AUTHOR STATEMENT, John S Newman

The first time I truly met a buffalo was in Yellowstone Park during a fierce late-winter storm near the Gardiner Gate.  My smarter-than-its-owner dog sat safely in the temperature controlled 4wd truck, while I stepped outside and clumped through knee deep snow to take a leak off in the trees – just as a burly family-band was headed north as the -25 degree Arctic wind and snow barreled south, their perfectly constructed battering ram head and shoulders impervious to the elements.

It didn’t really look like these semi-prehistoric bison could accelerate from zero to 40 in three seconds – as was explained in the chatty little Park Service brochure – but I prudently stood my ground and let them pass on by; curled horns sharp, dark eyes focused, the lead bull out front followed closely by his harem with several calves protected from unseen wolf predators safely in the center.  Seeing how the females guarded their young it crossed my mind that in this remote moment the odds were all in favor of the predators, and I too was prey, always a bracing thought to anyone who has fished in bear country or hiked the foothill trails favored by ever-stalking mountain lions. I crouched low, and the sound of their breathing – vapor issuing like smoke from both nostrils – was deep as the beating of a bass drum.  I let myself imagine what it would be like to try and take one down, equipped with a hand crafted wooden bow and arrow, riding bareback astride a nearly wild horse going full tilt over ankle-busting prairie dog infested ground; clearly an impossibility.  They pressed on into the storm while I, domesticated as a cow, got back in my truck and drifted with the wind, consumed with the unashamedly anthropomorphic thought that their evident strength and nobility of purpose made a mockery of twenty centuries of human cultural evolution.

I believe it was in this exact moment that I had the thought: “It was a good time to be a wolf.”

This line opens my novel, Buffalo Dreamers, and lays the foundation for what follows: a world where predators and prey uneasily coexist; where humans are on equal terms with other creatures; a present day that is primordial on every level.  This is a world that fascinates me and is the source of my passion for what I write.  It is why I have always been drawn to Native American history and culture, both to the mythic pre-contact period before the European invasion, and to the sad, violent aftermath that followed and still continues today.  The native experience reveals a dangerous but spiritually infused world lurking beneath the dominant safe society we all assume is invincible

My goal as a writer is to create character-based stories set principally in Montana and the west, where natives and anglos are compelled to confront the raw, mysterious edge of this hidden reality.  In the process, they learn from one another and overcome personal demons and historical trauma.  The stories are contemporary, action packed, and woven through with strong currents of romance.

            My formal training was at Stanford University, where I majored in biology and studied creative writing with Scott Turow and was strongly influenced by the Kiowa writer, N. Scott Momaday, and the western icon, Wallace Stegner.  Later, I worked as a river guide on the great western rivers and in Alaska, owned and operated a ranch in Montana near the Cheyenne Reservation, and have spent many seasons as a volunteer fire lookout on Mount Tamalpais overlooking the San Francisco Bay Area and Pt. Reyes.  Along the way I earned a juried writing award from the Marin Arts Council, and served as Chairman of the Board of the Museum of the American Indian in Marin County, California, where I live.  My professional work in public affairs and community involvement are assets for conducting readings and media interviews.  A good example of this was participating in the Western Literary Association annual conference in Missoula, where I was invited to be a panelist and speaker.  I presented a reading of Buffalo Dreamers and discussed my tribal experiences. That presentation is the basis for what I intend to use when my novel is published.  In my estimation, it was favorably received by my fellow panelists, by other writers and academics in attendance, and perhaps most significantly by a large contingent of Blackfeet natives down from the reservation in Browning, MT.  They appeared skeptical initially, then appreciative of my words and demeanor.  I should emphasize that I do not wear turquoise nor do I sport a ponytail, and my native characters are as individual, flawed, and unique as the non-natives; in other words, real. 

