About Benjamin H. Barnette ─ A Brief Biosketch

Benjamin H. Barnette has been a working "field archeologist" for over 35 years. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has worked in several states and environmental/cultural areas, including Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Oklahoma, California, Hawaii, and Alaska. His experiences include six years of work in Alaska on the Bering Sea coast in Southwest Alaska, so in that sense, on Beringia itself.

A Vietnam veteran, Barnette spent four years in the Air Force serving in Guam and Thailand in 1968 and 1969. He later enlisted in the Army and the Air National Guard, serving a total of 20 years. He retired in 2007. As a proud member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Barnette utilized his knowledge of the Muscogee (Creek) people and language as inspiration for the Muscogee Mammoth Hunters. He currently resides in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. In 1983 Barnette first conceived "Winds Across Beringia" while supervising an archeological field crew camped for the summer on the Bering Sea coast in Southwest Alaska near the Native Eskimo village of Tununak. It was an exciting location for him and other archeologists on the 1983 crew to imagine and discuss that they may be camped on the location where Native Asian peoples stepped from Beringia onto the coast of Alaska as ancestral people to all Native Americans of North and South America. He would later develop those ideas into the Paleo-Indian mammoth hunters of Beringia.

Barnette would spend another three summers in Southwest Alaska supervising crews that recorded some 250 Native archeological sites between the Bering Sea coast and the Kuskokwim River and documented hundreds of hours of recorded oral history offered by Native Elders of the region. Many of the locations in "Winds Across Beringia" are actual settings on the Alaskan coast. The Yupik Native village of Up'nerkillermiut, for example, where Harjo meets Onna, is a real Eskimo Native archeological site Barnette and his crew recorded. As in the novel, it is a spring seal hunting coastal village. "Winds Across Beringia" is Barnette's first novel, although he is currently writing a fantasy novel titled "Ravenbourne." He is also researching future Native American historical works.