The Apache

← Encyclopedia

On the last night, when the fire has been built high in the dark and the singers have taken up the song, they come out of the country beyond the light. Four of them, and then a fifth. Their bodies are painted, their chests and arms marked in white and black and yellow; their faces are hooded so no face shows; and above each hooded head rises a tall crown of painted wood, latticed and horned, catching the firelight as it moves. They carry wands in both hands. They step and turn and bend toward the four directions, and the fifth among them moves crooked to the others, the gray one, the one who plays. To the people gathered at the fire these are not men who have put on masks. These are the Gaan, the Mountain Spirits, the powers who live inside the sacred peaks and who taught the people the ceremonies at the beginning of things — come down out of the rock and made present at the fire, to heal what is sick and to drive off what would harm the camp. Pull back from the fire, and from the mountains that hold the Gaan, and there is a longer story: of a people who came south out of the far cold north, split from a brother people, and became the Nde.

The people who came south

The Apache call themselves, in their own tongue, Nde, Ndee, or Indé — words that mean, plainly, “person,” “the people.” “Apache” is not their name for themselves. It is an exonym, a name others fastened on them, and the most widely held account traces it to the Zuni word ʔa·paču, carried into Spanish and then into English. What the people say of themselves they say in the word for the people; what the record calls them it calls by a borrowing. Both names are used here, but the order matters — the self-name first, and the outside name known for what it is.

By speech the Nde are Southern Athabaskan, and this is the single fact that opens their genealogy. The Athabaskan language family reaches across an enormous span of the continent, its northern branches spoken in the interior of Alaska and northwestern Canada, and its southern outliers spoken in the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest. The Apache and the Diné — the people English named Navajo — are the two great southern branches, close enough in tongue that portions of their speech remain mutually intelligible, and close enough in sacred inheritance that their worlds share deep structures. They are brother peoples. Where their languages diverged and how far they have drifted are questions for linguists; that they are kin is not in doubt.

The coming south is where the scholarly record turns careful. The consensus among anthropologists is that Athabaskan speakers moved down out of the far northwest into the Southwest sometime between roughly 1000 and 1500 CE, and the estimate is often narrowed to about 1200 to 1500. The timing is genuinely contested; the route is contested; the exact web of borrowing that ran later among the Apache, the Diné, and the Pueblo peoples they came to live beside — who gave which ceremony, which practice was carried south and which was learned in place — remains an open matter in the outside scholarship, and where a claim here rests on that outsider work rather than on Apache voices it is marked as such. Against the migration account stands the tradition’s own sacred history: the emergence into this world, and the ordering of it by the powers who set its pattern. That history is carried by the people themselves, and it is theirs to tell; it is not the same kind of claim as a radiocarbon date, and it is not weighed against one here.

They did not arrive as one nation. They settled as several, spread across a great arc of the Southwest and the southern Plains, and the divisions still name them: the Western Apache of what is now Arizona; the Chiricahua of the borderlands where Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican state of Sonora meet; the Mescalero of south-central New Mexico; the Jicarilla of the north; the Lipan of Texas and the southern Plains; and the Plains Apache — sometimes called Kiowa Apache — farther east among the buffalo. Where a band reached open grass it took up the horse, the bison hunt, and the raid, and lived something like its Plains neighbors the Comanche and Kiowa. Where a band held the mountains it hunted and gathered and planted small fields in the canyon bottoms. Historically the Nde were a people of hunters, gatherers, and raiders, their bands bound together by matrilineal clan — descent and belonging reckoned through the mother’s line — and by a ceremonial inheritance they held in common across every division.

White Painted Woman and the Mountain Spirits

At the center of that inheritance stands a mother. The Apache call her White Painted Woman — Esdzanadehe among the Chiricahua, Isanaklesh among the Mescalero — and she is the same renewing figure the Diné hold as Changing Woman, the first woman, the one who ages and grows young again with the turning year and never finally dies. She is the mother of the people and the pattern of right living. From her come the culture heroes who cleared the early world of the monsters that had been preying on the first people, making the land fit to live in; and from her comes the order the ceremonies work to keep. When an Apache speaks of the beginning, White Painted Woman is near the start of it.

