Praise for 
Dreaming Bears

We won’t be seeing stories like this anymore, this remarkable real-deal first-person account of two generous and wry Indian elders who were still living out in the Brooks Range wilderness in the 1960s. Johnny and Sarah Frank’s memories reach back to the time before settled villages, to years of near-starvation and animal dreaming, while their grandchildren would become Native leaders in the modern era. Their story is told by a wide-eyed Southern doctor who stumbles into the Chandalar River country and is transformed into an advocate for the protection of wild Alaska and Native subsistence rights.  “Dreaming Bears” is Alaska’s “Dersu Uzala.”  
                         Tom Kizzia
    Author of Pilgrim's Wilderness and The Wake of the Unseen Object

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A well-told, straightforward tale that rings absolutely true. Dreaming Bears is reality, not romance—albeit a reality that many a romantic would envy! Through the shape of other lives and the arc of their stories, we learn about the world; reading Holloway is like a long talk around the campfire with a new friend.

               Sharman Apt Russell
            Author of Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist 
                           and Hunger: An Unnatural History

From left to right: Ted Holloway, Johnny Frank and Mike Holloway with Johnny's pack dogs.

The fight to save the calving grounds of the caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the great environmental issues of our time.  It is also a fight to save the Gwich’in – the northernmost Indians in North America – who depend on the caribou to sustain their way of life, which has existed since time immemorial.  Mike Holloway’s book based on his experiences with an elderly Gwich’in couple illuminates the Gwich’in way of life and provides the reader with an understanding on why both the caribou and the Gwich’in need to be saved.

                 John E. Echohawk
             Executive Director, Native American Rights Fund                                                    

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The next best thing to hunting bear (among other animals) at 55 degrees below zero above the Arctic circle with an elderly Alaskan Gwich'in named Johnny Frank may be to read about it, and much more, in J. Michael Holloway's captivating Dreaming Bears. In ways a coming of age journey, Dreaming Bears is even more an unfolding love letter from a non-Native doctor to Johnny and Sarah Frank, their extended Gwich'in family, and to their talents for survival, not to mention generosity. Johnny is the lodestar, a man who mixes Biblical and Gwich'in stories between an obligation to wrest any and every kind meat from the snow and tundra, and to find patience in existence.  
  
                       Alison Owings
             Author of Native Voices, Listening to Native Americans