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This website is updated periodically as new material is sent in.

 

Please submit additional written materials brief or long - articles, poems, messages, short well wishings, etc. to: Stephen Harvey swh10@shaw.ca

 

or to Maria H. Salter  maria226d@hotmail.com
 

MESSAGES:

1. Jim Loewen, Washington, DC

2. John Henry Sime  Readstown, WI

3. Charles Bracey Chicago, IL

4. Heather Booth, Washington,DC

5. Dale Jacobson Grand Forks, ND

6. Stephen Harvey, Courtenay, B.C.,Canada

7. Joyce Ladner, Sarasota, Florida

8. Roy T. Wortman, Gambier, Ohio

9. David Ranney, Washington Island, Wisconsin.

10. Steve Rossignol, Blanco County, Texas

11. David Finkel and Dianne Feeley Detroit, MI

12. Reber Boult Albuquerque, NM

13. Clyde Appleton, Tucson, AZ

14.) Joan Mulholland (Arlington, Virginia)

15.) Tim McGowan (Rochester,NY)

16.) Steven F. McNichols (San Francisco,CA)

17.) William Borden (Royse City, TX and Bemidji, MN)

18.) Kass Fleisher (Normal, Illinois)

19.) John Salter (Glyndon, Minn.)

20.) Duane Campbell (Sacramento, CA)

21.) Stephen Zunes (Santa Cruz,CA)

22.) John Lacny (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.)

23.) Joan C. Browning (Lewisburg,WV)

24.) Edward Pickersgill (Guelph, Ont., Canada)

25.) David MCReynolds New York, NY

26.) Jerry L. Severson (Grand Forks, ND)

27.) William Mandel (Oakland, CA)

28.) Ed Nakawatase (Philadelphia, PA)

29.) Theresa Alt (Ithaca, NY)

30.) Vivian E. Berg (Mandan, ND)

31.) Louis Proyect (New York,NY)

32.) Michael Hirsch (New York, NY)

33.) Rev. Edwin King (University of Mississippi Medical Center) Jackson

34. Sheila B. Michaels, St. Louis, Missouri

35. Macdonald John Enoch Stainsby, Vancouver, BC, Canada

36. Dan Hittner, Brooklyn,NY

37. Quinn Brisben Chicago, IL

38. Barry Cohen New York, NY

39. Steven F. McNichols San Francisco, CA

40.  Steve Rutledge  Charleston, W Virginia

41. Matthew McDaniel Maesai, Chiangrai, Thailand

42. Elliott and Muriel Ricehill  Black River Falls, WI

43. Sandra Thompson St. Cloud, Florida

POEMS

---

GHOSTS   [HUNTER GRAY / HUNTER BEAR DECEMBER 22  2003]

Note by Hunter Bear:  In just several days, this particular post has drawn a flood of  continuing praise.  Here are just a few of many indeed:

"This near-death experience by an authentic American hero--who was deeply involved in the Mississippi civil rights movement among many other principled stands--is so moving that I have to share it with you."

Steven F. McNichols [Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Attorney]
San Francisco, CA 94104-3503  12/21/03

great writing. xo Kass Fleisher  Author of forthcoming THE BEAR RIVER MASSACRE  [Spring 2004]    12/22/03

 I have forwarded this to my sons, calling it a wonderful read by a wonderful man who has led a wonderful life.  The whole thing belongs in your autobiography, including your present illness, because that will tell readers about your character.  And I urge you once again to get it written pronto, making arrangements for your writer and editor sons and whoever else to finish the job if you don't.

Bill [William Mandel]  Activist and author of many books -- including SAYING NO TO POWER  12/21/03

Oh, John!  This is wonderful.  Even with your terrible illness, your strength shines -- blazes, really.  My warmest gratitude to you and Eldri.  Paz.  Clyde    Clyde Appleton, Tucson, a close radical activist friend from the '50s.  December 27, 2003

Having been a subscriber for less than a year, I have very much regretted not having the opportunity to meet this man.  Knowing what I've learned of him through these pages inspires me to let him know that I very much appreciate his contributions and will miss him when he is no longer with us.  My wishes are for his impact to influence my thought world and that of others for many seasons and for his continued strength to continue to be with us for as long as he needs to be.

Marie Jackson, SNCC discussion list, January 6, 2004

ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING!  Dale Jacobson  Poet and Scholar  January 23  2004

From Tiffany: 2/21/05

Wow!  All that I can say is that I'm amazed.  i know you've probably heard
this so much that it's old, but your writing ability is incredible!  I'm
totally blind, lost my sight at two months old, have never been to Arizona,
and yet I saw the places to which you were referring.  I felt that I was
with you as you made that journey.  Then again, what else should i expect
from such an admirable figure as yourself?  [Tiffany]

 

GHOSTS
 

I was suddenly but gently aware that I was standing at the edge of a large
stand of tall, slim jackpine timber.  I was in a very strange half-light
that I had never before experienced.

I dream little -- at least in any recollective sense --  at any time.

But this was no dream of any kind. I had gone to sleep that night in our
'way far up home on the far western edge of Pocatello, Idaho.

I knew precisely where I now was:  several yards from our old and quite
isolated and remote -- and almost roadless -- family hunting  camp on the
very edge of the vast and beautiful Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Area
southwest of my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. Through eternity, the always
flowing Sycamore Creek continues  to cut at glacial pace -- deeper and
deeper.

I was looking from the Canyon's east rim directly west: down at the western
slope which then rose sharply to its rim -- in contrast to our eastern area
which had some substantial sloping regions in its upper setting. Then I
looked across that western rim and the widespread cedar plains that
dominated that side.

I looked southwest -- looking over a dozen mountain ranges that stretched
very far off toward the Colorado River -- and the California border.

And then  I was looking south: many, many miles down the Great Canyon into
Sycamore Basin and  its vast, and cedar-sprinkled open reaches -- bounded by
small mountains and high ridges.

And then beyond, directly south into the Verde Valley with its sprinkling of
tiny towns and scattered, often downright hardscrabble folk.

And then up above the Valley -- up the slopes of Mingus Mountain -- where a
handful of lights signaled the tenacious existence of the once fabulous
copper mining town of Jerome.  It had been a ghost town since the early
1950s -- and it was still legend.

Now the Great Canyon pulled suggestively -- and it pulled south.

And then, suddenly, I knew I was in Borders -- a complex of them.  And I was
also at Choices.

I had to go south -- directly down into the innards of Sycamore and then
southward 'way, 'way through the Canyon -- into the Verde Valley.

I had done that before -- a long time ago.

I was extremely ill with a sudden-striking and mysterious illness called
Systemic Lupus -- and the very worst and  deadly form of that particular
version of the oft lethal disease.  It had struck only a very few months ago:
widespread rashes, fever, extreme weakness, body pain, swelling -- all sorts
of deep disorders. It has no cure.

