PERSONAL NARRATIVE:
I was born John Randall Salter, Jr. and 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 (Micmac/Abenaki/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.
William Mackintire Salter, trained in Philosophy, and initially a Congregationalist, was, with Felix Adler, a founder and major leader of the Ethical Culture Society. He was a strong and courageous defender of the Haymarket anarchists; 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, through the 1890s to about 1914, 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 assimiliation 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 Gibbens, who married the great American philosopher, William James.
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 also became Maine's most prominent Native guide [Moosehead Lake and Northern Maine generally] -- and 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 in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, as did William and Alice James -- though both families were primarily based at Boston 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.
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 nascent abilities as an artist. [Among the many abilities 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 assimiliated and always aware of his tribal background 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 land-hungry entrepreneurs and sprinkled with Abolitionists, Populists, and red Socialists. I've been a social justice agitator all my life and I always will be one: a radical.
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. 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 a half-breed 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. Trained as a sociologist, I've taught in a number of colleges and universities. 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). 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 -- obtained in the 1980s under FOIA/PA.
I've written and published for decades on social justice issues: in such publications as Argosy, Industrial Worker, American Socialist, Mainstream, Mississippi Free Press, Southern Patriot [SCEF], The Carolinian, The Carolina Times, Native American Publication, The Movement (Chicago), The Catholic Courier (Rochester), Integrated 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, North Country, Contact Forum, Against the Current, The Montana Standard (Butte), One Big Union Annual, The Socialist, (and much more.) Bio essays of mine are carried in The Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990).
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 monograph: An Account of the Salter UFO Encounters of March, 1988: Their Background, Development, and Ramifications.
I'm presently (2001) deeply into a major book on militant, democratic, grassroots organizing -- with an emphasis on "how to."
Other significant writing projects are taking definitive shape: radical metal mining unionism in the Far West of the mid-20th century; and the role of Native rights advocates in the early 19th century Rocky Mountain fur trade. I have just finished [Summer, 2000 and it's been very well received by the editor], a substantial and very complex piece on my late '60s and early '70s Chicago organizing -- with Mississippi and other flashbacks as touchpoints and a vigorous look to the future. I've called it " May 1970: North and South, Mountains and Deserts -- and Blood." This for what definitely promises to be an exceptionally fine anthology on the United States in the twilight of the '60s and the era and tragedies of Kent State and Jackson State.
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 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 (), 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 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 adminiration of 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, (), who, having left the Salter family at 15, never had any appreciable high school work, was a gifted Native (Micmac/St. Francis Abenaki/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 -- who 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) -- was always very much a Native man indeed and his art frequently reflected this. But he never let anyone stereotype him or push him into any mold of any kind. (His last full year of teaching -- following his retirement from Northern Arizona University -- was at the University of Guanajuato. His ties with Mexico were always very strong.)
Both he 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 always have blazed my own way 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.
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.
Because of its strong and consistent commitment to Native rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and social justice, our family has always attracted much "official" attention and scrutiny. This was secured under FOIA in the early 1980s.