled to come out in several Native anthologies.
I very strongly believe, from my basic roots, that, if you're going to really believe in something, make it something that serves humanity in a deep and enduring sense and not simply something that serves only oneself. I believe that one should Keep Fighting, all the way through: in the green oases and the red water of rich and vibrant and far-flung struggle: and also in the long lonely stretches of desert with the bitter and unsung and critically important "little" fights -- and always with an eye on the Better World Over the Mountain Yonder.
This is a strong personal thought:
When I was a kid, an important role model was Arthur C. Parker [Gawasowaneh], Bear Clan, (1881 -1955), whose distinguished Seneca (Iroquois) ancestry traced back to his great-uncle Eli Parker (Seneca, Brigadier General in the Union Army, and aide to U.S. Grant, and first Native American Indian Commissioner) and also directly to founders of the Iroquois Confederacy itself. Other equally distinguished sides of his family went back to the earliest British settlers.
Arthur Parker was always very much a Seneca, Iroquois, Native American. He was a principal organizer, leader, editor of the first 20th Century pan-Indian (broadly inter-tribal) Indian rights organization, the Society of American Indians (1911 into the 1920s) and was a founder [1944] of the still very much in existence National Congress of American Indians. He was state anthropologist for the State of New York and a major writer and academic figure in Ethnology.
He was also someone who refused to let himself be stereotyped or cast into an iron block mold. "I don't have to play Indian," he said "to be an Indian." Parker, in addition to his Native rights activities, took positions on a wide range of national and international issues (a few of which I would not be in agreement, despite my admiration for him.) Like the eminent Harvard philosopher of the late 1800s into the 1900s, William James, Arthur Parker also studied and wrote extensively on "psychical research" -- what today is called parapsychology, and he extensively studied the mediumistic Fox sisters of upstate New York.
My father, (1898-1978), who, having left the Salter family at 15, never had any appreciable high school work, was a gifted Native (Micmac/St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk) artist who eventually received three earned academic degrees: B.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago and M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Dad, at 15 years of age, was part of an altruistic gun-running operation serving Mexican Indian revolutionaries (soon after the murder of revolutionary President Francisco Madero by the right wing military manipulated by the U.S. oil and mining interests) and spent, at that point, a good deal of dramatic time in Mexico in the service of the Revolution. He formed a very close association with Mexico which lasted throughout his life and, in time, developed close relationships with a number of Mexico's leading artists. His last year of teaching -- following his retirement from Northern Arizona University -- was a twelve month stint at the University of Guanajuato. His last completed oil painting just before his death -- a large and wonderfully colorful semi-abstract -- is Los Locos: eleven costumed Mexican Indian dancers. It hangs today in our living room in Idaho and a photo of it is at the conclusion of this Narrative.
My father was always very much a Native man indeed. But no one ever pushed him into any stereotyped box.
Our family has now, for several generations, been deeply involved with the Southwestern Native nations -- especially the Navajo [within and around whose world I grew up] and Laguna. Our ties with the Navajo could not be more enduringly and personally closer. And the ties with Mexico certainly continue.
Both Dad and my Anglo mother (she from her old and very colorful western "frontier" family -- with its many diverse philosophical perspectives: hard-bitten ranchers and mining engineers on the one hand; on the other, Populists and left-wing socialists) always encouraged me to do my own thing -- cut my own trail just as I saw fit.
I have always blazed my own trail and my broad interests and commitments -- all of which I see as reaching towards the Sun -- reflect this and always will. And I and my wife, Eldri, have always successfully encouraged our own children to do the same thing.
Indian Scholarship Committee. Seated: Jimmy Kewanwytewa; John Salter, Chairman; Raymond
Naiki; George Kirk and Willie Coin. Standing are: M.T. Lewellen; Ellery Gibson; Dr.
Garland Downum, Secretary-treasurer; Dr. William Tinsley; Melvin T. Hutchinson, publicity
chairman; and Dr. Lewis J. McDonald.
My father, John Salter, and associates. Arizona State College, Flagstaff, (later Northern Arizona University), ca. 1956. This is the precise listing and name spelling of the Indian Scholarship Committee members as given by NAU. However, it is Raymond Nakai -- not Naiki.
My father at age 77. Photo taken at Flagstaff, Arizona by Bob Fronske. Excerpt from Dad's adoptive documents, and from my name change effective in District Court, May 1995.
I served a full Active Duty hitch [and then Inactive Reserve stint] in the U.S. Army -- receiving an Honorable Release from Active Duty and, following several years in the Inactive Reserves, an Honorable Discharge. I am a member of veterans' organizations.
