Strider Brown - Deer Tracks Host

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Brown hosts Deer Tracks on Monday from Noon-2 p.m. 

In his own words, he was “Born on the Isle of Manhattan and raised in New England. Damned as a Yankee, I left home in ‘72 within a week of High School graduation. 

I first blew through New Mexico in the spring of 73 hitch-hiking old 66 and I-40. A U.S. Marine picked me up west of Albuquerque and gave me a ride all the way to Phoenix in a hail damaged pock marked Rambler. We refueled in Gallup when all traffic was funneled through downtown. That was my first time seeing the "hometown" of Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia.

The following autumn I was attending Kansas City Art Institute where I became friends with someone from Zuni Pueblo. Over the Thanksgiving break we visited Zuni where I attended my first Shalako ceremony. As that experience profoundly changed my world view the random chain of events kept me returning to New Mexico. 

I spent several years in Montana from 1975-1982. I began my career as a seasonal trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service during that time. 

During the same period I traveled the Powwow Highway, Ft. Hall, Idaho, Crow Fair, Kyio Days at the University of Montana, Missoula, and North American Indian Days on the Blackfeet Reservation up by Canada. 

I made the more or less permanent move to New Mexico in January 1982, living five years in Taos. 

Most of the past 30 years has been spent in Gila, N.M., where I still keep a home. I worked on the Gila National Forest for 12 seasons as a trail foreman, covering vast areas of the southwest portion of New Mexico. <p>I worked with the Youth Conservation Corps as a trail builder for about two decades, starting in 2002, when I also began volunteering with KGLP (Gallup Public Radio)."

(Photo: Canadian First Nations actor and musician Gary Dale Farmer and Strider Brown).