Reverend Immanuel Pardeahtan Trujillo, 82, died of congestive heart failure on June 24, 2010.
Immanuel was born to an unwed teen mother and WW I veteran Apache father and was given up for adoption and raised as James Coyle in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. In 1942, at the age of sixteen he ran away from home and joined the Royal Merchant Marines. In 1944, he became a British Royal Marine to fight in WW II. He suffered a traumatic brain injury from a bomb blast on the North Sea island of Helgoland, which required facial reconstruction and a metal plate to replace a missing piece of skull.
He transferred into the United States Army Rangers where he served as a sergeant, training soldiers at Fort Ord, California. He discovered the crafts room in the military hospitals and began to focus his talents on artwork as a means to support himself that would also allow for spiritual expression.
Upon his honorable discharge, Immanuel followed a lead in his father’s will to find an uncle and two of his father’s closest friends in the Southwest. His father’s friends gave him his father’s Peyote medicine box and encouraged him to join the Native American Church.