Walter Fleming Native American Studies Head Has a Best Seller by Carol Schmidt Two of the more distinguishing objects in Walter Fleming's office are a Northern Plains ribbon shirt that hangs on the back of his door and a computer that Fleming uses to write best-selling books on Native American history. Both tell a bit about the world of Walter Fleming, who has one foot in traditional Native American customs and the other in contemporary Indian scholarship. Fleming is a professor and head of the Montana State University Native American Studies Department and author of the best-selling The Complete Idiot's Guide to Native American History. He says he keeps the shirt in his office because he never knows when he will have to rush off to an Indian ceremony. The book, he says, is the 10th best-selling Native American history on the popular Internet bookseller Amazon. "That's a little like being the tallest Hobbit," he jokes. Humor is a part of Fleming, who has a little of Coyote, the traditional Indian jokester, in his persona. Coincidentally, Fleming told a story about Coyote at the inauguration of MSU President Geoff Gamble a few years ago. Fleming cautions that he is not a storyteller in the true sense, but he likes to tell jokes, which is one reason he's effective as both professor and historian. "It's healthy to find humor in situations that might not be as positive, recognizing that there is a serious matter that we're trying to balance," Fleming said. "The tone of the Idiot's Guide comes out of that." An enrolled member of the Kickapoo tribe of Kansas, Fleming was a "B.I.A. brat" (Bureau of Indian Affairs) who grew up on both the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations in Montana. "Lots of people assume that I am Cheyenne." He adds jokingly that if he makes an error, "They say that I'm not from around here." Fleming attended schools in Colstrip instead of on the reservation at the insistence of his mother "who thought the schools were better there." He went on to Dawson Community College and later graduated in education from MSU-Billings with the goal of teaching and counseling in a high school. He came to MSU to earn a degree in guidance counseling in 1979. He said he came to temporarily replace George Horse Capture, who left to become curator for the Buffalo Bill Plains Indian Museum. "And I never left," he said. Fleming's Ph.D. is from the University of Kansas. Fleming is also adjunct curator in Native American Collections at MSU's Museum of the Rockies. While Fleming is a prolific writer, he said that he particularly enjoys teaching, because teaching allows him the broadest influence in positively impacting Native American affairs. "Why I teach here and not in a local community is that I can educate a lot broader audience here--Native and non-Native students learn here, and then they can go out and make a difference." has a best seller