Harley SwiftDeer Reagan died more than seven months ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, and may he rest in peace. The funeral orations were given and the hommages praising his accomplishments posted on the internet, and may they truthfully reflect one side of the person Harley was. But there is another, a dark side to his story, and I would like to tell it here.

As a matter of introduction let me say that I am a Stanford graduate (M.A. in journalism) and the author of several books on Navajo culture (in German , for example ://www.amazon.de/Die-zehn-Lehren-indianisc ... 3451044056

) which I wrote after living on the reservation for two years in the early 1980s. I have recently retired from eight years service as a Customs and Border Protection officer at the Nogales Port of Entry and now live with my 18 year old son in Nogales, AZ.

Harley Swift Deer Reagan was the founder of the "Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society" which runs a "shamanistic" workshop and "therapy center” in Phoenix/North Scottsdale since the 1980’s and has numerous outlets all over the United States and Canada, Europe (Austria, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium), New Zealand and Australia. There are SwiftDeer "Lodges" and franchises around the globe where a pseudo-Native-American/New Age "Sweet Medicine Sundance Path" is taught, in addition to martial arts, firearms, sweat lodges and “sacred orgasms” (the bogus but supposedly Cherokee Indian "Chuluaqui Quodoushka Spiritual Sex Therapy"). According to a newsletter from January 2011, the Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society has now “more than 100 branches and affiliates in 11 countries.”





My interest in the “Medicine Society” derives from a number of investigative articles I wrote -- in the 1970s and 1980s -- about the excesses of the American New Age movement, particularly the abuse of genuine American Indian spiritual ceremonies. Over the years I always kept an eye on Swift Deer and could never quite understand why his pseudo-Native-American-spirituality-enterprise was never shut down and was even able to achieve and maintain 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit status for his worldwide empire which lists revenues in the amounts of well above $400,000 on its 990-ez forms. The organization's primary exempt purpose stated on the form: "Education on Native American Religious Beliefs and Practices." The official "Mission Statement" reads: "Our mission is to fight against ignorance, slavery, bigotry, racism, war, disease, dogma and superstition to seed future generations with beauty, power, knowledge and freedom." I never wrote about Swiftdeer but closely followed the career of this American phenomenon who calls himself a patriot, a sorcerer, a cowboy, a Cherokee, a Navajo medicine man’s apprentice, an alchemist and an elder of a mystical order, dating back to prehistoric times, called the Twisted Hair Society. In one interview he stated that “the traditions go back well over a hundred and some odd thousand years. We can date it to 128,000 years ago.” In his book “Song of the Deer: The Great SunDance Journey of the Soul” (1999, using his "nagual name" Thunder Strikes), SwiftDeer says that Native Americans are descended from extraterrestrial “Star People” who arrived on earth 950,000 years ago from the planet Oiricanwiyah, near Sirius. The Metis Medicine Society, he claims, has been meeting every four years since 1254 B.C., sometimes in the fifth dimension, sometimes just in the third.

I retired from my work as a Customs and Border Protection Officer a while ago, which gave me the time to do a bit of research on Swiftdeer and his claims of having been a Navajo medicine man's apprentice.

First of all, Harley SwiftDeer legitimized the teachings of the "Twisted Hairs and the Sweet Medicine Sun Dance Path" as having originated with his "primary teacher, the late Grandfather Tom Two Bears Wilson, Navajo Medicine Man and President of the Navajo Native American Church" (quoted from a previous website of the "Deer Tribe"). His sacred path, his spiritual lineage, he claimed, was based on the teachings of this Don-Juan-type humble Navajo Indian shaman. Some time ago I wrote an email to the current President of the Native American Church, David Tsosie, and inquired about Swift Deer's claim.



His answer came the same day:



Dear Mr. Abel,

There has never been a President of the Navajo Native American Church by the name of Tom Two Bears Wilson or Grandfather Two Bears Walks the Sacred Mountain. I have been associated with the Native American Church of Navajoland since its inception in the late 1960s and I know all of the past Presidents. Apparently this person is a fake. The Navajo people hold the bear to be a sacred animal and we do not name people after this sacred animal. Most of the name given to children at birth or either Christian names of names associated with horses, clan names like Manygoats, Blacksheep, or the physical appearance like Yazzie, Tsosie, Begay, etc, We don't have Medicine Chiefs of the Navajo Nation. All Medicine people are individual practitoners. That is the problem we have...Non-Indians claiming to be Native American healer when they are not. I hope this provides you with some information. David J. Tsosie