            Not long after meeting up face to face with those buffalo, I was visiting friends in Lame Deer, tribal home of the northern Cheyenne.  I had met Phillip Whiteman – a champion bareback rider, Cheyenne cultural leader, and creator of a native spirit based horse training program – through ranching nearby in central Montana. Son of great modern Cheyenne cultural leaders on both his fathers and mothers sides, he had given me the name “Hey John” which was the traditional response of natives to Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats who refused to accept authentic cultural native names when filling out forms.  The winter cold was deep in everyone’s bones, so a sweat lodge was proposed, and much to my surprise and appreciation, Hey John was invited by Phillip to join his extended family.  Little did I know that the three sessions of intense heat, chanting, drumming, and vision inducing “sweats” would test me to the core.  We prayed together, gave testimonials on what we hoped to change in our lives – I recall saying simply to survive this sweat lodge, meanwhile leaning way forward in the darkness, breathing the relatively cooler air near the floor – while overhead the blue and red sparks of ancestors danced across the curved buffalo skin ceiling.  When the triple thick wool blanket door was finally thrown open I stumbled out and raised my arms to the Milky Way, brighter than I had ever seen.  It seemed as if I could touch the stars, that I had a place alongside them, that the universe was knowable and embracing.

            I was subsequently invited by Phillip to participate as the sole Anglo in the mid-winter Fort Robinson commemorative run from Nebraska, 400-miles in subzero weather back to the Cheyenne Reservation.  The run honors the 1879 late night escape from the fort, and the massacres and epic flight through Pine Ridge and the Black Hills of South Dakota, across a corner of Wyoming, and eventually back to Lame Deer.  No one can read of that harrowing experience and not be moved to tears by the courage and perseverance of the few remaining survivors.  As a way of teaching the youth about their tribal roots and the historic trauma that is the legacy of every native, the run is simply overpowering in its significance.

            Preparation for the run begins with a “painting ceremony” when all the participants are blessed and daubed with sacred paint on their face.  I stood beside Stefani Bear Comes Out, Rosalie Bird Woman (a Sun Dance priestess), and other runners both male and female, young and old as we were painted.  Later that night when the signal came at 9:45 pm to break out of the Fort Robinson barracks I vowed that I would not fail, and took my turns on the black ice roads, sometimes accompanied by local police, other times running across barren lonely landscapes, eventually passing beneath the imposing Crazy Horse mountain sculpture in the Black Hills.  I carried the sacred staff, side by side with young men warriors running bare chested to embrace the cold and pain, and women who carried the Cheyenne flag.  Notably, in Cheyenne culture, it is the women who by virtue of retaining belief in the stories, language, and hope for the future, are believed to keep the tribe alive.  It was an experience that forced me to run, like those buffalo, head on into the storm, seeking warmth and peace beyond.

            We spent a welcoming night at Pine Ridge, where I had the privilege of meeting Chief Oliver Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux, fourth generation heir to the great chief who led the battle of Little Big Horn.  He told me he could vividly recall speaking with his great grandfather, who as a child had learned of the battle directly from his father, which personally and profoundly illustrated to me how recent western history and memory still is: both the proud memories of victory, and the agony and ignominy of defeat. The Cheyenne and Sioux were allies throughout the final terrible years of battle and ultimately loss, although the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), negotiated by his great-great grandfather and which Oliver Red Cloud admonished our gathering to never forget or compromise, created a framework that still exists today.  

            The run concluded at the Chief Morning Star (Dull Knife) burial site on the Cheyenne reservation.  The wind cut like a sharpened knife; Phillip spoke with no hat or gloves, and many of the young warriors again removed their jackets and shirts; only a few brave parents and tribal members were present, but I was alone with my thoughts.  How does a people survive the PTSD of an entire societal beat down?

