Dr. Donna Schindler has worked for forty years as a psychiatrist for underserved and indigenous populations in New Zealand, the Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona, California and New Mexico. She feels that her journey to become a cross-cultural psychiatrist began in 1979 when she worked on the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico  as a medical student. She was later greatly influenced by ten years of singing in a black Catholic gospel choir in Berkeley, California. In 1994 she began work with a Maori mental health team in New Zealand. In 1997 she moved to the Navajo Nation where learned about historical trauma and it became her passion in life to work on helping to heal ‘the soul wound.’ She continued doing telemedicine with the Dine in both in Kayenta and Pinon, Az for many years. She now works for two clinics-- the Alamo Navajo health clinic and the Santo Domingo (Kewa) clinic, both in New Mexico. As part of her journey, she had to confront her own racial biases and denial of the truth in order to work as a cross-cultural psychiatrist.

For over thirty years she collected stories from her work with peoples that have been colonized and oppressed. She eventually wove these stories together with significant dreams she had  along the way, as well as Native American history told from the Native perspective. In Flying Horse, the author hopes to put faces to statistics and to help others understand how the unhealed traumas of the past still affect Native people today. She believes that in order for the oppressed to be healed, the oppressors have to heal as well. The first step of healing is through telling the truth about what happened in our country and understanding how the past still affects people, which is made very clear in Flying Horse.