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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.”
A gripping story of the cultural resilience of the descendants of Geronimo and Cochise This book reveals the conflicting meanings of power held by the federal government and the Chiricahua Apaches throughout their history of interaction. When Geronimo and Naiche, son of Cochise, surrendered in 1886, their wartime exploits came to an end, but their real battle for survival was only beginning. Throughout their captivity in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma, Naiche kept alive Chiricahua spiritual power by embodying it in his beautiful hide paintings of the Girl’s Puberty Ceremony—a ritual at the very heart of tribal cultural life and spiritual strength. This narrative is a tribute to the Chiri...
When it acquired New Mexico and Arizona, the United States inherited the territory of a people who had been a thorn in side of Mexico since 1821 and Spain before that. Known collectively as Apaches, these Indians lived in diverse, widely scattered groups with many names—Mescaleros, Chiricahuas, and Jicarillas, to name but three. Much has been written about them and their leaders, such as Geronimo, Juh, Nana, Victorio, and Mangas Coloradas, but no one wrote extensively about the greatest leader of them all: Cochise. Now, however, Edwin R. Sweeney has remedied this deficiency with his definitive biography. Cochise, a Chiricahua, was said to be the most resourceful, most brutal, most feared A...
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 Mex...
Many readers may be familiar with the wartime exploits of the Apaches; this book relates the untold story of their postwar fate. It tells of the Chiricahua ApachesÕ 27 years of imprisonment as recorded in American dispatches, reports, and news items: documents that disclose the confusion, contradictions, and raw emotions expressed by government and military officials regarding the Apaches while revealing the shameful circumstances in which they were held. First removed from Arizona to Florida, the prisoners were eventually relocated to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where, in the words of one Apache, "We didnÕt know what misery was until they dumped us in those swamps." Pulmonary diseas...
WHITE PAINTED WOMAN appears in ancient myths of the Chiricahua Apaches as the virgin mother of the people and the origin of women's ceremonies. Such Chiricahua myths and traditions have closely prescribed the roles of women in relation to their husbands and children, to relatives and extended families, and to the band or tribe. One of those roles is to safeguard and hand on to the next generation the lore and customs of the people. In this way, Chiricahua women have served as safekeepers of a heritage that is now endangered. For more than a decade, H. Henrietta Stockel has moved with remarkable freedom and intimacy among the Chiricahuas, especially in the women's friendship circles. With the...
A majority of ethnographer Morris Edward Opler’s research was done on Native American groups of the American Southwest. He studied specifically the Chiricahua Indians, who were the subjects of one of his most famous books, An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social, and Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians. Opler studied many Native American groups, but the Apache were a main focus of his. An Apache Life-Way traces the life of an Apache year by year. Rather than a history, the book explains the day-to-day Apache experience, detailing the chronological order of one’s life. The lifestyle described in the book is from a time before the Americans started the long era of hostile int...
The first full-length life of the Apache warrior-leader, Mangas Coloradas, describes his outstanding qualities, the Apache culture in which he rose to power, and the battles against white and Mexican settlements in New Mexico that made him widely feared. UP.
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.
From 1886 to 1913, hundreds of Chiricahua Apache men, women, and children lived and died as prisoners of war in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Their names, faces, and lives have long been forgotten by history, and for nearly one hundred years these individuals have been nothing more than statistics in the history of the United States' tumultuous war against the Chiricahua Apache. Based on extensive archival research, From Fort Marion to Fort Sill offers long-overdue documentation of the lives and fate of many of these people. This outstanding reference work provides individual biographies for hundreds of the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war, including those originally classified as POWs i...