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. And there is also some material sprinkled about dealing with the relatively rare genetic disease, Lupus, classed as "deadly" and for which there is now no cure. Now into its tenth 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. Both as a Native person and a Real Westerner, I never -- never -- press anyone on any personal matters. If you wish to tell me something, fine -- but your name will always be held in confidence.
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

And see the very closely and directly connected Sky Gray: http://hunterbear.org/sky_gray_comes_home.htm Sky is also Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ -- very substantially Bobcat. Extremely active, she is a devoted companion of Hunter Bear and very psychic indeed.

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.

For a trenchant resume of my life-long organizing career, see Outlaw Trail: The Native As Organizer: http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm -- and for some interesting examples of some of my interpersonal encounters with adversaries, see Forces and Faces Along the Activist Trail http://hunterbear.org/forces_and_faces_along_the_trail.htm

For my full and detailed Movement Life Interview -- early years, movements, experiences, reflections -- see http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm

My father, John R. Salter [Frank Gray] -- Mi'kmaq / 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 and Wabanaki -- strongly influenced by Navajo and Laguna.