And the  destructive variant  with which we are dealing -- what my doctors
call
"a very serious case" -- attacks and threatens lungs, liver, blood vessels,
kidneys, and a number of other critical organs with a bloody passion.

In less than four months, I've been in the Pocatello mountain hospital three
times -- and  have come extremely close to dying at each  beginning point in
those week long stays.

This Lupus could  and will attack literally Anytime -- with virtually no
warning.

Early on, even before Lupus had been specifically diagnosed, our immediate
family gathered to do my Will in my hospital room: Eldri [my spouse of 43
years], myself, Maria [school staff] and her two children -- Samantha [13]
and  our grandson/son Thomas [21], Josie [just graduated from Idaho State in
Social Work].  Our two oldest sons, Beba [John ] a writer; and Peter, a
newspaper editor; each worn to the  bone from travel exertion arrived on
schedule:    Beba had come from Fargo to Lincoln, picked up Peter, and they
had driven a thousand miles to Idaho,

It's the Will of a Native family: solidarity, consensus, communalism.  While
a surprised -- and in some instances discomfited hospital staff  watched and
listened surreptitiously -- we took it point by point.  The family was the
executor committee and could choose its spokesperson when the time came; our
home -- very new, relatively large, big yard area, best view in Pocatello ,
rapidly climbing value -- would remain in the full hands of the family with
Maria authorized to use it throughout her life and the others able to use it
at will;  our big historical and contemporary Native arts and crafts
collection would remain forever in the group and nothing could be taken nor
sold. [Beba subsequently drew up an intricate codicil which provides for
very careful loans to reputable exhibits and institutions; same basically
for my quite large collection of Western American and Western Canadian
radical labor material.]  There is more, of course -- but mostly on a share
and share alike basis.

Once Eldri and I are both gone, and the Will then locks in with total
finality, no changes can be made in any  dimension of it save by bona fide
family consensus.  But it's a very close and tight outfit indeed.

Back home, I typed it up, and all signed via notary plus witnesses.

And Eldri and I did  a Living Will which provides for moderate efforts to
resuscitate.

After that there were more very close brushes with Death, twelve physicians,
twenty pills a day.

But before we ended that meeting, Beba raised a final point: looking at me,
he asked, "What do we do with you?"

"Cremation," I said slowly.

"And the ashes?" he continued.

"In the end there's only one place," I said. Heads nodded.

And that  -- our historic and long ago hunting camp, to which as a  Teen  we
had brought the huge
 Black coming-of -age bear which I had a lifelong mandate to kill and did --
is where I now stood.

Now I began walking slowly --- still in half-light -- down the trail into
the Great Canyon.  And there I hoped  to travel all the way down the Canyon
and into and through the Basin to the Verde Valley.

And Jerome glittered on Mingus Mountain.

--------------------

Jerome, Arizona. July 10, 1917.

Two hundred thugs armed with Winchester 44/40s, pickaxe handles,  and
baseball bats designated themselves a "Loyalty League" with the blessing of
United Verde Copper Company.  The great IWW-led copper strike, [Industrial
Workers of the World] -- from Butte to the Mexican border -- necessitated by
wartime inflation and static wages, had just begun.  The so-called
vigilantes rounded up 75 key  Jerome strikers in the early morning hours of
that terrible day, beat them badly, placed them in United Verde boxcars, and
took them far westward to Kingman, Arizona on the California border.  When
many tried to return, they were jailed at the Yavapai County seat of
Prescott.

Two days later, on the Mexican border at Cochise County, 1200 strikers and
sympathizers were rounded up by hundreds of Loyalty League vigilantes with
the full backing of the Phelps Dodge Copper corporation and local lawmen --
and taken by boxcars to Columbus, New Mexico where they were dumped in the
desert with neither food nor water.

In the early morning of August 1, 1917 at Butte,  Montana, a major IWW
leader, organizer, and copper strike coordinator -- the Cherokee, Frank H.
Little -- was hideously murdered by gunmen employed by massive Anaconda
Copper.

Blood dark clouds gathered in the Western copper country where memories are
very long indeed.  They are still there -- now, to this very day,

There was much, much more  anti-labor and anti-radical brutality across the
West -- and eventually the country itself. No one was ever punished for
these atrocities.  And then the Federal government itself rounded up 150
leaders of the IWW, quickly convicting them [along with Gene Debs, the
socialist], of the completely spurious charges of "Espionage" and
"Sedition."

That was long before my time, of course,  But the historic, always
remembered Jerome Deportation was -- along with the racist brutality and
economic exploitation of Flagstaff and many regional environs -- a key
factor in my own eventual radicalization at  barely 21.

--------------------

The half-light didn't change -- but I had no difficulty seeing and
navigating. The Canyon was forty miles long, north to south, and I was
taking the lower 30 all the way to the end.  But for me now time and distance
were meaningless.

For a few moments, I studied myself.  I was big, very muscular, much hair.
I wore my traditional J.C. Penney wide-brimmed hat, Levis, worn blue Western
shirt,  heavy and steel toed logging boots cut slightly  long ago by a
mis-aimed double-bitted axe blow.  I carried my old 30/30 Winchester lever
action, with its curved butt plate and long octagon barrel.  On my left hip,
I packed a large hunting knife.

And I had energy! -- energy I had not had since the hideous disease had
struck many weeks before.

Almost 50 years earlier, in May 1955, I had taken this very route over a
major junket of several leisurely days. [I know of no contemporary person in
those days -- and maybe even to this day -- who ever made that trip.] I was
a basically healthy kid -- but there were problems.  The Army, in which I
had just served a full stretch --  very honorably by its standards -- had
left marks. I had a brand-new IWW  card.  This was fine by my parents, but
they still hoped [and Mother pushed ] for a "respectable" career to which I
was resistant. That far off trip through Sycamore  -- coming home to my very
special setting -- was in large part to organize my own thinking.

In the course of that Great Trek , I explored some vasty side canyons coming
down off the western rim. I saw ancient Indian ruins in cliff settings --
the location of which I would never reveal.   The entire journey featured
all sorts of wild game -- much of it not afraid of me at all -- and I saw
hundreds of elk antlers, seasonally shed  in winter grazing areas.   At one
point, I saw huge bear tracks -- very fresh -- under Sycamore trees which
had been clawed eight feet or so up.  This was grizzly sign -- even though
no grizzlies were supposed to exist anywhere in Arizona by that time.  At
another point, resting on a knoll above Sycamore Creek,  I heard a noisy
crashing sound coming in toward me through the brush.  I waited.  Suddenly,
a huge jet black long-horn bull emerged nosily, limping from an old wound on
one back thigh evidenced by old lion or bear claw scars.  He drank from the
creek.  When he had finished, I asked him quietly, "How are you doing
today?"  He jerked his head up -- had never, I'm sure, seen a human creature
before -- and looked directly at me.  Then   he turned and plunged back into
the brush.  He was a direct descendant of many generations of purely wild
cattle, stemming from Spanish gold mining operations in the latter 1700s.

