Barker received his BA degree, majoring in philosophy, from Knox College in 1968 and then went to the San Francisco State University for a two-year creative writing master's program.
[5] The book chronicles the events surrounding the mutilation murders of three Navajo men in 1974 by local teenagers in Farmington, New Mexico, the violent aftermath, and the struggle by Native American activists to create a positive civil rights legacy.
[6][7] In 1996, Barker authored his third book, Dancing with the Devil: Sex, Espionage and the U.S. Marines: the Clayton Lonetree Story, in light of research opportunities that opened up in the former Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War.
[8] In this book, Barker unveils previously unknown facts about the headline-making sex-for-secrets Marine spy scandal at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the late 1980s.
[11] In 2002, Barker took a break from writing to mount a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based philanthropic public art project called The Trail of Painted Ponies,[12] which he expanded into a collectible horse figurine company of the same name.