            These experiences co-mingled with memories of growing up in Ishi country in northern California, ancestral home of tribes long since consumed by genocidal blood-madness. As a child I had helped with my parents to construct the “Ishi Trail” along volcanic walled and wildflower strewn canyon lands.  Through the story of Ishi I learned that life was not fair, easy, or consistent: well meaning Christians killed with the same vengeance as non-believers; a spirit of righteousness could be as evil and hypocritical as the most heartless of villains.  Later, during high school I worked on farms and ranches adjacent to the New Clairvaux Trappist monastery.  The great mystic, Thomas Merton, contemplated and wrote about the native experience here while staying at the monastery downstream from the Deer Creek country where Ishi’s people once roamed.  He observed that in the long view of history, the immigrant Europeans were the aggressors, more primitive in their behavior than the resident natives.  For Ishi, as for all native people, the arrival of Europeans and subsequent physical and cultural genocide that ensued, created a personal and social trauma that was Biblical in proportions; from a Garden of Eden before, to a hellish life on earth after. 

            This was also true for the Washoe tribe at Lake Tahoe, who traveled between the Nevada lowlands in what is now Carson City, up to Da-oh-ah-ga (Lake of the Sky) on a winter-summer cycle, until gold was discovered and their serene life came to a crashing halt.  I studied the Washoe language for a time at the tribal headquarters, and came to appreciate their deep spiritual connection with the Lake (which is the basis for my second, fully written and professionally edited novel, Peyote Moon).  But the profound sense of dislocation and loss is palpable.  Another great local mystic leader, the northern Paiute Jack Wilson from the Carson Valley, known as Wovoka or “Wood Cutter”, created the Ghost Dance, intended to overcome native privations and restore the old ways, most significantly the return of the buffalo.  His visions, powers, and ritual leadership were fervently embraced by natives across the country, particularly so in Lakota lands.  The practice of the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee was mis-interpreted by the US Military as a pre-war dance and led to the infamous massacre in 1890.  Connecting these dots between Lake Tahoe and Montana identifies one essential truth: historical trauma and how to reconcile the past with the future requires a causative agent; a messenger from beyond; some-thing that transcends the trauma.

            Fast forward to the ongoing carnage of middle east wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, now ISIS and the seemingly ubiquitous beheadings, burnings, and mayhem of god-cloaked martyers.  Whole villages, countries, and populations have been uprooted, torn apart, and left for dead, while the occasional terrorist attacks on American or European targets shatters any latent sense of invulnerability, and presages a coming Armageddon.  Who is to say that war, catalyzed in some toxic combination with climate change, rampant unchecked viral pandemic pestilence, or global economic collapse, might not upend and reverse any notion of stability and progress that each of us takes for granted as our birthright?  We have come so far, but know so little; what if we are at the apex of human civilization, rather than the bottom of an ever-rising curve?  It is worth considering, and impossible to ignore.

            In my Buffalo Dreamers novel, all this is personalized and condensed in the experience of a lone returning US veteran, who seeks peace and reconciliation, healing from a crippling suicidal case of PTSD, but where is he to turn?  A Nevada native and trained Marine sniper, he is enlisted to kill on a new and more intimate scale, to shoot free-ranging Montana buffalo that are suspected of infecting domestic beef cattle.  Sam is no tree hugging animal lover.  But in the course of his journey to Montana’s Paradise Valley, he discovers that the answer to his pain can be found in the sacred buffalo spirit contained within each of us, whether or not we know it is there.

            Some degree of pain, suffering, and loss is inevitable for all living beings.  But the trauma experienced by native populations has provided the few remaining survivors with metaphysical and practical clues as to how to cope; indeed, to come to terms with a profoundly unfair world and to make sense of it in the much longer view of history.  The Europeans came; the day may come when they leave or, like the Cheyenne, the Washoe, Ishi, and virtually every other native people, are reduced to nothing.

            Sam enters this shadowed native world, and similar to my own experience within the sweat lodge, he discovers truths that are hidden to the dominant culture; he becomes enmeshed in the way of the buffalo – the causative agent, a messenger and connection with the Great Spirit from before the onset of trauma and a vital link to the future – and thereby confronts his pain and emerges from a long trail of suffering, as if from a womb into a new way of seeing. 

            Through Sam and his conflicted relationships with various tribal members, most importantly, an evocative romantic interlude with a young native Lakota woman, we come to understand that we all have much to learn from our native neighbors who were treated so poorly but who have so much to give.  We may even discover our own inner buffalo spirit.