Lair of Hunterbear

This website is based on a lifetime of consistent and direct grassroots activist community organizing: Native rights, union labor, civil rights, civil liberties. It also includes much on the American West. There is a great deal on the actual practice of bona fide organizing and such accompanying dimensions as issues, strategies, tactics, pragmatism and vision -- through explicitly focused material and many personal and experiential accounts of significant campaigns. Now into its ninth year, the site draws a very substantial number of visitors each day. Please scroll down to directory / index.

Dedicated To Our Enduring And Immortal Cloudy Gray [ Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ ]

This site contains a vast amount of Native American, civil rights, civil liberties, labor and related social justice material. Scroll down a few inches to the Index.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance. Hunter Bear [Hunter Gray/John R Salter, Jr.]

I am honored -- humbled -- by the 2005 Elder Recognition Award of 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.

Cloudy [Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ ] Half Bobcat and half domestic cat. Virtually inseparable from Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear], she takes care of him on an almost full time basis. She is substantially psychic. http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

Bad beatings at Jackson: June 13, 1963 -- two days after Medgar Evers was shot and killed. It helps a lot to have, as I have since the hatch, a thick skull and a thick hide. When a horde of police charged me on Rose Street, I stood my ground -- facing them. I was clubbed several times, into bloody unconsciousness; then taken to the Fairgrounds Stockade Concentration Camp; finally to a hospital; then to jail. This newspaper photo was taken later that evening at the Blair Street A.M.E. Church where I spoke in my badly torn and very bloody shirt to a very large, packed audience. Young whites were reported seen driving by with firearms. Minutes after this photo, I telephoned Martin Luther King and asked if he would come to Jackson for Medgar's funeral two days hence. And, of course, Dr. King immediately agreed. [See our many Mississippi pages, listed on the inside Index -- including http://hunterbear.org/A%20MISSISSIPPI%20KEYNOTE%20STORY.htm and http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm .] We were in the hard-core South, deeply involved in the Movement, from 1961 well into 1967.

And for a trenchant resume of my life-long organizing career, see Outlaw Trail: The Native As Organizer: http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm

My father, John R. Salter [Frank Gray] -- Micmac / St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk -- and excerpts from relevant documents relating to his change of name from Gray to Salter -- and my change of name back to Gray.

Our basic cultural perspective is Iroquoian -- strongly influenced by Navajo.