J. Richard Johnson is a PhD sociologist, management consultant, statistical engineer, and longtime college professor whose career has spanned decades of research, teaching, and applied work at the intersection of data, human behavior, and organizational strategy.
But the story that drove him most wasn’t professional. It was personal.
Johnson developed a passionate interest in Native American history at age ten, thanks in large part to his mother — a Cherokee mixed-blood born in a Chickasaw hospital in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. Her father, who claimed half-Cherokee blood and looked the part, had been working as a mechanic in Chickasaw territory at the time. What she passed on to her son was quiet, mostly unintentional, and lasting.
It was enough to make him curious. And that curiosity, deepened by decades of research, hardened into something closer to outrage. Outrage against the cowboy-and-Indian films of the fifties and sixties, the high school textbooks, the sanitized and distorted portrayals of a people and a history he had come to know differently. “Though I didn’t look the part, from the time I was nine, I identified as an ‘Indian’. Every time I saw a White man shoot an Indian off his horse, I took it as a personal affront. I wanted to get even…And I knew from reading history (other than my schoolbooks) that the reality was quite a bit different from what we were taught in school or worse, what we saw in cinema in the 1950s and ‘60s. As I matured, I realized that there would be no getting even the old-fashioned way. Writing this book was the closest I could come to setting things right.”
