Ohkay Owingeh official gave Po' Pay national recognition
Longtime member of tribal council remembered for work preserving history, traditions
Herman Agoyo of Ohkay Owingeh, a longtime Pueblo Indian government official and a cultural activist who helped gain national recognition for Po’Pay as leader of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, died Tuesday following a lengthy illness. He was 82.
A member of the Ohkay Owingeh tribal council since 1992, Agoyo served as governor, lieutenant governor and in several other offices at the pueblo north of Española. He also was a past executive director of the Eight Northern Pueblos Agency and a former chairman of the New Mexico All Indian Pueblo Council.
But those who knew him said Tuesday that Agoyo will be best remembered for his work in preserving and passing on the history and traditions of Ohkay Owingeh and the Tewa culture.
“Growing up, I remember him as a runner,” said Ohkay Owingeh Lt. Gov. Matthew Martinez. “He was always running up and down the hills. Running is a tribal tradition. He helped get young people interested in cross-country running. He was a tribal historian dedicated to preserving and protecting the Pueblo way of life.”
“His own quiet eloquence is what I’ll most remember,” said filmmaker and author Jaima Chevalier of Santa Fe. “He was [physically] unable to speak for the last year of his life, but what he did will speak eloquently for years to come.”
He died in a nursing home at Laguna Pueblo, Martinez said.
Born in 1934, Agoyo earned bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College in 1958 and a master’s in guidance and counseling from The University of New Mexico in 1969.
As a youth, Agoyo’s goal was to play professional baseball. But the Rev. Joel Byrne, a priest he met at the Santa Fe
Indian School, encouraged Agoyo to seek a four-year college degree. “This was a radical idea in the mid-1950s, as so much fine government work had gone into preparing us Indians for vocational careers,” Agoyo wrote in 2005. “I was the only one of my class to go immediately to a four-year college.”
“I’ve been involved in earning a living in Indian affairs since 1965,” Agoyo said when he was recognized as a Santa Fe Living Treasure in 1991. “Arizona State [University] got a contract to hire people like me to go into the Indian communities to tell them about the law and how to start community action programs. That was my job.”
Much of his career was spent educating people about the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and its leader, Po’Pay, an Ohkay Owingeh religious leader who led the effort to unite New Mexico pueblos in an uprising against the Spanish colonial government.
In Po’pay: Leader of the First American Revolution, a 2005 book he co-edited with Joe S. Sando, Agoyo wrote about how this revolutionary had been ignored by historians.
Referring to his own education, he wrote, “all that schooling taught me many things of the world but nothing of myself or my people and our history. I learned about the causes of the American Revolutionary War and all the wars between then and now. I learned about Plato, ancient Greece, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but not one word was ever spoken of the great leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Po’pay. In fact, even the Pueblo Revolt itself has been merely a footnote in most history books, if it’s mentioned at all.”
In 1976, he got the idea for a statue honoring Po’Pay in the nation’s Capitol when he and his wife, Rachele Agoyo, led a delegation of 40 Ohkay Owingeh residents to Washington, D.C., to help commemorate the U.S. bicentennial. Visiting Statuary Hall in the Capitol, he realized that New Mexico was represented by only one statute — a bronze figure of U.S. Sen. Dennis Chavez.
“Beneath the watchful eyes of those giants of the past, Rachele asked, ‘Why not Po’pay?’ I thought about it. So, why not Po’pay?” Agoyo wrote in the book about the man who led the uprising that killed hundreds of Spanish and drove the remaining settlers out of Northern New Mexico for a period of a dozen years.
Agoyo for nearly three decades worked on making that idea a reality. In 1997, the New Mexico Legislature selected Po’Pay as the subject of the state’s second figure in Statuary Hall and created a state commission that Agoyo would eventually head. Sculptor Cliff Fragua of Jemez Pueblo was commissioned to carve the 7-foot marble statue, which took its place in the Capitol in 2005.
“To the Pueblo people here, [Po’Pay] is our hero,” Agoyo said in a brochure for the New Mexico Statuary Hall Commission. “Tribes were on the verge of losing their cultural identity when the Pueblo Revolt brought everything back on track for our people.”
Agoyo was a strong supporter of officially changing his pueblo’s name from San Juan Pueblo to Ohkay Owingeh — the Tewa name that tribal members had always used. That finally happened in 2005, the same year Po’Pay’s statue went to Washington.
“That’s who we are, so we should be proud of that. … San Juan was a name given to us to which we had no choice,” Agoyo told The New Mexican in 2005. “I hope that people respect our desires here and that in time they won’t be confused with what to call San Juan Pueblo.”
He said the renaming process started in 1995, when a poll of tribal members found that more than 80 percent wanted the name change.
In addition to the Living Treasure distinction, Agoyo received many honors in his life. In 1993, Newsweek magazine named him as as one of the 50 most influential Native Americans. In 2006,
The New Mexican named him one of its 10 Who Made a Difference.
Agoyo is survived by his wife and several children and grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.