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“We are dealing here with a living literature,” wrote Morris Edward Opler in his preface to Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians. First published in 1942, this is another classic study by the author of Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians. Opler conducted field work among the Chiricahuas in the American Southwest, as he had earlier among the Jicarillas. The result is a definitive collection of their myths. They range from an account of the world destroyed by water to descriptions of puberty rites and wonderful contests. The exploits of culture heroes involve the slaying of monsters and the assistance of Coyote. A large part of the book is devoted to the irrepressible Coyote, whose antics make cautionary tales for the young, tales that also allow harmless expression of the taboo. Other striking stories present supernatural beings and “foolish people.”
Classic study of myths relating to creation, agriculture and rain, hunting rituals, coyote cycle, monstrous enemy stories, many more.
Lipan Apache are Southern Athabaskan (Apachean) Native Americans whose traditional territory included present-day Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, prior to the 17th century. Present-day Lipan live mostly throughout the U.S. Southwest, in Texas, New Mexico, and the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, as well as with the Mescalero tribe on the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico; some currently live in urban and rural areas throughout North America (Mexico, United States, and Canada). “The myths and tales of this volume are of particular significance, perhaps, because they have reference to a tribe about which there is almost no published ethnographic material. The Lipan Apache were scattered and all but annihilated on the eve of the Southwestern reservation period. The survivors found refuge with other groups, and, except for a brief notice by Gatshet, they have been overlooked or neglected while investigations of numerically larger peoples have proceeded. “It is gratifying, therefore, to be able to present a fairly full collection of Lipan folklore, and to be in a position to report that this collection does much to illuminate the relations of Southern Athabaskan-speaking tribes and the movements of aboriginal populations in the American Southwest. “The myths and tales of this volume were recorded during the summer of 1935.”—Claremont Colleges
In the 1940s and 1950s, long before historians fully accepted oral tradition as a source, Eve Ball (1890-1984) was taking down verbatim the accounts of Apache elders who had survived the army's campaigns against them in the last century. These oral histories offer new versions--from Warm Springs, Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache--of events previously known only through descriptions left by non-Indians. A high school and college teacher, Ball moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico, in 1942. Her house on the edge of the Mescalero Apache Reservation was a stopping-off place for Apaches on the dusty walk into town. She quickly realized she was talking to the sons and daughters of Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, and their warriors. After winning their confidence, Ball would ultimately interview sixty-seven people. Here is the Apache side of the story as told to Eve Ball. Including accounts of Victorio's sister Lozen, a warrior and medicine woman who was the only unmarried woman allowed to ride with the men, as well as unflattering portrayals of Geronimo's actions while under attack, and Mescalero scorn for the horse thief Billy the Kid, this volume represents a significant new source on Apache history and lifeways. "Sherry Robinson has resurrected Eve Ball's legacy of preserving Apache oral tradition. Her meticulous presentation of Eve's shorthand notes of her interviews with Apaches unearths a wealth of primary source material that Eve never shared with us. "Apache Voices is a must read!"--Louis Kraft, author of Gatewood & Geronimo "Sherry Robinson has painstakingly gathered from Eve Ball's papers many unheard Apache voices, especially those of Apache women. This work is a genuine treasure trove. In the future, no one who writes about the Apaches or the conquest of Apacheria can ignore this collection."--Shirley A. Leckie, author of Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian
Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait, James L. Haley's dramatic saga of the Apaches' doomed guerrilla war against the whites, was a radical departure from the method followed by previous histories of white-native conflict. Arguing that "you cannot understand the history unless you understand the culture, " Haley first discusses the "life-way" of the Apaches - their mythology and folklore (including the famous Coyote series), religious customs, everyday life, and social mores. Haley then explores the tumultuous decades of trade and treaty and of betrayal and bloodshed that preceded the Apaches' final military defeat in 1886. He emphasizes figures who played a decisive role in the conflict; Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Geronimo on the one hand, and Royal Whitman, George Crook, and John Clum on the other. With a new preface that places the book in the context of contemporary scholarship, Apaches is a well-rounded one-volume overview of Apache history and culture.
The publication of Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians by the American Folk-Lore Society in 1938 illustrated the richness of the material on the tribes of the Southwest. Still a treasure-house of information, it appears with a new introduction and for the first time in paperback. Morris Edward Opler based his pioneering work on the accounts of Jicarilla men and women born in the nineteenth century. In a preface he explains that the stories, sacred and profane, were meant to be told on winter nights. The book takes up the creation of the universe, the birth of Killer-of-Enemies and Child-of-the-Water, the slaying of monsters, and the Hactcin ceremony. Other myths center on games and artifacts, hunting rituals and encounters with supernatural animals, and the trickster Coyote. There are also vivid, earthy stories of foolishness, unfaithfulness, and perversion; mon-strous enemies; and Dirty Boy's winning of a wife.
Storytelling has been a vital and vivid tradition in Apache life. Coyote tales, the creation legend and stories of historic battles with Comanche and Anglo intruders create a colorful mosaic of tribal heritage. Percy Bigmouth, a prominent oral historian of the Mescalero and Lipan Apache tribes, realized in the early twentieth century that the old ways were waning. He wrote in longhand what he had learned from his father, Scout Bigmouth, a prison camp survivor at Fort Sumner and participant in the turbulent Apache Wars. Join author Lynda Sanchez as she brings to light the ancient legends and lore of the Apaches living in the shadow of Mescalero's Sacred Mountain. Seventy-five years in the making, this collection is a loving tribute to a way of life nearly lost to history.
In the decade after the death of their revered chief Cochise in 1874, the Chiricahua Apaches struggled to survive as a people and their relations with the U.S. government further deteriorated. In From Cochise to Geronimo, Edwin R. Sweeney builds on his previous biographies of Chiricahua leaders Cochise and Mangas Coloradas to offer a definitive history of the turbulent period between Cochise's death and Geronimo's surrender in 1886. Sweeney shows that the cataclysmic events of the 1870s and 1880s stemmed in part from seeds of distrust sown by the American military in 1861 and 1863. In 1876 and 1877, the U.S. government proposed moving the Chiricahuas from their ancestral homelands in New Mexico and Arizona to the San Carlos Reservation. Some made the move, but most refused to go or soon fled the reviled new reservation, viewing the government's concentration policy as continued U.S. perfidy. Bands under the leadership of Victorio and Geronimo went south into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, a redoubt from which they conducted bloody raids on American soil. Sweeney draws on American and Mexican archives, some only recently opened, to offer a balanced account of life on and off the reservation in the 1870s and 1880s. From Cochise to Geronimo details the Chiricahuas' ordeal in maintaining their identity despite forced relocations, disease epidemics, sustained warfare, and confinement. Resigned to accommodation with Americans but intent on preserving their culture, they were determined to survive as a people.
In 1933, famed anthropologist Morris Opler met a Mescalero Apache he called Chris and worked with him to record the man's life story, from the bloody Apache Wars into the reservation years of the mid-twentieth century. Chris's vivid recollections are enriched at strategic moments with crucial background information on Apache history and culture, supplied by Opler. Chris was born around 1880, the son of a Chiricahua man and a Mescalero woman. At the age of six, he and his family and other Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war and were relocated by the U.S. government to Florida and Alabama. Eventually settling on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Chris grew up expecting to become a shaman like his parents. Although Chris apprenticed as a shaman, his confidence in his healing ability waned after he was forced at the age of seventeen to attend federal government schools. Nonetheless, his interest in Mescalero religion, healing, and other traditional customs and beliefs remained, and that intimate knowledge of his people's world underscores and deepens the story of his own life.