As ‘Dances With Wolves’ actor Nathan Chasing Horse faced justice, these two Bay Area women built a network of survivors

When a Las Vegas jury on Jan. 30 found Nathan Chasing Horse guilty of 13 felony counts, most of them related to child sexual abuse, it sent reverberations through tribal communities across North America.

One of the most powerful tremors passed through Sonoma County.

“I don’t have the words to describe what it feels like to have this conviction come through, and to know this process started on a bench in (Santa Rosa’s) Howarth Park,” said Kathryn Lombera, who lives in Windsor.

Chasing Horse found fame at 13, when he played the character Smiles a Lot in the Oscar-winning 1990 film “Dances With Wolves.”

Infamy found him in January 2023, when he was arrested at his home in Vegas following a multi-jurisdictional investigation into what prosecutors and victims described as years of exploitation and sexual abuse of Indigenous women — by a man who had created the persona of a respected spiritual healer.

By the time of his arrest, a group of women — most of them survivors of Chasing Horse’s predation, some them friends or relatives — were already meeting over Zoom to support one another through grief and recovery.

It was Lombera, the Windsor resident, who formed the group alongside Lisa Diaz-McQuaid, co-founder of Redemption House of the Bay Area, a Santa Rosa-based nonprofit that assists survivors of human trafficking.

When The Press Democrat wrote in depth about Chasing Horse in June 2023, Lombera served as a prime source, describing a sexual assault by the once-revered medicine man, and its aftermath. She insisted on anonymity for that story.

Diaz-McQuaid never responded to interview requests at that time; two family members, her sister and niece, were still enmeshed in Chasing Horse’s cultlike circle then. Another niece had been abused by him as well.

Now that justice has landed on Chasing Horse, offering a measure of closure for his many victims — and with Diaz-McQuaid’s relatives having fled to safety — both of the organizers are now willing to use their names.

And for the first time, they have publicly described a support group they created for survivors. Taking the name VOICE, for Voices of Indigenous Ceremonial Exploitation, it became a vital space for women trying find the resolve to press onward through inevitable backlash.

As Lombera said, the idea began on a bench in Howarth Park.

Dubious medicine man

Chasing Horse, who is Lakota and grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in lower South Dakota, enjoyed an exalted position in Indian Country. He used his abundant charisma, and his early fame, to build a reputation as a traditional medicine man.

He traveled a wide circuit around the continent with a growing entourage, leading sweat lodges and ceremonies of gratitude or remembrance. Santa Rosa was one of Chasing Horse’s regular stops between American reservations and Canadian reserves, and he gained many devoted followers in the North Bay.

He rolled through Sonoma County about 40 to 50 times between 2006 and 2014, one of his former assistants told The Press Democrat in 2023. Chasing Horse hosted ceremonies at a big vineyard property on Sonoma Mountain Road and at a resort off Calistoga Road near the Napa County line.

Chasing Horse also worked with the Sonoma County Indian Health Project, a Santa Rosa-based medical hub for tribal communities along the wider North Coast — and another indication of the high esteem many people here held for him.

“That’s not to say that they were bad people or that they were involved in the terrible things that were happening,” Diaz-McQuaid said. “Looking back now, I call it what it is. It was a cult. And people were manipulated, and people were threatened, and people were coerced.”

What some came to realize, and what a Nevada jury eventually determined, is that Chasing Horse was grooming young girls as sexual partners. Several became his “wives” in informal ceremonies when they turned 16. His 2023 arrest report mentions six wives. Sources familiar with his household told The Press Democrat it was seven.

One of them was Diaz-McQuaid’s niece, who has a child fathered by Chasing Horse. He abused another of her nieces as well.

Public rumblings about his behavior date back at least to 2011, when two different bloggers called him out. In 2015, the Fort Peck Journal published a story about tribal leaders on the Montana reservation of the same name voting to banish Chasing Horse out of “safety-related” concerns. And a year after that, another actor, Chaske Spencer — best known for playing the werewolf Sam Uley in the “Twilight” franchise — publicly denounced Chasing Horse for “spiritual abuse” and “sex abuse.”

Still, the proclaimed healer continued to operate.

Lombera experienced an awakening in December 2014, about a decade after Chasing Horse assaulted her, when a friend who lived in Arizona confided that her own daughter had been sexually assaulted by the medicine man. (That victim, Siera Begaye, would later testify against him.) The conversation sparked Lombera to tell people in her social circle about her own attack.

“I had the idea that my word was respected well enough that it would help validate what she said,” she recalled. “And that’s not what happened.”

Chasing Horse had fiercely loyal supporters. Some of them accused Lombera of being jealous or spiteful. Some were openly hostile. The experience bruised her, but her resolve began to harden.

“I decided that whatever young girl got away (from Chasing Horse) would have support, and I would make sure she was believed in a way I never was,” Lombera said. “That situation presented itself eight years later.”

