Phillip H. Duran

 

I emerged into this world in 1936 as the second son of Modesto Jácquez Durán and Consuelo Holguín González, who gave me the warmth and security of a good home. When I was very young, we lived in an adobe house in Ysleta, a very old village established by the Tigua Indians that is now a voting precinct in El Paso County, Texas. The name that appears in my birth record is Felipe Durán. On my first day of public school my name was changed to Phillip, which now appears in official documents. My mother is an Holguín from the Tigua Tribe (Ysleta del Sur Pueblo), but she is not an enrolled tribal member and neither am I, a fact that is a part of my story. My father is also said to have been a Tigua Indian.

These few paragraphs tell of the synchronous events that together form the story of one person’s life, a story that continues to unfold and is being recorded more fully in a separate document. During the time that has lapsed since my father made his journey in 1991, I have actively sought the wisdom of elders from many tribes in Indian country. My own relatives know little about the thoughts and ethics that now guide my life, which I have incorporated into my walk with Yesh’ua (Jesus), the Christ, whose coming was foretold not only among the Hebrews but also among many tribes.

Actually, my life is marked by several beginnings. My two brothers were born at home but I was born in a hospital. My mother says the nurses brought her the wrong baby. Fortunately, she insisted in trusting her motherhood instinct until they brought the right baby (me) to her.

In 1958, I experienced the purifying work of the Creator through Yeshua his son.  Twenty years later, the same source of power gave me the strength to forgive and "start over" after I was forced to terminate my work toward the Ph.D. degree. In 1991, I learned that I belonged to a tribal family from whom our family had become disconnected. This revelation was the beginning of a life-long quest. In May 2004, I was adopted into a Pueblo family whose name means "a new beginning." 

From my early school days and into much of my adult life, I was deeply influenced by the grand idea of the American dream: the promise of reward for hard work, honesty, and determination. But we know, sometimes from painful experience, that one may do all that is required through allegiance to a political democracy yet not achieve the dream. It is in the pursuit of truths that belong to a higher realm of laws and teachings, which the Great Spirit has given to all peoples of the Earth, that the two-leggeds will find ultimate fulfillment. And it is to these "first instructions" that humanity needs to return and find healing again. I learned my patriotism in school and church, often hearing that freedom was made possible by this nation's founders and pioneers who forged westward across the frontier with great armies and ideals.

But what I did not learn in school was the part of history that was experienced from the other side of the frontier by those who survived and whose families are still here. The absence of their history and the denial of all that is Native is an essential part of an incomplete story that has created an American myth.

My personal goal was the Ph.D. degree, a successful career in teaching and research, and the freedom to contribute to the visible pages of American history through some significant service to humanity. The encouragement to believe in myself came not only from my parents but also from my teachers in elementary school and high school, where I had an excellent academic record. One memorable day in my high school English class, when the teacher asked us to predict the careers of other students in the class, one of them said I would become a great scientist and the others nodded in agreement. I nurtured that seed of hope, which undoubtedly influenced my decision to major in physics and mathematics when I entered college.

But beneath the dream of personal success was the deeper desire to reward my parents for the sacrifices they had made in behalf of their three sons. Dad finished high school and built a successful business from a humble beginning. I rode with him many times during the early 1940s when he delivered large truckloads of fill dirt to customers. I saw him sweat as he loaded his truck three times a day using only a hand shovel. He paid my way through college until I earned my Bachelor of Science degree. Before Mom could finish the third grade, she dropped out of school in order to support her family. She says she labored “just as hard as the men,” working with the shovel and often left alone out in the field until dark.

 

Identity

During my early school years, I was self-conscious about my dark skin, which stood out among many of my classmates. I did not like to see myself in photographs. The textbooks didn’t help much either, as they depicted heroes who did not look like anyone in my family. And we had no relatives in Mexico, so where were we from?

