The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (original) (raw)
The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad (Review)
Journal of Early American History, 2022
In this sweeping, detailed study, Paul Conrad interprets four centuries of Apache history through the analytical framework of diaspora, which he argues "helps us understand Apache and North American history better" (3). Drawing from Spanish-language archival documents from Spain, Mexico, and the United States, the U.S. National Archives, oral testimony from the Morris Edward Opler Papers, and a wealth of printed primary and secondary sources, the author convincingly proves his thesis that "[t]he history of the Apache diaspora reveals the efforts of outsiders to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate Indigenous peoples across more than four centuries, and Natives' own determination to resist and survive wherever they have found themselves" (290). While scholars have recently written thorough treatments of the Apaches de paz and indigenous slavery, Conrad's book is important for being the most thorough treatment of Apache captivity and forced migration written to date. Conrad uses "diaspora" rather broadly throughout the book. He and other scholars employ diaspora interchangeably with "migration" or "dispersal" of a people from their homeland; however, the author explains that Apaches also exhibit the four other characteristics of a more nuanced definition: "collective memory of an ancestral home, a continued connection to that home, a sustained group consciousness, and a sense of kinship with group members living in different places" (2-3).
In the Land of the Mountain Gods: Ethnotrauma and Exile among the Apaches of the American Southwest
Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2016
In the mid to late nineteenth century, two Indigenous groups of New Mexico territory, the Mescalero and the Chiricahua Apaches, faced violence, imprisonment, and exile. During a century of settler influx, territorial changeovers, vigilante violence, and Indian removal, these two cousin tribes withstood an experience beyond individual pain best described as ethnotrauma. Rooted in racial persecution and mass violence, this ethnotrauma possessed layers of traumatic reaction that not only revolved around their ethnicity, but around their relationship with their home lands as well. Disconnected from the ritual resources and sacred geographies that made up every day Apache living, both groups faced a profound and uphill struggle to maintain their community and very identity in the wake of immense and collective psychological distress. This essay emphasizes the role that geography plays in both the immediate impact of exile trauma and in the healing possibilities that this sacred connection to place has to offer Indigenous communities, even in the midst of exile.
In the mid to late nineteenth century, two Indigenous groups of New Mexico territory, the Mescalero and the Chiricahua Apaches, faced violence, imprisonment, and exile. During a century of settler influx, territorial changeovers, vigilante violence, and Indian removal, these two cousin tribes withstood an experience beyond individual pain best described as ethnotrauma. Rooted in racial persecution and mass violence, this ethnotrauma possessed layers of traumatic reaction that not only revolved around their ethnicity, but around their relationship with their home lands as well. Disconnected from the ritual resources and sacred geographies that made up every day Apache living, both groups faced a profound and uphill struggle to maintain their community and very identity in the wake of immense and collective psychological distress. This essay emphasizes the role that geography plays in both the immediate impact of exile trauma and in the healing possibilities that this sacred connection to place has to offer Indigenous communities, even in the midst of exile.
Reclaiming Land and Spirit in the Western Apache Homeland
AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY, 2001
In the Apache language ni' means both land and mind, that is, country and way of thinking. This is no accident or random convergence. For the Apache people, as for many other Native Americans--to borrow a bit recklessly from the great anthropologist, Levi-Strauss--land is good to walk and good to think. The inseparability of land and thought, of geography and memory, and of place and wisdom has long been recognized by non-Indians. For a much longer period--since time immemorial, in fact--this unity has been put to work by Ndee, Dineh, and other people who possess spirits embedded in their place of living. What is relatively new and worth emphasizing is how this concept is at last receiving the attention it deserves from resource managers, from linguistic preservationists and cultural perpetuationists, and from historians, archaeologists, astronomers, tribal advocates, and teachers, to name just a few.
Recent scholarship on the North American West has suggested that kinship mattered more than race in social relations through at least the mid-nineteenth century, which illustrates the longevity of indigenous power in the region. In considering interactions between Chiricahua Apaches and Spaniards in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that kinship was indeed of central importance, but not always as a reflection of Native dominance or in lieu of the influence of other understandings of human difference such as race. Spaniards conflated nuanced knowledge of Apache political divisions and kinship relations with ideas about the innate and unchangeable character of all "barbarous" Indians to justify efforts to subjugate them through a war targeting Chiricahua and other Apache families. Spanish interest in exploiting Native war captives ultimately worked against any fixed racialization of Apache people, however, as the Spaniards argued that Spanish families could serve as key sites through which Natives might finally be Christianized and civilized through labor. For Chiricahua Apaches, meanwhile, flexible family strategies proved their principal means of persistence through the violence and forced migrations of this period as they incorporated refugees, recovered missing kin, and adopted outsiders into new family formations.