Beside her, and above all in the ceremonial life, stand the Gaan — also written Ga’an — the Mountain Spirits. They are powerful and benevolent beings who dwell inside the sacred mountains, and the tradition holds that it was they who taught the people the ceremonies before withdrawing into the earth to live within the peaks. They did not vanish. They return. In ritual the Gaan come back as the masked dancers the outside world has called by several names — the Crown Dancers, the Mountain Spirit Dancers, and, in the dismissive older sources, the “Devil Dancers,” a label that carries a missionary’s judgment and none of the tradition’s own sense. What the public record can say of the dance it says at a distance: that a set of dancers, commonly four for the four directions with a fifth gray one who plays the clown, appear at night by firelight; that their bodies are painted and their faces hooded, their heads crowned with the tall wooden headdresses, and their hands filled with wands; and that their purpose, in the standard reference account of the Apache Crown Dance, is to protect the community from disease and enemies. What the record cannot give, and does not try to, is the interior: the specific songs, the making of the crowns, the knowledge held inside the dance. Those belong to the tradition and stay within it. The single point the outside must grasp is the one it most often misses — that when the Gaan dance, the people at the fire are not watching a performance of the Mountain Spirits. They are in the presence of the Mountain Spirits themselves.

The whole system aims at a condition the Nde and the Diné both name, a word close in their two related tongues: hózhó, the beauty, balance, and order in which the world is meant to stand and to which the ceremonies return it when it is broken. To keep hózhó is to keep the world right. The Gaan came to teach the way of it; White Painted Woman is its living form; and the most public and best-loved of the ceremonies is the one in which a single girl, for four days, becomes that first mother and carries hózhó back into a new generation.

The Sunrise Ceremony

The ceremony is called na’ii’ees — often written na’ih’es, and known in English as the Sunrise Ceremony or Sunrise Dance. It is a girl’s coming-of-age rite, held in the summer after her first menstruation, and it runs four days. In it the girl is not merely honored. For those four days she is White Painted Woman. Sponsored by a godmother who takes on her care and instruction, and sung over by a medicine person whose songs run through the days, she is blessed with cattail pollen — the yellow pollen that stands, across this whole religious world, for fertility and blessing and life — and through the songs and the pollen and the molding of her body she takes on the strength, the even temper, the prosperity, and the long life of the first mother. The Mescalero know the ceremony’s central figure as Isanaklesh; the Chiricahua as Esdzanadehe; the shape is one across the divisions. When the four days are done, the girl carries the blessing she has become back to the whole community — she has been the mother, and the mother’s power stays with her.

Described here only at that public distance, na’ii’ees is the living heart of the faith. It is the point where the three meet: the girl, the Gaan who dance on the last night, and White Painted Woman whom the girl has become. What the interior of the ceremony holds — the exact order of the songs, the words sung over the girl, the knowledge passed between godmother and initiate — is kept by the people who keep the ceremony, and it is not set down here. The outline above is the outline that has long been public; the rest belongs to the tradition. And the ceremony is not a thing recalled from a vanished past. It is danced now, every year, on the Apache reservations of Arizona and New Mexico, and a girl still becomes the first mother on the fourth morning.

The wars

American memory reaches the Apache first, and often only, through the wars of the nineteenth century — and that record is exact, and it is sober. As the United States pressed into the Southwest after the war with Mexico in 1846, Apache bands fought a long resistance, band by band, leader by leader, across four decades of raid, campaign, treaty, and betrayal.

