What surprised me most when I listened to Professor John Moriarty decades after he left the University of Manitoba was that he  had engaged some of the same thoughts as I did.  Specifically, he like I, had encountered Indigenous thought and spirituality, something frankly in 1967 this  was not something I ever considered. What could we possibly learn from indigenous people I thought. I never heard anything of my professors suggest otherwise either.  We all missed out on a lot in other words. Thankfully, for Professor Moriarty and I we both encountered indigenous thought later. We smartened up.

Like D.H. Lawrence, Moriarty says he has learned a lot about coming down to earth from Native Americans.  Lawrence had challenged himself to “follow the trail of vanished Native Americans at the foot of the crucifix and take upon the primordial Indian obstinacy.”  Lawrence wanted to make a new day with them. Lawrence did that in Taos New Mexico.  Even though he had lots of fine contact with Native North Americans he eventually realized he was just another Pale Face.  This is what Lawrence wrote:

“I was born of no virgin of no Holy Ghost. I know these old men telling the tribal tales were my fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced, father far back in the resinous ages, but he like many old fathers with a changeling son, he would like to deny me, but I stand on the edge of their finite now, and they neither deny nor accept me. My way is my own of Great Father. I can’t cluster at the drum anymore.”

Moriarty says that like Lawrence he can’t deny he is a pale face and can’t cluster at the drum any more but he said when he came back to Connemara Ireland from Canada he couldn’t use Aristotle or Plato or other European thinkers to help him on that journey because he found Connemara to be cold and savage and the only way he could do that was to become aboriginal.

Now I must interject that I have been to Connemara and did not find it cold and savage, but admittedly I was there in summer. There was nothing cold and savage about it. One thing Moriarty learned from Canada was to face into the blizzard. That is what the buffalo do. They don’t run from the blizzard: they face it. They have the hairy face to do it too.

Moriarty said one day he was travelling among one the bogs of Connemara and he was in distress. So he fell down and asked the bog to heal him. He wanted the bog to suck out his “expensive European education”. It was not helping him there he thought. He realized his European head hurt the earth. His European head was doing damage to the earth. He did not want to continue like that. All of this also astonished me. After all I consider myself a bog guy. I don’t think I have blogged about that yet, but intend to. As well, I believe that the attitude to nature of Europeans and their descendants has been harmful to the earth, and we can learn a lot from indigenous people about learning a new attitude to nature.  I also believe bogs can do a lot to improve that.

Like me, Professor Moriarty wanted to start again in the bog. Shakespeare, whom he loved, as do I,  would not take him up but he found some old Native North American stories that helped him to get up again. He says some of those stories he learned from Indigenous people in Canada who took him back to the earth. He wanted to tell some of those stories. Some of those stories have helped me as well.

I will blog about them next.