Eventually, when the geology had shifted into the Great Verde Fault, I found
rose quartz -- gold-bearing quartz -- but I would never reveal the location
of that, ever.

In due course, at the lower end of the Great Canyon, I emerged into the land
of our two old hermit friends -- Joe Dickson, a  retired hard-rock miner and
Jerry Greaves, a former merchant seaman.  They lived in the Old Packard
Ranch and I spent a day with them, telling what I'd seen.  They were a bit
disappointed that I had not cut the sign of the Lost Spanish Mine, somewhere
in the vastnesses of Sycamore, guarded -- according to legend --  by the
ghost of a black-robed Spanish priest.

And when I soon "came out" in the comparatively "civilized" Verde Valley, I
was  very much together.  Not long thereafter, I went with my family to
Mexico where Dad painted and lectured -- and I spent the month studying that
fascinating nation's radicalism and union movements.  And then to sociology
at the University of Arizona and eventually to Arizona State University --
fine enough.  But almost immediately I  fortunately connected with  radical
and democratic  -- and consistently embattled --  industrial unionism. My
organizing career all over the country in Native rights, labor, civil rights
and liberties, social justice in general,  has been -- no false modesty --
successful.  I still keep going.

Now I was at the bottom of the Canyon, turning south, downward.  Sycamore
Creek's familiar running and rippling and splashing noises were old and
friendly music. And so was everything else I experienced-- almost all of
which I remembered with the most intricate clarity -- as I walked, slowly
but strangely down, down Sycamore, mile after mile after mile. Again, time
and distance meant nothing for me here,  I was extremely happy and I liked
my thinking.

And then I was suddenly  awake -- in my bed on the far western frontier of
Pocatello. It was dawn and the half light was gone. I was weak, utterly weak
and felt generally like Hell.  My one-half Bobcat, Cloudy, nuzzled me.
Eldri was cooking breakfast and my daughter, Maria, handed me a huge cup of
super strong black coffee.

My head, as always was very clear.

"If you had to choose," my newspaper son Peter asked a few days ago,
"between physical health  on the one hand and your thinking and writing
ability on the other, which would you take?"

"My mind always," I replied.


And what I do know is that it's critical to keep fighting -- and to always
remember that if one lives with grace he/she should be prepared to die with
grace.

How much time do I have?  Maybe lots, maybe not much.

But I'd like, too,  within the now somewhat narrowed borders of my
canyon-of-life, to help others do some good things as well. Let me know.

In the mountains of southeastern Idaho.

Nialetch/Onen

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear] Micmac / St Francis Abenaki/ St Regis Mohawk
Late December, 2003
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'


In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]

_

THE STORMY ADOPTION OF AN INDIAN CHILD -- MY FATHER

[HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER, JR] JUNE 11 2004 WITH JULY 6  AND JULY 9 2004 ADDENDA

 

Dear Hunter,  [July 8 2004]

Thanks so very much for sharing the details of your father's adoption that you experienced.

It is a valuable addition to those who are interested in William Mackintire Salter.  Oh that we had his voice telling us the story. 

I shall be sharing this bit of history with the archivist of the American Ethical Union and a few others that have been interested in you and your ancestors' lives.

Life is busy here and I never get everything I wanted to do done in the day.  I'm sure you have the same problem.  We are all grateful for your writings.

Most Cordially,
Dorothy Lockhart
Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago

 

Hunter: The more we learn about you and the remarkable connection of
various individuals in your family to important circumstances, events,
and movements in this country's history, the more urgent it seems to me
that you assemble it all into an autobiography. In my own case, I
started with my grandparents, but they did not represent the kind of
diversity, in every sense of the word, that yours and their forebears
do. Your book would SELL, and in my view a hell of a lot better than
mine has, among other reasons because you write very well.
                                William (Bill) Mandel  7/9/2004

Hi to all,

So glad to hear from you, hope all is well with you!!

Love & Prayers

Alta M. Bruce
Indian Health Service
Injury Control Specialist

Belcourt, ND 58316   [8/4/2004]


NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR:

This is hard to write about.  Initially [7/9/04], I posted this only on Bear Without Borders. As of the end of this July, however, I have expanded it somewhat and am sending it out much more widely.

This is not an argument against sensible and committed cross racial
adoptions.

This page, now on our Lair of Hunterbear website,  deals with
my Native father's adoption by a well-known liberal activist family, William
Mackintire Salter and Mary Gibbens Salter.  Their brother-in-law, Professor
William James of Harvard, initially opposed the adoption -- not because Dad
was an Indian but because of the limitations of the Salters.

"I can't help from expressing the feelings which have been besetting me
throughout the day, and growing hourly stronger, about the Salters' project
of adopting a child. The plan seems to me fraught with terrible risks for
the remoter future and with a present inconvenience which I should think
would be fairly disastrous. If they were younger, securer in health, and if
they dwelt in the country or in a rural town it would be different. And it
would be different if, being as they are, they were richer. It would be
different also morally if they were now leading merely selfish lives and not
devoting themselves to arduous public ideals."   William James, to his
mother-in-law, Eliza Putnam Webb Gibbens, June 20, 1900.

Among his several liberal affiliations, William M Salter was active in the
almost all-white Indian Rights Association -- which, during this era, was
mistakenly pushing the cultural assimilation of Native people.  The IRA
was encouraging its members to adopt Indian children.

Dad was essentially a full blood.  His mother, Mamie E Gray
[Wabanaki and Mohawk] and his father, Thomas Taylor [Micmac
and Maliseet] were Northern Maine Indians.  [A portion of Thomas Taylor's family became closely involved with the Penobscot Nation,  near Old Town, Maine.]

When the adoption did occur, William James and his family got
vigorously behind it.  William M Salter, however, soured badly on it
 -- although  Mary Gibbens Salter remained a kind and loving person.

The shadow of this adoption hung -- and in a very real sense still hangs --
over our family. I -- a consistent supporter of my father always -- have had
a very tough time coming to terms with it.  Yet I can see how, in the
strange way in which the cards often fall out, Dad benefited from
the travail.

In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted -- providing considerable
protection for Native children and working actively to keep them within
their extended family, or the tribe itself, or in the Indian community.

