Golgonooza

The final volume in Kent Nerburn's moving trilogy of books built around his relationship with an Indian elder, Dan, whose life commission has been to bridge the gulf between his own and 'white' culture, takes one into an even deeper territory of difference. For we travel into what the predominant culture would call, if being generous, the 'paranormal' and when not the merely superstitious; but, which Dan simply calls, at one point, 'Indian science'! In the first two books, discussed here,  http://ncolloff.blogspot.nl/2017/10/journeying-with-indian-elder.html , we follow Dan and Nerburn on two journeys. The first two are into Dan's past. The first concludes at the site of the Massacre at Wounded Knee from which Dan's parents are survivors. The second ends at the discovered grave of Dan's younger sister, Yellow Bird, whose apparent speech impediment and supernatural gift with animals had deeply unsettled her boarding school authorities (Catho...

Benjamin Lay was a victim of 'history from above', airbrushed out of the history of the abolition of slavery for being not only ahead of his time but awkward, cantankerous, impolite and, importantly, an artisan and a self educated autodidact who was a dwarf, presumably as a result of a genetic variant, coming in at a little over four feet high. He was decidedly not one of the saintly persuaders of the subsequent generation - middle class, well-educated men of property and station, heirs to the burgeoning Enlightenment. But, as Marcus Rediker, eloquently argues in his, 'The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist', he led in the 1720's and 30's, through his writings, his provocative theatre of protest and his general way of life to pave the way. It was in the year of his death that the Pennsylvania Monthly Meeting, who had expelled him, agreed that the trade in slaves was incompatible with membership. The fir...