Sonoma County families torn apart by Nathan Chasing Horse

“Those people are sick,” he said.

Even during the height of Chasing Horse’s popularity, some local families were talking about troubling rumors they’d heard.

“I was warned when he was coming out here,” said MaDonna Feather, a tribal advocate who lives in Santa Rosa now but was based in Napa at the time. “I called a relative. I said, ‘Hey, I was invited to come to a lodge.’ They said, ‘No, stay away from him and don’t let your children near him.’”

The picture painted by Chasing Horse’s Jan. 31 arrest report, and corroborated by about a dozen Press Democrat interviews, suggest Feather’s relative had valid concerns.

Ceremonies in the barn

The most popular venue for Chasing Horse’s ceremonies was a big vineyard property on Sonoma Mountain Road, not far from Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. Others happened at a resort off Calistoga Road near the Napa County line.

Both property owners (neither is Indigenous) acknowledged those connections to The Press Democrat, but declined further comment.

The vineyard site was divided between a rental property, occupied by close friends of Chasing Horse’s, and the area where the owners lived.

On the renters’ side was the Inipi lodge, used for purification sweats. On the landlords’ side was a barn that housed bigger ceremonies — they could be for healing, for gratitude, for mourning — that might draw 50 to 75 people.

Those gatherings would typically start in the early afternoon. Helpers would staple opaque plastic sheeting over the windows to darken an empty room, and attendees would sing ancient tribal songs until 3 or 4 in the morning.

Chasing Horse had another important connection to Santa Rosa. He worked with the Sonoma County Indian Health Project, which has provided a range of health care services to local tribal residents since 1971.

One of the people who remains in his inner circle noted the connection in a Facebook comment in 2015, saying she met Chasing Horse “at the Old Indian Health in Santa Rosa.”

“Prior to meeting Nathan, I was a drug addict & alcoholic, uneducated and full of resentment,” wrote Shya Chasing Horse, who adopted her mentor’s last name.

“Nathan has encouraged & believed in me, and taught me how to love and respect myself.”

Several local residents interviewed by The Press Democrat say they worry that Chasing Horse conducted prayer circles at the health facility, potentially introducing himself to other victims.

Reno Franklin, president of the Sonoma County Indian Health Project Board of Directors, confirmed that Chasing Horse practiced there. It was part of Indian Health’s traditional health component, within the organization’s behavioral health program.

Franklin said he isn’t sure whether Chasing Horse was paid for his work, or what exactly his methods were.

“We stopped any association with that guy, I think 10 years ago,” Franklin said. “The stuff you hear now, all the sexual abuse, that was not mentioned back then. Fortunately for us, we’d gotten rid of him long before that. We did it for other reasons.”

Franklin, chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, said he hopes Chasing Horse’s victims can “find justice and find closure.”

He said he supports the traditional health model, which incorporates tribal practices in modern health care, and considers it egregious that someone like Chasing Horse could use it to his advantage.

‘This could be a problem’

The Sonoma County rape survivor who chronicled her ordeal was 19 in 2004. Chasing Horse was 27.

On the ride back from a healing ceremony in Sylmar to a friend’s house in San Pedro (both of those communities are in Los Angeles County), he held her hand, she wrote last year. They wound up in separate beds in the same room. They talked and flirted, but it went no further.

The young woman said she was flattered to have the attention of such a respected man.

She would recount the experience in a long thread — 21 screen shots of text — she posted to social media on May 5, National Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Day, in 2022. She used her real first name on the post, but didn’t share it widely. She employed screen shots so the text would not be internet-searchable.

After setting the scene in the thread, the Sonoma County woman proceeded to describe the rape she alleges to have followed, in wincing detail.

“I woke up in the morning to the feeling of someone climbing into my bed, pulling me close by my waist with their face in my neck,” she wrote. “It was Nathan. … My attempts at ‘gentleness’ did absolutely nothing and that’s when I realized, oh s**t, this could be a problem.”

The woman said she asked Chasing Horse to stop and tried to hold him off. She figures she weighed about 115 pounds at the time. She remembers wearing blue flannel pajama pants.

“So I laid there, and I was raped,” she wrote.

It would take more than a year of therapy for the woman to begin to overcome the trauma of the abandonment and loneliness she felt after the sexual attack, she said.

For a decade, she told almost no one of the incident.

It was a conversation she had in 2014, she said, that compelled her to break her silence.

Clarity came in a message from a respected friend in Arizona.

The friend’s daughter had been sexually abused by Chasing Horse. When the friend found out, she had publicly called out the supposed medicine man. Now the friend shared a long, “gut-wrenching” description of the daughter’s assault.

Other snippets of conversation, with other Native women, began to reverberate in her mind. She was certain more girls had been abused.

“Personally, I felt I had failed every single one of my nieces by not coming forward sooner about my experience,” the woman said. “That’s the part that’s still hard to consider.”

A rift across generations

But not everyone has disavowed Nathan Chasing Horse.

At a Feb. 8, 2023, bail hearing, his attorney requested that he be released to the care of Jennifer McQuaid, noting that she worked as an advocate for victims of human trafficking in the Salvation Army’s Seeds of Hope program in Las Vegas.

The judge denied the request.

McQuaid is from Santa Rosa. She is in Chasing Horse’s inner circle, said four local sources who know her. Trujillo also described her that way.

McQuaid, who lives in Las Vegas, did not respond to Press Democrat requests for comment.

“The woman fights against human trafficking. And she was a supporter of his cult,” Marina Crane, a member of the Tsuut’ina Nation in Alberta, Canada, said of McQuaid. “And I’m going, ‘That’s my point!’

“Why do you think he got away with so much? It’s because people in positions of power — who are working in terms of helping in mental health, social services, legal, police or whatever — were supporting this man.”

Crane knows Chasing Horse from his time filming a TV movie, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” in Calgary in 2006.

McQuaid no longer works for the Salvation Army, said Scott Johnson, public relations director for the organization’s Southwest Division. He had no comment beyond that.

McQuaid remains devoted to Chasing Horse. She supports him in court proceedings, and joined in the song of prayer across the street from the jailhouse. That loyalty has severely damaged her relationships with family members back in Santa Rosa, and has caused hurt and confusion here, the local rape survivor said. And it has ripped apart the next generation of the family, too.

One of McQuaid’s daughters, who lives in Sonoma County, has denounced her mother on social media.

“She sits in court in support of a man who is a known rapist,” she wrote. “Her own two daughters being victims to him.”

The other daughter is now in her mid-20s and has adopted the last name Chasing Horse.

She recently gave birth to Nathan’s baby, said two local sources who know her.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been revised from an earlier version to more accurately describe Jennifer McQuaid’s relationship to Nathan Chasing Horse.