I excelled in all subjects, including math, English spelling and grammar, and I remember a student saying one day in class, “Ask Phillip. He knows everything.” I was also a very fast runner, weighing only 90 pounds in the eighth grade. That’s the year I tried out for track and won every contest at a track meet. When our school was behind at the start of the relay race and I was the last runner, I took the baton and gave it all I had, passing the other runners and winning for my school, 19.5 points to 18.5 points. Unfortunately, a reporter mistook another Duran student for me and gave him all the credit in a newspaper article.

Dad crossed over to the spirit world in 1991, leaving a treasure of memories. During the family gathering after the funeral, a branch of relatives who had researched the Duran ancestry gave me a document that had been written five years earlier, stating that Dad was a Tigua Indian. The Tiguas, a federally recognized tribe, are among the Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest.

Not everyone in the family was affected as I was by the news about Dad’s heritage. For reasons that would eventually emerge in their own time, what seemed insignificant to others in the family created a passion within me to learn more, and I began to do my own genealogical search. As I sat with Mom in her living room one day, asking questions about our past that had never before come to mind, she casually mentioned the name of a relative on her side of the family. It was my cousin Rosa, an enrolled member of the Tigua Tribe, whom I had never met or knew existed. Rosa had not been in touch with Mom for quite some time, but by an apparent happenstance that I now believe was synchronicity, the phone rang as we were talking. It was Rosa, and after I took the phone to become acquainted, she said, “You’re Indians just like us, and I am now learning our language. You and your mother should be enrolled in the tribe.” She later gave me copies of her documentation that proved our blood relationship to the tribe.

But the opportunities to ask Dad questions about his childhood and ancestry were gone forever. He was the last of his brothers and sisters to leave us. But the few facts that had remained latent in my memory since childhood suddenly began to emerge and make sense. I remembered the many times Dad said, “Son, this is Senecú,” as we drove by a place that must have been very special. He never explained what he meant by those words but I later learned that Senecú was a Tigua village. I remembered Mom’s mother, Leonor, deceased since 1962, who made regular visits to Primo (cousin) Pablo, a tribal member. I remembered the times during my childhood when our family went to the powwows with the Mescalero Apaches. Mom now says, “That’s when the two tribes were friends again.” We were not there just to watch “those Indians” dance; ours was one of the Indian families that gathered there. Powwows are social events that bring tribal families together. When I played cowboys and Indians with my cousins as a small boy, I remembered not wanting to play the Indian, because they always got killed in battle, just like in the movies.

Cousin Rosa told me that her father, a full-blood Tigua, hid his Indian identity from his daughters. As recently as the 1970s, Indians were ostracized and ridiculed; in order to succeed in American society, many decided not to reveal their identity. The Tiguas had maintained their traditional ceremonial life away from public view since the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when their ancestors retreated southward with the Spanish from present-day New Mexico and established a village in Ysleta, which is now a part of El Paso. During our childhood, my brothers and I often walked through El Barrio de los Indios (Indian village) and visited some of the families, unaware that we were among relatives. In the picture below, taken at the Tigua's annual feast on June 13 a few years ago, Prima Rosa is second from the left, my mother is third from the left, and the other two are Rosa's sisters.

Today many people proudly claim to be Native American and others are tracing their roots. But the language I often hear is troubling, for some speak of being “part Indian” in the same way that they refer to their pets, like a dog that is part Collie and part German Shepherd. Being Indian implies many things that I learned through a long process. In traditional Indian thought, a tribal member is a piece of the community, not just an individual. If fortunate, he receives an education that the tribe has passed down through generations of existence, and he eventually becomes aware through experience that life is one great flow, not what American society can only offer in linear fragments that are often incoherent. He also learns the meaning of responsibility to all life, human and non-human, and the need to preserve what is sacred.

When we lose contact with tribal relatives, we thus become disconnected from the community of language, traditions, knowledge, ceremonies, and relationships. These ways take a lifetime to learn. Needs are always present in Indian country and threats appear in different forms. I cannot be a warrior who defends a people if I am excluded for any reason.