_____________________
 

Amy Kittelstrom, has been doing a PhD
dissertation on William James [with substantial mention of W. M. Salter and some
mention of Dad]. She interviewed me almost two years ago. Her
work is now finished, will be published as a book, and here are a few very
salient excerpts. Our assumption has always been that Louise
Annance died quite young at Greenville, Me. [She is my great grandmother and
grandmother Mamie's mother.] But, as per these recently opened James letters, she worked for the James family at Cambridge-- as several other Annances did. The Massachusetts state agency to which Dad wrote for more of his background details in 1950, providing bureaucratic confirmation of the essence of which we already knew, referred to his mother, "Mamie E. Gray" [born in Maine], and to Mamie's
parents, "Louise A. Gray" and "John E. Gray." John E. Gray is not to be confused with our other direct ancestor, John Gray [Ignace Hatchiorauquasha], Mohawk fur hunter in the Far West. 

[John E.  Gray was a violent and abusive person.  Louise's relationship with him was short lived and centered almost completely in the Moosehead Lake region.]

We don't know when Louise died but it was still very probably at a relatively young age. Ms. Kittelstrom found this material on Louise -- a bit of which we have not known before today.  

--------------------------------------------------------

FROM THE DISSERTATION – Democracy Upon Its Trial: Pluralism and Categories of Difference

"Not until the Shaw oration did James use language that advocated mixture.
Until that point he expressed distinct squeamishness about social mixing
across categories of difference. In 1880 he wanted to design his home's hall
to avoid "the disagreeableness of servants going through to the door when
there are guests," thinking aristocratically-for he wrote up his new plan
while in England-of a way to separate the household by "a lower kitchen." In
1881 James was pleased enough that his wife was retaining two Wabanaki
servants, although "with every allowance made for natives on sentimental
grounds, how poor a pick of them there seems to be." Yet he could not see
how his wife could keep Louise Annance, the Wabanaki female, as well as "one
white [female] servant." He seemed to fear the possible dissatisfaction of
his white servant, were her race not in the majority, over the Wabanaki's
desire for employment. . ."

* * *

"When William Salter and his wife, a decade after the death of their only
child from measles, moved to adopt a ward of the state, the two-year-old
grandson of James's Wabanaki servant Louise Annance, the character of the
adoption is unclear. Were they taking the young Frank Gray to be their son,just as though he were flesh of their flesh? The legal formality of the
adoption and the changing of his name to John Randall Salter would seem to
suggest so. So does the fact that he played with William James's kids-the
children of his adoptive mother's sister, and therefore his cousins-on terms
of equality, eventually receiving a wedding present "from your cousin Alice
and me," that is, from William James, Jr., and his wife. But he often did
not live with the Salters in Chicago, mostly staying back east in Chocorua
near where the rest of his extended family ranged. The Salters did not make
sure he attended school every year, extending such little oversight that he
never attended any high school at all. If they viewed him as their own son,
wouldn't they have taken him along when they spent a year in Europe? Instead
they placed him with a family in Evanston, Illinois. But John Dewey and his
wife also left their sons behind when they traveled in Europe, with
heartbreaking consequences: two of their three sons died while the Deweys
were away.

It could be that the Salters wanted John to remain near his extended family
to cultivate his Indian culture. William Salter was apparently open to
talking about John's background, although he made no effort to help him
retain the language or the Catholic religion to which his ancestors had long
since converted. But Salter mostly seemed quite distant from his adopted
son. Acrimony increased between them until 1913, when John was fifteen, and
Salter dragged him to an Army recruiter to try to sign him up and be rid of
him. The recruiter chastised Salter, saying John was "far too young." The
rift, by that point irreparable, led John to escape as a cabin boy on a ship
out of Boston. Salter cut him out of his will. Mary Gibbens Salter set up a
small trust fund for him at the State Street Bank in Boston, and eventually
the James estate paid for John Randall Salter's education at the Art
Institute of Chicago.

Of his years with the Salters, John Randall Salter would remember Mary
Salter's warmth and lovingness, William Salter's emotional reserve, and
sylvan times in Chocorua with the James family. "There was nothing ever even
slightly remote about William James," John would teach his own son. John
remembered sitting by Lake Chocorua with James discussing the possibility of
frogs having souls. He never forgot visiting James's deathbed in Chocorua
with Salter, a day or so before James passed. He also remembered the
contrast between James's children's camaraderie with him and Salter's
brother Sumner's children, who taunted him, calling him "Sitting Bull," and
once accused him of stealing a watch from them. And of John's years with the
Salters, what would William Salter remember? He never wrote of it, left no
record of the meaning of it for him. He would remain a member of the IRA
until 1916, three years after John ran away, by which point he would have
reached the age of majority and Salter could have felt his responsibility
fully absolved."

* * *
 

Note by Hunter Bear:

In early May, 2003, Eldri and I drove to Chicago where I delivered a major Founder's Day talk to the Ethical Humanist Society of Greater Chicago.  This had been founded by William M. Salter. 

"In my speech at Chicago -- a packed house with a number of non-Society
members present, I spoke of the enduring influence on our family of my
ggg/grandfather, John Gray [Ignace Hatchiorauquasha], fiery and committed
leader of the Mohawk fur hunters in the Columbia and Snake River country in
their disputes with the Anglo fur bosses. I spoke, too, of a maternal great
grandfather, Michael Senn -- Swiss immigrant to Kansas Territory in the
early 1850s, Abolitionist, Civil War veteran, founder of the Knights of
Labor in Kansas, major leader of the Populist Party and a Populist state
senator, denouncer of atrocities against the Indian people, cousin of Chris
Hoffman ["Millionaire Socialist of Kansas" who died of a heart attack while
addressing an IWW rally at Kansas City.] Michael Senn became a Socialist
himself.

But now, for the first time publicly, I also spoke of the very positive
influence of William Mackintire Salter for our family:  his great commitment
to the Haymarket victims and their families, his opposition to American
imperialism, his many endeavours on behalf of Indian and Black people, his
staunch support for civil liberties which never wavered in the several
nefarious periods of spontaneous and concocted fear and hysteria through
which he lived and worked. . .

In the end, however oft-turbulent Dad's adoption, he got the best of both
worlds -- Native and Anglo social activist -- and my parents passed all of
that along to me."

KASS FLEISHER WRITES AN EXCELLENT POST ON JULY 9 AND I RESPOND:

Kass writes:

"hunter, this is painful indeed.  i knew there was strain betw your
father and his adoptive father but didn't know that w.s. had broken
with him entirely.  do you have a sense of the reason?  or should we
conclude the obvious, that racism was eating at him?  anyway.  you
have come a long way, a long walk.  what a miracle you are."  k

_____________________
 

I very much appreciate your kind words, Kass.  This is the first anniversary
of our realization that something was seriously wrong with me, medically.
We had gone to ISU to pick up Josie who had just finished her last exam
prior to graduation.  She had no vehicle then but is now a working LSW
Social Worker and she and Cameron [IBEW] have a fine new Jeep Liberty.  The
world seems a bit more distant to me each day!

