About the Author

...Ned spent much of his time alone roaming the fields and forests surrounding his home with the plants and animals as his friends and companions. His earliest memories are of summers living in a primitive cabin near the Ojibway Indian wigwam-settlement on Partridge Lake in the “wilderness” area of the northeastern Wisconsin. His grandfather and father were close friends of Chief John Escanaba and his family, and it was the Escanaba family who introduced young Ned to their oneness with nature. This example of the “Indian Way” – their traditions and faith, their close connection with Mother Earth and all living things – was aligned with his own experiences the rest of the year and, over time, formed the philosophy by which he chose to live.

After the death of his father in 1945, his mother married her childhood sweetheart and they moved east to Connecticut, where he attended the Hotchkiss School and Yale University. Ned earned an MS at the Yale Graduate School of Conservation and a PhD in education and conservation at Columbia Pacific University. He applied this knowledge and his life experience to a 23-year teaching career with The Gunnery School; work with the Massachusetts and the National Audubon Societies; and part-time lecturing, consulting, and writing.

The author’s exposure to Indian ways and philosophies always remained with him. At the age of 39, while tilling his vegetable garden, he experienced a profound and life-changing Creator-inspired vision, in the tradition of the northeastern Native American Indian. He was told to give up his present comfortable life and create a northeastern regional Indian Museum to rescue, preserve, and share this little-known culture. Ned and his colleague Sidney Hessel co-founded the Institute for American Indian Studies (IAIS) in 1975, and it continues to flourish today.

In 2000, when he was retired from decades of active service to the IAIS, Ned was once more blessed with a Creator-inspired realization. Following severe congestive heart failure, he became aware that he would at last have the time to write a book sharing his northeastern American Indian faith and his life of miracles and human angels. He has always been blessed by the presence of Native American elder teachers from different Indian nations, mostly in the northeast. Two in particular would have great influence on his life: Keewaydinoquay, an Ojibway of the Tribe-Nation of his childhood; and Adelphina Logan, an Ondondaga Iroquois who became the first spiritual leader of the Indian Museum.

The author and Debbie, his wife of 54 years, have lived in rural Washington, Connecticut, since 1956 where they had three children, Lucie, Ted, and Paul, as well as a Navaho foster son, three Spanish-American guardian children, a young lady who has “adopted” them, and a number of young people who over the years have found a loving family when they needed it most.