 

Conflict

 

As a young boy, I went with my parents to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, the oldest church structure in Texas, established by the Tiguas in 1682. There I also had catechism classes and took first communion at the appropriate age. Our family was stable. I did not speak disrespectfully to my parents, aunts, or uncles. Talking back to them or getting into heated arguments was unthinkable, not because of fear but out of respect. I always addressed them with the polite form of “you” in our language. My brothers and I never got into illegal drugs or addiction to alcohol. We never discussed or argued about religion. But one day I did something that created a deep crisis in our family.

I had very close friendships in elementary school and high school. Three of us, representing different “religions”—Catholic, Baptist, and Mormon—which none of us seemed to take seriously at the time, continued doing things together in college. (In those days, mass was still conducted in Latin.) Half jokingly, we talked about moving to a big city after graduation, where as adults we would live independently and free to do what we wanted. We joked about deciding on the same religion in order to get along in our plans for the future. One day in 1958, one of my friends invited me to the Baptist church and I kept going back.

I was a senior in college majoring in physics that year. I began to think about my relevant insignificance on a tiny planet compared to such a vast Universe. (Estimates based on Einstein's theory of gravity indicate that it takes light 17 billion years to reach us from the farthest place in the Universe.) What was my purpose here? How will I account for the things I had done? What is death? I did not know how to pray, but in the presence of three witnesses one evening, I told Creator that I wanted to live for him from that point onward. An incredibly ecstatic sensation then came over me, which I can only describe as a purifying process that felt like a river gushing through my soul, washing me clean, and filling me with awareness. The experience is undeniable. I didn’t even mention Jesus in the prayer but I knew later that he was the ancient one who visited me. I do not have a sanguine personality, but this was real. An outward change in my behavior occurred immediately, and an inward knowledge of the experience has always stayed with me. When I encountered the deepest crisis of my life twenty years later, this experience would come back to me with great power.

My association with the Baptist Church caused turmoil in the family. In the minds of relatives, I had disgraced the family, equivalent to abandoning our culture and becoming a White man. Older relatives came to our home and made me kneel to ask forgiveness. I heard that my name had been mentioned in one of the Catholic churches, where the priest told other Catholics not to associate with me because I had become a Protestant. I was taken to two priests for deprogramming, but neither was able to invalidate my experience. For months to come, my family and I went through incredible grief. Their pain was as deep as mine and I had caused it, yet in my heart I knew I had done nothing wrong, because my transformation had actually made me a more loving person. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was disobeying my parents. In order to avoid a confrontation on Sunday morning, I got up before my parents and arrived at church three hours early, using that time to read the Bible. During the many years that followed, I read and studied theological works by Lewis Sperry Chafer and others.

 

History

It was not until Dad died 38 years later, when I was immersed in the study of American Indian history, that I understood the root of our family conflict. During my childhood days, evangelicals were referred to as “Protestants,” the enemies of our people, who took away our culture and brought teachings from the Devil.

There was some truth to the claim about culture, but our family was not affected in the same way as those who practiced their Indian traditions. As America expanded westward, displacing the tribes, at least 95 percent of the Native populations perished through disease and conflict. To justify conquest, many politicians and church leaders used Biblical parallels by which they viewed themselves and other English immigrants as a “New Israel” moving into the Promised Land. Historians refer to this doctrine as “manifest destiny”: that America’s expansion westward to take over the Continent and establish its own institutions was divinely ordained. The tribes were perceived to be incapable of self-government; their customs and spiritual practices were scorned. Presuming them to be ignorant savages, the United States established a policy whose intent was to eliminate all forms of Indian life by transforming Indian children into “civilized” White men and women. To accomplish this, Indian children were taken from their parents and placed in church-run boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their language. This policy lasted almost 100 years. The residential schools in Canada parallel the American experience.

Thus, the tribes played an important role in helping form the American dream, but they were on the other side of the struggle. Native America was left with historical trauma known to psychologists and others working with Indian communities as the soul wound, which appears in various forms, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and various ways in which Native people today internalize characteristics of the oppressor.

