Hunter Gray

Hunter Gray has referred to tribal communalism and the Rotinonshón:ni ethos of tribal (mutual) responsibility as "strawberry socialism." (27)

Hunter Gray (Hunterbear) John R Salter, Jr. : Ahkwesáhsne Kanien'kehá:ka, Mi'kmaq, St. Francis Abenaki, labor organizer and civil rights activist, former departmental chair of Indian Studies at University of North Dakota, member of Solidarity, Socialist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the United Auto Workers Local 1981 (National Writers Union).

27. Hunter Gray, "Strawberries, the Iroquois, and My Strawberry Socialism"

"I have read your piece and it looks quite good. You have certainly done a great deal of solid "homework"! Your interest and commitment are commendable and you write well. Your work here could be a pamphlet!

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.

It was a Time for Flint. It was the Day of the Strike.

The setting was a ruggedly beautiful one on the present border of Northeastern Utah and Southeastern Idaho. And the day was May 24, 1825 at the camp of Peter Skene Ogden, a major fur entrepreneur for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Matters were not tranquil at the HBC bastion -- and the dark clouds of human storm were very low indeed. The long smoldering resentment of the Native trappers of the beaver -- Indians from the Northeast and virtually all Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy -- was heating rapidly. The issues involved their multi-faceted exploitation by the HBC which paid only modestly for beaver skins, charged high for goods, and kept them in a state of continual debt and quasi-indentured servitude.

And now the pine needles were beginning to burn openly.

Following a meeting at his tent, John Gray, Mohawk of St. Regis [Akwesasne] of far up-state New York, and the always fighting leader of the Iroquois and related fur trappers in the Far West, strode to the tent of Ogden and denounced the Hudson's Bay Company leaders -- "the gentlemen of the Columbia" as he sarcastically put it -- as "the greatest villains in the world."

He vigorously added a thoughtfully significant threat: "And if they were here this day, I would shoot them."

At that point, John Gray, with eleven other Iroquois trappers, led a historic labor strike as they all walked out on Ogden and the HBC. The next day, they were joined by five other Native trappers -- including Joseph Annance, a St. Francis Abenaki of Quebec, from a famous Native family of Mohawk origin.

The strike, its walkaway, and its far flung implications -- inspiring other Natives and Anglo trappers as well and frightening a wide array of fur bosses -- was probably the first such labor action in the Intermountain West. It successfully boosted the payment for beaver pelts, eliminated the viciously exploitive pricing system, and ended the quasi-indentured servitude over the whole, entire wide region.

John Gray was my great/great/great grandfather. And so, too, was Joseph Annance.