On William M Salter:  It was an almost total break all the way around --
though there were occasional points of contact, at least with Mary Salter.
Although Mother met both William and Mary, it was only briefly and they died
not long before I was born. They may have been a little frightened by her:
Western horse ranching and Idaho and Washington state mining engineering
antecedents on one side of her family and rambunctious Populism on the
other. Obviously, the reservations expressed [however delicately] by William
James vis-a-vis the Salters are points very well taken indeed.  In addition
to that, Salter's high idealism which had traveled and survived so many
rough trails  apparently could not -- in the instance of a lively child --
avoid the rocks and rapids of the River of No Return.

I definitely don't believe he was a racist -- at least not a conscious one.
With his close colleague, Jane Addams and several dozen others, he signed
the Call to Organization of the NAACP in 1909.  As I've noted, he was, for
better or worse, involved in the Indian Rights Association. He was
consistently opposed to American imperialism. His courage in defending the
Haymarket victims and their families and his advocacy on their behalf with
Governor Atgeld was tremendous. But Salter was old -- well beyond his years
as it turned out -- and brittle.

He took voluminous notes -- his books are full of them -- and, if no written
record of his feelings on the adoption were found, there is at least the
possibility that he destroyed them.  After both William and Mary Salter
died, my parents, visiting their large home [the Hilltop] in the
Chocorua/Silver Lake NH setting, went into their large barn.  There,
partially concealed at least, was a box with two dozen photos of Dad at
various points and some adoption documents.  We speculate that Mary Salter
put them there to avoid their destruction by William.  All of these have
been in my possession for many years.

All best, Kass.  Humans were made to survive and, as I was told when I was
near death from Scarlet Fever at the age of five or six, "Only the good die
young."

H

Kass, I should add, is the author of the excellent,  The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History, [Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2004.] The mass murder of almost 300 Shoshone people -- men, women, children -- by Union affiliated troops in Southern Idaho, January, 1863 and the wide-ranging chronological and geographical and cultural implications and ramifications.  H
 

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'
 

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]

_________________

TRIBUTES AND GOOD THOUGHTS
FOR AND ABOUT
HUNTER BEAR

Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]

Mi'kmaq/St Francis Abenaki/St Regis Mohawk

1.  JAMES W. LOEWEN

2.  JOHN H. SIME

OUR RIVER OF THANKS

From Hunter Gray
March 01, 2004

I have just been the recipient of great tribute.

This message is going to all Lists with which I am affiliated. It's also going to a great many individuals -- many of whom have written fine things and others who have done other solid things and those who have thought fine thoughts. In addition, my son, John, will be forwarding this to the Four Directions.

I speak here on behalf of our entire family -- and our many, many friends: old and new.

I am genuinely Overcome, truly Overwhelmed. Totally.

It is like looking out a familiar window -- for one more of countless times.

And expecting to see the same mountains and trees, snow and sage and grass.

And then -- genuine and stunning surprise -- viewing a large new Mountain, a whole new one, a vast and shining Panorama.

And, with all of that, a whole fresh array of glittering Crags and Canyons and Ridges -- and Perspectives from and of the Sun and the Stars and the Wind.

There are now many, many places to explore, and nuggets far richer than any gold to receive and to hold and to treasure -- in this emergent masterpiece of organizational complexity and intricacy and rich water.

In Solidarity

Nialetch/Onen

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR]

Micmac/ St Francis Abenaki/St Regis Mohawk

In the mountains of Eastern Idaho

www.hunterbear.org

When you cut to the bone and cut away the college degrees, academic and other titles, published books and articles, ours is essentially a working class and Indian family. We consistently join unions -- and we always support them with the greatest vigor.

It's critical to always keep fighting -- and to always remember that, if one lives with grace, he/she should be prepared to die with grace.

Among the Contributors To
This Hunter Gray Tribute

 

Theresa Alt, Ithaca, New York
Norla Antinoro, Tucson, Arizona
Clyde Appleton, Tucson, Arizona
Alice Azure, Mystic, Connecticut
Vivian E. Berg, Mandan, North Dakota
Heather Booth, Washington, DC
William Borden, Royse City, Texas and Bemidji, MN
Reber Boult, Albuquerque, NM
Charles Bracey, Chicago, IL
Quinn Brisben, Chicago, Illinois
Joan C. Browning, Lewisburg, West Virginia
Duane E. Campbell, Sacramento, California
Barry Cohen, New York, New York
Gilles d'Aymery, via SWANS
Easy, Spokane, Washington
Dianne Feeley,
David Finkel, Detroit, MI

Diane Feldman, Washington, DC
Kass Fleisher, Normal, Illinois
Sam Friedman, New Jersey [and New York, NY]
Robert W Gately, Phoenix, AZ
Stephen Harvey, Courtenay, B.C., Canada
Michael Hirsch, New York, New York

Dan Hittner, Brooklyn, New York
Dale Jacobson, East Grand Forks, Minnesota
Rev. Edwin King, University of Mississippi Medical Center  Jackson
Jessica LaBumbard, Detroit, Michigan
John Lacny, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Joyce Ladner,  Sarasota, Florida

Dorothy Lockhart, Skokie, Illinois
Jim Loewen, Washington, DC

Dawn Lough, Iowa City and Tama, Iowa
Tim McGowan, Rochester, New York
Steven F. McNichols, San Francisco, California
David McReynolds, New York, New York
William Mandel, Oakland, California
Sheila Michaels, St. Louis, Missouri
Joan Mulholland, Arlington, Virginia
Loki Mulholland, Orem, Utah
Ed Nakawatase, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Celine Nally, Stanley, New Mexico

Carmen Pappas Lincolnwood, Illinois

Edward Pickersqill, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Patricia Pristas, Stanley, New Mexico
Louis Proyect, New York, New York
David Ranney, Washington Island, Wisconsin
Elliott & Muriel Ricehill, Black River Falls, Wisconsin
Steve Rossignol, Blanco, Texas
Steve Rutledge, West Virginia
John Salter, Glyndon, Minnesota
Peter Salter, Lincoln, Nebraska
Samantha Salter, Pocatello, ID
Jay Schaffner, New York, New York
John Henry Sime, Readstown, Wisconsin
Jerry Severson, Grand Forks, North Dakota
Macdonald Stainsby, Vancouver, BC
Martha Ture, Fairfax, Marin County, California
Jay Weinstein, Ypsilanti, MI
Roy Wortman, Gambier, Ohio 43022
Steven Zunes, Santa Cruz, California

---

FROM DALE JACOBSON:

FOR HUNTER GRAY
by Dale Jacobson


All these voices, all these lives, the world.

