Jason Watson came to Israel ready to despise it. Then he started seeing his own story differently.

Watson grew up in North Texas carrying two traditions at once: He was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, where his grandfather was a preacher, and Sundays, Christmases and family vacations revolved around church.

But Watson, 48, is also a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, and on his mother’s side, his childhood was filled with Chickasaw stories, family history and memories passed down from his grandparents.

“My childhood was a mix of Chickasaw culture and Southern Baptist culture,” Watson says. “Not fighting each other but complementing each other.”

His grandparents told him how the Chickasaw were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in what is now Mississippi and Tennessee and sent west under the Indian Removal Act.

WATCH the full episode here:

They also told him stories about the natural world: why certain squirrels have stripes on their backs, how the earth came to be, and why an owl appearing outside a window could be understood as a messenger of death.

At the same time, they went to church.

“We all still hang eagle feathers from our rearview mirrors and tell stories about how the Earth was created out of a mud ball,” Watson says, “and are also still able to hold Christianity in the other hand.”

That ability to hold more than one identity at once would eventually shape the way Watson approached Israel.

As a college student at the University of North Texas in the early 2000s, Watson studied international relations with the intention of working with refugees. He interned at the Center for Survivors of Torture in Dallas, where he encountered asylum seekers from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the former Yugoslavia.

His motivation was deeply personal.

“As a Chickasaw, I wanted to stop, or be a part of helping people not have to leave their homelands,” he says. “I just didn’t want anybody to have to flee their homes or their indigenous lands like the Chickasaws were forced to.”

But Watson realized that by the time refugees reached him, the displacement he wanted to prevent had already happened.

He briefly planned to attend law school. He studied for the LSAT, drove to the testing center, sat down, began the exam and then abruptly put down his pencil.

“I canceled my score,” he says. “I went to my car and thought, ‘Oh my gosh,........

© The Times of Israel