I was ignorant about Indian history for most of my life. Because I was heavily influenced by decades of involvement in school and church, which made me very patriotic, the psychological shock of learning the dark side of American history was especially severe. I finally accepted the reality of genocide, treaty violations by the U.S. Government, loss of culture and language, as well as the fact that many issues in Indian country are ongoing, including the socio-economic problems and an average unemployment rate of around 50 percent. My wife and I are personally acquainted with some of these issues, because we have lived in, or close to, Indian communities.

My consciousness gradually changed, and I feared that I would eventually stumble upon a conflict with my Christian theology. The conflicts that did occur were related to a higher level of self-awareness. It was a hard road to travel, for I could not always fit new knowledge into old paradigms. The changes that were occurring within me were inevitable. But I was fully aware of the need to be respectful in church venues, though I did offer a different perspective  on topics that pertained to the world's peoples. My comments often drew uncomfortable reactions from other church members, so I usually chose not to pursue them further. The more I learned about Indian spirituality, the more I discovered its compatibility with Bible truths and the teachings of Jesus.

In a sincere effort to educate the university and surrounding communities, including my own church, about Native issues, knowledge, and perspectives, I began to screen video documentaries about Indigenous peoples on the university campus. Over a two-year span, I eventually collected and reviewed over 100 such documentaries. But I was disappointed at the general disinterest and awareness among church members. The response has been the same almost everywhere I've been. It's as if a veil were covering the Church and only a Great Learning can remove it.

 

Rejection

In 1971, the pressure to seek the Ph.D. degree led my wife and me to pull up our roots and move to the Pacific Northwest with our three children. At the time, I was teaching and doing research at the University of Texas at El Paso, where I was denied tenure but had a good record. Before leaving, the Dean of Sciences offered me, in writing, a tenured position to teach applied mathematics contingent upon returning with a doctorate. However, doctoral studies took much longer than expected and my program eventually collapsed after seven years of arduous work. I became a doctoral candidate after passing the difficult Ph.D. qualifying exams in Computer Science and theoretical Physics. After working for nine months on a research problem that the chair of my Ph.D. committee had assigned me with the understanding that it was a dissertation topic, he informed me that he had already submitted a manuscript for publication on that same problem. He said my results agreed with his and that the assigned research problem  was only meant to test my ability to perform original research. Having thus proven my capability, he said we were ready to decide on a “real” dissertation topic.

Completely demoralized by this betrayal of trust, I dropped him as my advisor, after which the Department Chair assigned me a new topic arbitrarily. But after a year, he forced me out of the doctoral program, saying I had made no progress. Knowing an injustice had been committed, I fought to remain in the doctoral program but the university administration sided with the two faculty members who were involved. Tired of fighting the establishment, I finally surrendered, fully convinced that my student rights had been violated and that I would have completed my program of study had I been allowed to continue. Before coming to the Northwest, I had already done research that required difficult mathematics. (In my physics masters thesis, I showed that another physics graduate student had made a wrong assumption. After disproving his thesis, I then solved the more difficult problem.) Seeing no other options, I buried my face in a bath towel, accepted defeat, and cried bitterly.

I asked myself if there was any meaning or purpose to the seven wasted years and the end of a long academic career. I could not return to my position at UT El Paso or find employment as a physicist. I concluded that the only way I would be able to function in life was to forgive. The forgiveness was so genuine and complete that I became friends again with my former advisor, as if nothing had happened. I traced my spiritual strength to that encounter with the Creator in 1958. Learning to forgive not only gave me sanity; it also prepared me for future work with tribal people, for I was able to understand to some extent what elders meant when, referring to American Indian history, they said, “We must forgive the unforgivable.”

One of the members of my doctoral committee offered me a technical position in a non-academic WSU department, but only if I agreed to stop fighting to remain in the doctoral program. His offer lacked ethics, because it was essentially a bribe, but by then I was emotionally drained, so I accepted the position. For the next 20 years (until 1998) I faced new obstacles in my professional life. In time, the American dream faded away.

In 1994, I applied for enrollment with the Tigua Tribe but my application and several certified follow-up letters to the tribal council went unanswered. Several years later, I received a letter from the Tribe, stating that I had been dropped from the tribal roll. (I did not know I had been enrolled.)