Jay Gould, who wanted Fridays black,
said “labor is a commodity,”
no news to Marx. But another kind
of work that shapes the world round
made the banker shudder!--
and though the nation still rushes
toward those nuggets of ‘49
one minute to the intersection
of dream and despair, blissfully
oblivious how late it is
into the senile century just born-- who,
asks the miner deep among mineral,
mines the sky not for gold but its light?

America is a myth but something is older.
In those wild lands west where space
is ancient and terrain is free though
land be owned, shale rings with time
when rock talks to rock, and a long
catechism of echoes ricochets through
ravines indifferent if anyone hears
and no mountain will move for word or will.

From that place came Hunter the Bad Bear
who stalks the hunters who hunt the poor.
From Arizona to Mississippi to Chicago
and places between, even Grand Forks
on the far northern plains, he came
to call in the way the world calls itself
down the canyons of cities where
the faces of the poor are locked
in their prisons of deep stone silence--
his voice echoes into tomorrow where
those same ancient and wild expanses of light
cannot be fenced but wait
for the free word to pronounce the day.

DALE JACOBSON [UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA]

_____________________

SUMMING UP -- BUT NOT GIVING UP -- MY RIVER OF NO RETURN  

It's critical to always keep fighting -- and to always remember that, if one
lives with grace, he/she should be prepared to die with grace.  [Hunter Bear]
 

Messages Continued

10. STEVE ROSSIGNOL

Please add my name to the list of folks wishing Hunter the Best-

Steve Rossignol

11. DAVID FINKEL AND DIANNE FEELEY [AGAINST THE CURRENT]

Hunter Bear is a friend, comrade and inspiration to us in the socialist group SOLIDARITY and our journal AGAINST THE CURRENT.

To ATC in particular, he has contributed stimulating essays on such topics as reparations for slavery; his encounters with "a rattlesnake friend;" and the handling of racist speech on campus, to which his trenchant response was "Don't Censor Anything." In each case his thinking reflects a deep synthesis of his Native American heritage and Civil Rights organizing experience. To every question and encounter he brings a profoundly libertarian, revolutionary and socialist perspective, in the very best sense of each of these often-abused terms.

The indomitable spirit, courage and above all dignity with which he has confronted his present illness is no surprise to anyone who knows of his life and work. He continues to inspire and educate all of us, and always will. Venceremos!

-David Finkel and Dianne Feeley, for Solidarity and Against the Current

12.  REBER BOULT

Hunter-

Wow! A couple of years ago when Ed Hamlett said he was putting me in touch with somebody with "grit" (he used the quotation marks), I had no idea what that meant. Well, here we are; must be "grit." Actually it's great. Tremendously so to get to know you, even in the less than entirely adequate medium which is, though, entirely better than not having met at all. If Susana and I weren't leaving to drive to Chiapas in a day or two, I think we'd be leaving to drive to Pocatello.

Your amigo,

Reber

The historic first picketing in the history of downtown Jackson:  December 12  1962.  We were immediately arrested by almost 100 Jackson police officers.  This launched the extremely effective boycott of downtown Jackson which grew, in time, into the massive Jackson Movement.  In addition to Eldri and me, the arrested pickets were Ms. Bette Anne Poole, Mr. Walter Mitchell, Mr. Ronald Mitchell, and Mr. Rupert Crawford -- all Tougaloo students of mine.  In that, and subsequent cases, we were very capably represented by Jess Brown of Jackson and Bill Kunstler of New York City.  [From Lair of Hunterbear.]
 

13.  CLYDE APPLETON

1111 W. St. Mary's Rd., #720

Tucson, AZ 85745-2480

18 February 2004

Dear Hunter Gray,

Is it proper for one to write a fan letter to a friend? Proper or not, that's what I'm doing. My admiration for you and your worthy life is immense, and I cherish our friendship that has spanned more than forty years.

I remember the day we met. It was in about 1960; maybe 1959. You and your friends and fellow ASU students Tony and Bill knocked on the door of the house I shared with Barbara and Vern Elfbrandt. You were in Tucson to picket William R. Matthews, publisher (editor?) of the ARIZONA DAILY STAR and on the Board of Trustees of the Arizona University system. My memory is faulty, but I think the issue may have been compulsory ROTC. And we have been comrades and friends-and in frequent or not-so-frequent contact- from that day 'til the present one.

I went off to teach at Shaw University in North Carolina, and you and Eldri went off to Tougaloo College in Mississippi. We were in contact by mail during those times when we both were active participants in the civil rights struggles of that era. Your experiences (and Eldri's) in Jackson are chronicled in your wonder-full book about the Jackson Movement.

Badly Beaten/Bloodied John Salter/Hunter Gray

14.  JOAN [TRUMPAUER] MULHOLLAND

15. TIM McGOWAN

16. STEVE McNICHOLS

17. BILL BORDEN

18. KASS FLEISHER

19. JOHN SALTER [BEBA]  [IROQUOIS / WABANAKI]

 POEMS

 

1.

Hunter

by Sam Friedman

 

I know him

as electronic words

on a list serve,

printed words

in a few articles

and a book,

and by brief talk

by telephone --

and by the echoes of his deeds

which were not his

but those of the movements

he helped to organize.

As he would say,

the greatness is theirs,

or maybe, grudgingly, "ours,"

never "mine,"

never "me,"

though not through the false modesty

he reviles.

His ego resembles

a Pocatello pine,

his mind ranges over the Rockies,

his caring and vision

spills from the Arizona of his birth

through Jackson, Eastern Carolina,

Rochester, Chicago, the Dakotas,

down deep into the dark metal mines

where safety depends on power,

through the longshore bars of Seattle

and the firefronts of arid Arizona.

When he dies, the Scorpion and Centaur in the sky

Will drive Lupus from the star-fields with meteors,

and the Bears will dance around the Pole Star

to commemorate a life of their own.

---

 

 

2.

FOR HUNTER GRAY

by Dale Jacobson

 

All these voices, all these lives, the world.

Jay Gould, who wanted Fridays black,

said "labor is a commodity,"

no news to Marx. But another kind

of work that shapes the world round

made the banker shudder!-

and though the nation still rushes

toward those nuggets of '49

one minute to the intersection

of dream and despair, blissfully

oblivious how late it is

into the senile century just born- who,

asks the miner deep among mineral,

mines the sky not for gold but its light?

America is a myth but something is older.

In those wild lands west where space

is ancient and terrain is free though

land be owned, shale rings with time

when rock talks to rock, and a long

catechism of echoes ricochets through

ravines indifferent if anyone hears

and no mountain will move for word or will.

>From that place came Hunter the Bad Bear

who stalks the hunters who hunt the poor.

>From Arizona to Mississippi to Chicago

and places between, even Grand Forks

on the far northern plains, he came

to call in the way the world calls itself

down the canyons of cities where

the faces of the poor are locked

in their prisons of deep stone silence-

his voice echoes into tomorrow where

those same ancient and wild expanses of light

cannot be fenced but wait

for the free word to pronounce the day.