This disclaimer got me really interested in the matter, so I traveled to the Navajo reservation, thinking that maybe I could find the Wilson family and verify Swift Deer's claims with them. No reporter has ever gone out to Navajoland to look for the Wilsons, so I figured I might get lucky and actually collect some hard evidence. SwiftDeer has always declared Tom Wilson to be the rock upon which he built his "Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society." Wilson was his declared and sacred founding father, his prophet, his Pope, his Holy Man. He even called Wilson as the originator of his Karate-type “American Indian Fighting Arts” and the “American Indian Fighting Arts Association.” In his as-told-to-Bill-Wahlberg-biography "Star Warrior", Swiftdeer mentioned a place "near" Many Farms and Rough Rock as his teacher's homestead, so I inquired at the Rough Rock chapter house and was told that, yes, the Wilson place was about five miles to the west, just off highway 59 to Chilchinbito.

It was easy going on brand new asphalt, and a short while later I slowly rolled towards a complex of several well-kept buildings and stopped a distance from a cottonwood tree where I saw two elderly ladies, some middle-aged Navajos and two children sit in the shade. I introduced myself and presented a new copy of the SwiftDeer autobiography "Star Warrior" (published in 1993) to the two most responsive and outspoken people in the group, Albert Yellowhair and his sister Sara Yellowhair, two of Tom Wilsons grandchildren. The elderly women were Stella and Irene Yellow Hair, two of Wilson’s surviving children; they only spoke Navajo and needed to have my questions as well as their answers translated (which was done by Albert Yellow Hair).

I gave a brief rundown of the information I had regarding SwiftDeer’s activities to which the adult family members responded with exclamations of disbelief, disgust and horror. As we were talking they flipped through the book – which they had never seen, even though this was now almost 20 years after publication – and kept shaking their heads that a scam like this was even possible and that it had happened to them. As far as the book was concerned they were outraged not only about its false and defamatory claims regarding Tom Wilson and his relationship with Swift Deer, but also about photographs of the medicine man SwiftDeer had acquired from him under false pretenses and had published after his death without the family’s permission.

This is what happened, according to the Wilson family members I talked to (another Wilson daughter, Annie Yazzie, was in Gallup for a medical treatment that morning, but could be interviewed at the Wilson “outfit” where she lives with her handicapped son in a separate house):

· In the early 1970s Harley SwiftDeer showed up at the office of the “Navajo School of Medicine Men” in nearby Rough Rock, a government-funded program that had been set up to train young Navajos in the traditional healing practices and ceremonies. He expressed an interest in the program and was told that it was strictly for Navajo apprentices (for obvious reasons, among them the exclusive use of the archaic Navajo ritual language for the ritual practices, plus the given circumstance that none of the teaching medicine men could speak a word of English). SwiftDeer hung around for a while, promised material support of the program with blankets and other goods, and he socially befriended one of the instructors, Tom Wilson. “My grandfather, “ explained grandson Albert Yellowhair to me, “was a very friendly, very kind man, and even though he couldn’t communicate with SwiftDeer (who didn’t speak a word of Navajo) and never taught him anything, he somehow must have appreciated the interest SwiftDeer showed, and so he let him and his friends camp out on his land over a weekend once in a while. That was it, that’s as far as the ‘relationship’ and the ‘apprenticeship’ went. SwiftDeer would show up with some of his people and they would put up a tent out on the land, away from grandfather’s hogan. There they would camp out, I don’t know what they did, but grandfather Wilson never instructed them or taught them anything. He couldn’t have, he spoke no English. He just let SwiftDeer camp out on his land, that was it, he was just being friendly, that’s all. He never spent any time with them at all.”

These purely social visits, when SwiftDeer “would bring all kinds of gifts and was being nice” (Albert Yellowhair) took place over the duration of a year or two (Albert and Sara were not quite sure how long it lasted), “and that was pretty much it”, the family thought they had seen the last of him. The big disillusionment and shock came years later, when after grandfather Wilson’s death in 1981, they started to hear more and more rumors about SwiftDeer’s dubious activities as a “shaman” in the Phoenix area, about his false claims of having been an apprentice of Wilson (who SwiftDeer claimed to be identical with the sorcerer Don Genaro in the Carlos-Castaneda-books) for 13 years (from 1966 to 1979) and about being in lineage with and a current “Twisted Hairs elder” of a secret “Metis Medicine Society” Tom Wilson supposedly belonged to.

· News reached them that SwiftDeer was using photos he had taken of Wilson and the family for propaganda purposes (in 1993, the same pictures were used, without permission from the family, as illustrations in SwiftDeer’s as-told-to-autobiography, “Star Warrior”) and that he was making one false and defamatory claim after another about “traditional Navajo teachings” and the training in the “Sweet Medicine SunDance Path” he had supposedly received from Wilson. The family felt traumatized by this onslaught of slander and slur, of outright falsehood and lies which totally misrepresented and the healing ways of the highly respected, traditional medicine man.