According to a federal rule, a tribal member must be the direct descendant of an enrolled ancestor. For unknown reasons, my mother was mistakenly bypassed during the initial enrollment period in 1984, and I also learned that the Durans had been bypassed. This means that I have no tribal family and I’m not allowed to participate in Tigua or any other Pueblo ceremonies.

 

The Red Road

           My academic life was dead for two decades following the demise of my doctoral program. From WSU I went to South Dakota to become director of First Nations Institute and was laid off less than two years later when the campus was closed down. Eventually, the property was sold. I found new hope when I was hired by Northwest Indian College in summer 2000 to direct a degree program in environmental studies that was designed to meet the needs of tribal students. There, my interest in physics was re-kindled and I also began to network with Native scholars who are bringing traditional Indigenous knowledge into the science curriculum in addition to Western science. For a time, I was also Dean of Science and Mathematics. I caught up with several developments in quantum physics and cosmology and also learned that Native languages are suitable for describing the processes that occur in the quantum world, while modern languages, including English, are not.

Indigenous worldviews do not treat science and religion as separate entities. Traditional practices are based on a proper relationship to the earth, to the plants and animals upon which we depend, and even the cosmos. Spirituality involves an experiential “connectedness” and responsibility to an implied trust; it is not acquired by memorizing facts or by being theologically correct. In Native traditions the Universe is seen as a unified whole, alive and imbued with spirit. American Indian scholars are now challenging the Western scientific establishment to take seriously the validity of traditional practices so that the science of the future will incorporate holistic principles of sustainability.

For a long time, I blamed myself for the grief that has also affected my wife and children. I have wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But I now approach the Great Mystery with awe and respect. It is impossible to forget the past, but instead of fretting, the past has become a part of a sacred path that will hopefully bring healing to others. It is not necessary for me to carry religious or political labels, which would only limit how I relate to people from all walks of life. Most of my moments of ecstasy and inspiration occur in private in the presence of the only Sovereign. But I do carry grief for what is being taught and done in the name of God by those who claim to know "the truth."

An elder once said that being born is a sacred trust. We emerge from a water world inside our mother’s womb into a world of air, relationships, and responsibilities. In making choices, our minds must be guided by the higher Power. I had to walk the Red Road for over a decade before I could understand my purpose along a journey that was surely guided by design.

On Sunday, May 16, 2004 my wife Norma and I attended a gathering that addressed the historical wounds which have long existed between the Pueblo Indian people and the Christian Church in America. I listened intently as Pueblo elders spoke. The next day, at the base of the mountain under the open sky, I witnessed the power of Pueblo oral tradition to encourage, teach, and admonish. The story telling was spontaneous. There were no sermons or speeches from prepared notes, and this would be true about all future gatherings. We were blessed by traditional Pueblo songs and ceremony. The spiritual leader, a Pueblo traditional elder fluent in his Native language, was anything but brief, yet not boring. It was a completely traditional Indian event centered in Christ. Spiritual truths were conveyed in the Pueblo tradition. It was neither an exclusively Christian event nor a traditional Indian event. It was both without designating either and it was meaningful. Love and candor were evident. It was an example of something that cannot be understood unless it is experienced. I witnessed what the Creator intended when the gospel first came to this land. The Church today still needs to heed what the Pueblo elders said: "Don't try to change us."

The elder filled a cup with hot water that was being heated on the open fire and added juniper to make a tea. At the appropriate time, Norma and I drank the tea in ceremony. The people at White Dawn House then welcomed us into the Pueblo family. No longer an "orphan," I did not want to leave.

After returning to our home in the Pacific Northwest, I crushed the dry juniper from the tea into a fine powder, as instructed, and spread it over the doorstep to remind me that I will be walking on Pueblo land, where I really belong, each time I pass through the door.

A warrior that was once lost has found his path again. Later, he was given an Indian name. Some day, before the end of the trail, he will sing his own song in his own language to bless many people for future generations.