---

 

3.  ALICE HATFIELD AZURE [MI'KMAQ]

 

 

Dear Hunter,

 

Your long email about lupus came this evening. I don't know where to begin with an adequate response. What I want to do is to express to you the powerful influence you have had upon my life. There isn't nor the space to piece everything together in a coherent way. The best I can do tonight is to start with an early poem I wrote in 1974, shortly after leaving the University of Iowa's graduate school of urban & regional planning:

HORICON I

Against

The harvest sky

Wild geese by instinct fly

Away to places where I

Can't be.

 

 

Another poem, HORICON II, expresses an entirely different frame of mind:

 

HORICON II

Interstate Eighty-eight

meanders a northerly way

along the Rock River. I flow

point by point from Patti's

Geneseo Home

to exit ninety-nine

at Rochelle's Iron Skillet.

Fueled and fed

I head true north.

With forty cents

at South Beloit

I change to Interstate Forty-three,

pushing time to Milwaukee

where that sign says,

north Green Bay,"

and others say

in rapid succession,

fifty

fifty-five

sixty-five.

At seventy-five

in the right-hand lane,

the policeman lets me go-

flying north, going home.

 

 

The second poem was written in 1998-thirty-four years after the first. My long, hard but transformative journey between the two was made possible in large part to your teaching, inspiration and friendship. It's a journey nowhere as radical as what you described in your email, my friend. What was radical, however, was the way your influence turned me upside down. Happily, I haven't been the same. In the process, I have found myself, most importantly my Native American identity. You did what the best of teachers do-give their students keys that unlock the doors of mind, heart and-perhaps-even one's soul. I am grateful and blessed to have had my life shaped by your great vision of social justice.

 

 

Love,

 

Alice Hatfield Azure

 

57 Quaker Farm Road

 

Mystic, CT 06355

 

December 21, 2003

---

 

 

 

4.

His Courage is a Beacon

(For Hunter)

by Norla M. Antinoro, 2-23-2004

 

His true courage is a beacon

Pure gold and shining in the night

>From the shadows he awakens

Our hearts to join him in the fight.

His voice calls to faint hearts aloud

And to courageous souls alike

"Come stand with me or stand aside!"

He calls us all to join the strike.

---

 

 

5.

(Although a newbee to Hunters universe, I am moved to send along this mornings thoughts on his condition and his contributions to our collective conscious.)

 

RESTLESS BEAR

by Robert Whalen Gately

 

Restless Bear in hibernation,

outside your den, a celebration,

Winters howling winds are dying,

Snows melting, soon to the North, geese flying.

Restless Bear in relaxation,

stretch your paws, feel the action,

Scratch your mark on pulp & bark,

roaring orders to the Cardinal, Doves, Larks &

Hawks.

Restless Bear in reflection,

remember Spring's eternal promise,

Summer's hope and Fall's harvest,

Around your fire gathered, Family, Friends, all

Blessed.

Restless Bear in remission,

Great Spirit returns, recognition,

From mesa to mesa, village to village news is shared ;

He comes again to bless us, Great Hunter Bear !

 

With Great Respect & Appreciation,

Robert Whalen Gately

---

6.

Samantha Salter

 

 

The Bear

by Samantha Salter (granddaughter)

 

The bear I know is nice and brave

He is like no one else

He hangs on through the toughest of fights

He hangs on through the hardest of nights

He helps everyone stay together

He is a bear that will last in everybody's hearts forever.

---

 

7.

Ecological musings by an AIDS researcher

2/11/04
by Sam Friedman

From the overlook, Tasmania stretched vast

with flame-spurts scattered

where gum trees enacted

annual rites of aromatic self-immolation

unhelped by human hands.

Any humans were wee small,

too tiny to be seen&emdash;

or gone forever through the gentle ministrations

of English invaders who saw them as wild game

like the foxes they had left behind

in their imperious Isle.

Hunter traipsed weeks in his youth

in beloved Arizona gorges

chatting with bears, mountain lions,

coyotes

 

Hunter's coyote - Good.

 

who rarely had seen

the spoor of human feet.

In January, I spend Martin'sDay weekend

doing poems at Cape May.

The waves don't notice me,

don't hear my poems though

I shout them to their spume.

They send their everyday

roaring rhythms to themselves

while timeless birds pick over

their repetitive left debris.

I remember my first interviews

with men with AIDS,

their timeless sturdy bodies shrunken

by the gnawing depredations of viruses

too tiny to be seen.

 

Sam Friedman

National Development and Research Institutes

71 West 23d Street, 8th floor

New York, NY 10010

USA

1 212 845 4467

Fax 1 917 438 0894

friedman@ndri.org

---

PHOTOS AND ART 

Micmac Man
A 1978 painting of Hunter by his brother, Richard Salter.

" an all-out imposing, absolutely self-confident Native American man who just happened to be my graduate advisor at the University of Iowa's graduate school of Urban & Regional Planning."

46. ALICE HATFIELD AZURE [MI'KMAQ]

You asked if anyone had a story to go with the wonderful oil painting of Hunter Gray by his brother, Richard. I do. I purchased the painting from Richard in 1980 at his home near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

The image is 32" by 40" and is absolutely one of the best Native American contemporary images I have seen executed by a painter. I think my husband went white in the face when I told Richard that I wanted to purchase that painting. After all, "Micmac Man," as the painting was called, represented an all-out imposing, absolutely self-confident Native American man who just happened to be my graduate advisor at the University of Iowa's graduate school of Urban & Regional Planning.

After my husband & I divorced, "Micmac Man" stayed with me throughout several different homes-hanging on my living room wall in his own imposing way, glaring out at everyone who came though the doors of my home. Is it any reason that I remained single for nine years?

Anyway, I stray. One man, however, was not intimidated by Hunter's image. Alec Azure knew John, and had participated in visits organized by John and by the Quad Cities Intertribal League (Davenport, Iowa) down to the Ft. Madison penitentiary to visit Native American prisoners, including Alec's own relatives.

Three years after Alec's wife passed on in 1987, he came calling on me in Virginia. Under the glare of "Micmac Man," he courted me. His jealousy was obvious. Blithely, I hung onto the painting after we were married and we moved across the country to establish residency in Evanston, Illinois. I had taken on the position of vice president of administration for NAES College (Native American Educational Services). A horrible fire destroyed the entire interior of the college in December of 1990. We lost everything except our library. All the paintings of Chicago Native American elders, such as Willard LaMere, were gone. Between the emergence of a new college with very bare walls, and my new husband's jealousy, I opted for some peace and thus donated "Micmac Man" to the college, along with Richard's other painting called "Cinder Hills."