In 2022, she got word that a young woman she knew, Ren Leone, had broken free of Chasing Horse after years of sexual abuse that began when she was 14. Lombera, using only her first name, took to Facebook in October of that year, speaking aloud what Chasing Horse had done to her.

Fateful meeting in the park

Seeking to collaborate in support of survivors, Lombera noticed the work Diaz-McQuaid was doing at Redemption House. The two knew one another but hadn’t spoken for seven years, Lombera said. She reached out via Instagram, and it took several weeks for Diaz-McQuaid to see the message.

The two women agreed to meet in Howarth Park.

Lombera had no idea what to expect. She knew Diaz-McQuaid’s sister and niece were still in Chasing Horse’s orbit, and it was unclear where Diaz-McQuaid fell in the increasingly intense rupture.

“I went to Howarth Park with a lump in my throat,” Lombera said. “I didn’t know if I was meeting someone who wanted to fight me. I thought it would be a great conversation, or I’d be fighting in a parking lot. And honestly, I was fine with any of it.”

As it turned out, the women hugged and cried together on that park bench. And quickly hatched a plan.

Diaz-McQuaid suggested forming a support group, and Lombera began reaching out to women she knew had been impacted by Chasing Horse. Soon, the VOICE group had formed.

“The initial meeting, people were very cautious,” Lombera recalled. “I think people’s guards were up, and nobody knew what to expect.”

But it became a weekly, virtual shelter for these survivors, many of whom had been ostracized for turning against Chasing Horse. The collective grew to 15 women, Lombera and Diaz-McQuaid said, most of them assault victims. Two of the women who testified against Chasing Horse were in the group.

One of them was Leone. And the nurturing and support she found then eventually encouraged her to go public with accusations against Chasing Horse, according to the VOICE co-founders.

Her revelations proved to be a long-awaited turning point. The defensive wall around Chasing Horse began to crack after Leone’s Facebook post. Supporters started trickling away.

It took Diaz-McQuaid’s sister and niece longer than some to break from Chasing Horse’s inner circle. But they eventually did, returning to the North Bay last year. Diaz-McQuaid credits the work done by the VOICE survivors.

“Because they came forward and spoke their truth, that then was the ripple effect that rippled down into my own family coming home and being separated from that monster finally,” she said.

Tears of joy

The entire VOICE group followed Chasing Horse’s trial intently. The two members who testified updated people “play by play,” according to Diaz-McQuaid.

“I followed the news like a detective,” Lombera said.

She said that with the weight of a grand jury report, the arrest report and riveting testimony by multiple victims, she was certain there was “no way in hell that man would walk away without a conviction.”

But Diaz-McQuaid harbored doubts.

“I would love to say that I was confident. But to be honest, there was a part of me that had a little bit of anxiety,” she said. “Just because historically and statistically, most of the time when women come forward, there isn’t any justice in our system, right?”

Lombera was watching a livestream from the courtroom that day in late January when the verdict was announced. Nevada state prosecutors had charged Chasing Horse, 49, with 21 felony counts. The jury found him guilty on 13 of them — 10 counts of sexual assault of a minor under 16, and one count each of sexual assault, possession of visual presentation depicting sexual conduct with a child, and “open or gross lewdness.”

Chasing Horse stood silently in the courtroom as the verdicts were read, according to Las Vegas news accounts. A number of victims and their supporters were on hand to cheer the moment, some wearing yellow ribbons.

Diaz-McQuaid was working at Redemption House when she got the text.

“I had to step away from my desk and go to the bathroom, and just cry like tears of joy,” she said. “Because I just think about all the years that my niece endured, the trauma that my other niece endured from him, and then even the mental abuse and trauma that my sister endured from him.

“All of that is not in vain. It’s not gonna go unrecognized.”

Most of the counts on which Chasing Horse was acquitted were related to sexual assault charges from a later period, when one of the victims was an adult. Another unsuccessful charge was for using a minor in the production of pornography, the official wording. Jurors watched a wrenching video of an adult man abusing a child; prosecutors alleged the man was Nathan Chasing Horse. But the charge failed on a legal technicality, according to Lombera.

Interviewed after the trial, one juror told 8 News Now in Las Vegas, “Everyone had a problem with it. It’s hard to watch an innocence of a child with a grown adult that knows what he’s doing, to do that to a child.”

After the conviction, Lombera wrote a Facebook post honoring Chasing Horse’s accusers and chastising those who had protected him.

“This case was about sexual assault, but this monster did so much more,” she wrote. “He gutted families. He fractured communities. He loosened families of their finances using their love for him against them. He turned sisters against each other. Sons against their mothers. Mothers lost their daughters. Fathers lost their sons.”

Chasing Horse faces a minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for each of multiple counts. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 11.

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