J. Richard Johnson

J. Richard Johnson developed a passionate interest in Native American history when he was about ten years old and maintained this interest throughout his life. This was partly due to his mother, a Cherokee mixed blood, who was born in a Chickasaw hospital in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. Her dad, who claimed to be half Cherokee and looked the part, had been working as a mechanic in Chickasaw territory at the time. She transmitted what little she knew of Cherokee culture to him, mostly unintentionally, as he grew up.

He earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also studied philosophy, mathematics, economics, and political science. For the next several decades he worked as a management consultant, statistical engineer, general manager, and college professor, pretty much in that order. All the while, he dreamed of writing a book that would show a different picture of Native Americans from what he had read about in high school textbooks or saw in cowboy-and-Indian movies made in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, when he was growing up. He was outraged by most of them, since, thanks to his research, he knew better.

He dreamed about correcting this warped vision of our history, some way, somehow, someday. "Tenkiller" is the result of that dream.