I left the college in October of 1993-nine months after my husband's passing in February of 1993. Whether the paintings are still there I don't know. But I hung on to another of Richard Salter's paintings, "Hawks & Cliffs," a hawk's eye's view of canyons and a river bed somewhere in Arizona, I presume. I will never part with that one!

Alice Hatfield Azure

NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR:  

I am very pleased and honored that Alice Hatfield Azure and her fine Chicago colleagues arranged for Micmac Man to be sent to us in early March [2005.]  It now hangs proudly on our wall, here in Idaho.

Hunter at his toughest! Mid-1990s, Grand Forks, North Dakota.

"I Consider Myself a Real Red:"

The Social Thought of American Civil Rights Organizer John R. (Salter) Hunter Gray

(An excerpt.)

by Roy T. Wortman
Department of History
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio 43022 USA

The eclectic libertarianism and communitarianism of the IWW connects to Hunter Gray's life - long quest, not only for civil rights, but for lawful self-defense within the American republican and libertarian tradition of the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. His own self- defense weapons of choice, he once told a Kenyon College audience, included a Ruger .357 single action revolver and a Marlin .444 lever action rifle. This was, perhaps, the first time brand name firearms were given an endorsement in the civil rights struggle. He owned his first rifle at the age of seven. Hunting and firearms were a part of his boyhood environment and his coming of age even as they are now a part of his persona. "When I was seven I wanted a Red Ryder BB gun. Dad was all for it; Mother-who had nothing at all against guns... dragged her feet as mothers do with the first child. There was a three-way hassle: me and my two parents, Dad on my side. An older cousin settled the whole issue by giving me as a gift, when I was still age seven, a very nicely kept .22 Wincherster 1890 pump, 24" octagon barrel.... I never thought about a BB gun again (Hunter Gray, letter to the author, 29 March 2000)." The culture of hunting and of safe, responsible use of firearms was simply a normal part of Hunter Gray's growing up. As a rite of passage in his own maturation and personal growth, Hunter Gray, as a boy, killed his first Black Bear (estimated at 650 pounds live weight by educated adult guesses), "fulfilling a very important coming of age River to Cross. I used an old 30/30 Model 94, "24 octagon barrel, curved butt plate.... We ate every bit of his meat and his skull hangs from the wall over our bed, right here, right now. The Tooth has always been extremely important to us from the perspective of protection / self-defense: blocking malevolence and sending it right back into the perpetrator(s)-all of this perfectly consistent...with principled self-defense." (Hunter Gray to the author, 29 March 2000.) He qualified as an expert marksman while in the Army. At a broader level he understands that both American and Canadian "grassroots people " are knowledgeable about firearms and their safe use, but that media, "tied often to self-serving and frequently demagogic political agendas...continue to push the anti-gun campaign with no regard for truth and reality." Hunter Gray served as a volunteer National Rifle Association civil liberties and media organizer in North Dakota, and continues in these capacities in his retirement in Idaho.

Hunter Gray criticizes the mainstream media for failing to realize the importance of self- defense and civil rights in such situations as labor and civil rights, as well as in men's resistance to violence. What concerns Hunter Gray for the United States is that the mainstream media deny that the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, is "a statement of natural rights [emphasis supplied]." Moreover, in their attempt to restrict if not prohibit firearms, politicians and media bypass the basic cause of crime: "economic deprivation, racism and ethnocentrism, and urban congestion-and, in that context, interpersonal and value alienation."

Yet the existence of crime must not deter the law - abiding from lawful self - defense:

"In the end, Roy, we are many, and there are lots of guns and will continue to be. I just hope that, in a generation or two, there are still many of us: the gun people. I think there will be." (Hunter Gray, letter to the author, 29 March 2000.)

The point here is that Hunter Gray views lawful possession as a natural right, compatible with the democratic heritage and historical origin of the American Republic, which trusted its people to take to arms for defense of self and commonwealth. Added to this in Hunter Gray's mind are the complex issues in a modern bureaucratic and regulatory society, which impinge on individual freedom. This makes for a draconian police state in the name of "gun control," which Hunter Gray fully understands to mean firearms prohibition and intimidation by government of the law-abiding. Predatory, violent criminals, as individuals or as paramilitary organized groups have been and will continue to be exempt from administrative and legislative measures to restrict the use of firearms. Hunter Gray's concern is that only the non-criminal element in the United States will suffer and be denied the right to self-defense and resistance against tyranny. In this view he is in the company of the founders of the American Republic. Hunter Gray's amplification of the right to keep and bear arms is also colored by the twentieth century experience of minority groups in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in suffering at the hands of armed racist state or paramilitary aggressors. Such minority groups must have the right, the sacred right and duty of resistance.

For Hunter Gray, it once again comes down to a principled matter of freedom with justice: not anarchy, and not chaos, but freedom for the law - abiding to resist violent dominators and intruders in their lives, and freedom from the bureaucratic heavy hand of the all-powerful regulatory state which, in this instance, rather than maximizing human freedom, constricts it with restrictive legislation and sanctions against self-defense. Once again, things come full circle for Hunter Gray, and once again, to him, without contradiction.

- Roy Wortman

MATERIAL AND LIBERTARIAN WELL-BEING - AND FIREARMS

by Hunter Gray

I have always held firmly to the right to defend one's self and one's family. And that, for me, certainly includes principled, armed self-defense.

The ancient and time-honored principle of "tribal responsibility" - i.e., the group has an obligation to the individual and the individual has one to the group - with the accompanying dimensions of solidarity and sacrifice - is a critically essential complex in any fundamentally healthy and vigorous social system.

Included in that traditionally tribal context has always been the working ideal of a full measure of material (physical) and libertarian well-being: food, and freedom too. And that goal, certainly, has to be the functional ethos of any decent social system, small or large.

I've always been a very strong and full supporter of both material and libertarian well-being.

And there are times, believe me - many times indeed - when these must be firmly and effectively protected - by the individual and his/her grassroots colleagues.

I was seven years old when I had my first .22 rifle. I've had many, many - conventional - firearms since then. I was president of our Flagstaff High School NRA club - Northern Arizona small-bore champs. I was Expert Marksman in the U.S. Army. I presently have six Western lever action big-bore rifles and one single-barrel ten gauge magnum shotgun [all of these stemming from pre-1900 patents.] These continue to be quite useful from a self-defense perspective.

A gun is no better or worse than the person who uses it.

 

---

Eldri and Hunter have been married for 43 very good years. Eldri is Finnish/Saami-Lapp, Norwegian, and Swedish.

 

Thomas, grandson/son in his Idaho State medical student garb.  Thomas is Iroquois/Wabanaki/       Choctaw.

Josie, the youngest daughter of Hunter and Eldri, now a social worker [LSW] -- and her very special friend, Cameron Evans, an IBEW member.  Josie is Iroquois/Wabanaki.