Los Locos, Mexican Indian Dancers at San Miguel de Allende, 1978
One of my father's last paintings.
My father exhibited very widely indeed -- nationally and internationally. This was the sort of exhibition which always gave him enormous satisfaction.
John R. Salter, Jr. [Hunter Bear], age seven, painting a war drum. I had just been given -- as an extremely significant gift -- a very powerful Iroquois boy's bow at Onondaga.
This is my activist bio -- right into contemporary times -- from the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website: http://www.crmvet.org
Trained in sociology, I came with Eldri to Mississippi in 1961 and taught at Tougaloo College, just north of Jackson. I was Advisor to the Jackson Youth Council of the NAACP, a member of the executive committee of the Jackson NAACP, a member of the Board of Directors of the Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches, and a primary organizer of the Jackson Movement of 1962-1963. I worked closely with SNCC, CORE, and later also with SCLC and Highlander. [I also conducted some of the first poverty/racism surveys in several Mississippi rural counties and testified to my grim findings before hearings conducted by the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights].
I served as the Strategy Committee Chair of the developing and ultimately very large-scale and blood-dimmed Jackson Movement which reached its climax in the Spring and Summer of 1963. I participated in the most direct sense in many of the bloodily-suppressed and increasingly massive demonstrations. Along with many others, I was beaten and arrested on a number of occasions; was targeted in the sweeping anti-Movement injunction, City of Jackson v. John R. Salter, Jr. et al. [which, of course, we defied]; and was seriously injured [along with a colleague, Rev. Ed King] and my car destroyed, in a rigged auto wreck.
Following the sanguinary Jackson Movement epoch, I became, at the end of the Summer of 1963, Field Organizer for the radical Southern Conference Educational Fund, which was then headed by Jim Dombrowski [with Miss Ella J. Baker and Carl and Anne Braden and Rev. Howard Melish as staff colleagues]. I worked across the hard-core South. I was the primary organizer of an ultimately quite successful large-scale, multi-county civil rights grassroots organizing project in the isolated, poverty-stricken, Klan-infested Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt. In 1966 and 1967, I organized militant grassroots anti-poverty movements i.e., Peoples' Program on Poverty in the Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt. In those hard-fought Southern years, my wife and I learned much, much indeed from the grassroots about courage and commitment and vision - and we have carried all of that with us for all of these decades.
We left the South in the Summer of 1967, went to the Pacific Northwest where I was active in many social justice endeavours. In 1969-1973, we were on the bloody South/Southwest Side of Chicago where I directed the large-scale grassroots organization of multi-issue block clubs. We worked with African American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, and some Native American people and we fought the police and the Daley Machine and organized more than 300 block clubs and related organizations.
Concurrently, on the North Side of Chicago, I was a key organizer of the regional all-Indian Native American Community Organizational Training Center and served for many years as its Chair. I was active in the Plains in Native rights campaigns. And I served as the controversial social justice director for the 12 county Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester, New York [1976-1978], where Native rights and union labor and anti-racism were among the key thrusts that I and others initiated and carried through successfully.
Then we were back in the Southwest for several years in the Navajo country [the vast Navajo Nation], teaching and holding other posts as well at Navajo Community College [now Dine' College], and involved in anti-uranium campaigns and related endeavours. For most of the 1980s deep into the 1990s, I was an active organizer of many effective Native rights campaigns in the Northern Plains e.g., Grand Forks, ND and the utterly racist reservation border town of Devils Lake, ND.
In 1994, I retired as a full professor and former departmental chair [and former chair of Honors] from the American Indian Studies Department at University of North Dakota. In due course, we returned to the Mountain West and are presently based at Pocatello, Idaho where we are quite involved in various 'rights campaigns and very much in the worsening situation regarding the extremely negative city and state police.
I have written and published many articles, some short stories and also one book: Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism, 1979, with an expanded Krieger edition in 1987. I am presently completing an autobiographical book of my writings.
I've been a bona fide working organizer since I was a Teen. [I will be to the day I pass into the Spirit World]. And that kind of organizing involves getting grassroots people together, developing on-going local leadership, dealing effectively with grievances and individual/family concerns, achieving basic organizational goals and developing new ones - and building a sense of the New World Over The Mountains Yonder and how all of that relates to the short-term steps. We learned a hell of a lot about all of those critical dimensions during our great years in the Southern Movement.
Member of United Auto Workers [AFL-CIO].
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR]
Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na΄shdo΄i΄ba΄i΄
and Ohkwari'