The family felt shamed and deeply wounded in their pride and honor, but didn’t know how to deal with this "impostor and con-man" (Sara Yellowhair). The Wilson family lives deep in the heart of the Navajo reservation not far from Canyon de Chelly, and from there the city of Phoenix appears to be far, far away. How to stop a white man from doing what he was doing? How to bring his fraud out into the open and have the crook prosecuted? They didn’t know and were reluctant to contact the tribal authorities or a lawyer. So they contacted SwiftDeer and asked for a meeting in a restaurant in Flagstaff, which is about halfway between Rough Rock and Phoenix. SwiftDeer showed up with a huge revolver provocatively stuck in his belt and barely listened to their grievances. Only expressed his annoyance about having been called and said he didn’t do anything wrong. At this point the family told him he was banned from their land on the reservation “forever”, they did not want to ever see him again.

Nothing has happened since in terms of shutting down the impostor. The Wilson family keeps hearing about the abuse of their family name down in Scottsdale and Phoenix, in Metis Society publications and on the Internet. The family feels shamed and deeply humiliated. They have heard rumors about ex-prostitutes living with SwiftDeer, and his “Quodoushka”-”sex-therapies” he claims to be of Native American origin. Leafing through the “Star Warrior” book, they discovered a new lie on almost every page. Unbelievable in the fullest meaning of the word and without any relationship to any existing Navajo ritual objects or healing ceremonies are the “teachings of Tom Wilson” that Swiftdeer has made up, be it a pistol-shaped “laser gun” , a “medicine sprinkler to control the elements of the earth” or a “bird feeder” to control the rain, thunder and lightning.”

In the book Swiftdeer claims that Tom Wilson took him to Massacre Cave in Canyon de Chelly to receive his final training: After seven days and nights of sweats and peyote eating he writes, his body was painted in red and blue and black, in yellow and white. Then he had to enter a 25 mile long labyrinth of tunnels for four days and had to find his way out: “Two red-eyed demons appeared and I banished them…(Then) I was in perhaps the largest rattlesnake den in the world, a cavern three hundred yards across…The ninth demon then rushed at me hard from behind and knocked me forward toward the snakes…Now I had to figure out how to cross thirty feet over a bottomless drop into darkness. I knew I would have to teleport my body across the chasm in order to survive…(Finally, after four days like this) I crawled for the light and pushed into one of the old storage rooms of the White House ruins…’I see you made it,’ said Grandfather Wilson.”



In his book, SwiftDeer explained his fantastic claim of Wilson’s status as a member of an ancient secret society which came from a distant planet with Wilson’s supposed “double personality”: To his family, SwiftDeer wrote, he was the simple traditional Navajo medicine man who did healing ceremonies and taught at the Rough Rock School of Medicine Men. While in another role unknown to his family he transported himself to Tuba City and taught the secrets of the ancient Metis Medicine Society to SwiftDeer over many years in the 70s and then transferred the authority of “Elder” of this society from Wilson to SwiftDeer. (Remember Don Juan? He supposedly did something like that with Carlos. SwiftDeer was a perfect CC-copycat, and his followers continue the scam by calling him their "nagual" even after his death. But CC was smart enough to never tell an outsider where he could find and interview "Don Juan".)

I don't think I am too extreme in my interpretation that Harley SwiftDeer was a spiritual-lineage-thief who built his entire career of more than 30 years on this one major act of "stealing from the Indians". It shows him not only to have been a charlatan and "plastic shaman", but also quite a ruthless human being who stole a "Native American lineage" from an unsuspecting Navajo healer and his family in order to sell himself as a genuine spiritual teacher in line with their traditions. All this happened after the medicine man died in 1981, and it left a Navajo family hurt and traumatized to this very day. We are talking about a time period of more than thirty years without justice having come their way. And there is, of course, the very serious aspect of tax fraud by claiming tax-exempt status for supposedly being an institution devoted to “Education on Native American Religious Beliefs and Practices".



About a year ago I sent SwiftDeer a registered letter: I presented the results of my research and suggested three steps for him to take: (1) Formally apologize and make good to the family for his lineage-theft, (2) publicly come out with the truth and withdraw all his false Navajo-lineage-claims, and (3) come clean with the IRS, pay your back taxes and voluntarily give up your tax-exempt status.



[font=ARIAL, 'SANS-SERIF'] SwiftDeer never replied to my letter. I reported the tax violation to the IRS, but the Wilson family was never contacted by the authorities. The Deer Tribe Metis Society still has its tax-exempt status.

[/font]