Mangas Coloradas — Red Sleeves — led the Chihenne, the Warm Springs or Mimbreño band, after the killing of the previous chief in 1837 for bounty, and became the principal figure of the central Apaches. His daughter, Dos-teh-seh, married the Chokonen Chiricahua leader Cochise, binding the two bands by marriage. Cochise had kept an uneasy peace until the Bascom Affair of 1861, when a young army officer at Apache Pass wrongly accused him of a kidnapping, tried to seize him under a flag of truce, and drove him — after he cut his way out of a tent — into open war. He fought for roughly eleven years. He made peace at last, and he died on his reservation on June 8, 1874. His people buried him in secret in the rocks of the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona, at a place now called Cochise Stronghold; only they and the agent Tom Jeffords knew the spot, and they never told it.

Sunset over the Dragoon Mountains of southeastern Arizona — the granite refuge now called Cochise Stronghold, where the Chiricahua leader was buried in secret in 1874. Mia & Steve Mestdagh, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Mescalero were swept early into the same machinery that took the Diné. Held at Bosque Redondo — the internment ground at Fort Sumner on the Pecos in eastern New Mexico — from 1863, they were penned there alongside the thousands of Navajo who were force-marched to the same barren flat on the Long Walk of 1864. Drought, frost, insects, and cut rations destroyed what crops they could raise, and on the night of November 3, 1865, close to three hundred and fifty Mescalero slipped away in a single planned exodus, leaving a handful behind to tend the fires and keep up the look of an ordinary camp. They scattered to frustrate pursuit, and they made their way back toward their own mountains. They did not gain a reservation on the Sierra Blanca of south-central New Mexico until it was set by executive order on May 27, 1873. The full weight of the Long Walk and of Bosque Redondo belongs to the account of the Diné, whose people bore the largest share of it; what marks the Apache record is that the Mescalero were held on the same ground, and got themselves out.

Victorio led the Warm Springs Chihenne in the war that carries his name. From September 1879, refusing to be confined to a reservation not his own, he led a band that never numbered more than two hundred fighting men in a running war across the mountains and deserts of New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico. It ended on October 14, 1880, when he and his people were surrounded at Tres Castillos in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, low on ammunition, and were killed or captured by soldiers of the Mexican army under Colonel Joaquín Terrazas.

Last came Geronimo. His name in his own tongue was Goyaałé, “the one who yawns”; he was born on June 16, 1829, into the Bedonkohe band, and he was a medicine man and a war leader, though never a chief. After the Mexican killing of his mother, his wife, and his children early in his life, he fought the Mexicans and then the Americans with a ferocity that made his name a byword far beyond his own country. His final surrender, on September 4, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in southeastern Arizona, closed the Apache wars. What followed was not peace but captivity: he and his people were carried off as prisoners of war — first to Florida, then to Alabama, then to Fort Sill in Oklahoma — and held as prisoners for twenty-seven years. Geronimo never saw his homeland again. He died still a prisoner, of pneumonia, at the Fort Sill hospital on February 17, 1909, and was buried in the Apache prisoner-of-war cemetery there.

Geronimo (Goyaałé), the Bedonkohe medicine man and war leader, in 1887 — the year after his final surrender. Photograph by Ben Wittick (1845–1903), National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A living people

The wars are the part of the record the outside remembers, and they close in imprisonment and loss. But they are not the end of the Nde, because the Nde did not end. They are a living people, present tense, and the tally makes the point plainly: some 194,715 people identified themselves as Apache in the 2021 American Community Survey, organized today in nine federally recognized tribes across Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas — the Western Apache on the reservations of Arizona, the Mescalero and Jicarilla in New Mexico, the descendants of Geronimo’s people among the Fort Sill Apache and the Chiricahua who returned to Mescalero, the Lipan, the Plains Apache. The divisions that spread across the southern deserts four centuries ago are still named, and still peopled.

The ceremonies came through as well. The assimilation era set itself against exactly this — the federal policy that ran from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth suppressed Native ceremonial practice, and much of the Apache religious life was driven out of official sight and carried on in spite of the law. It was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that such practice was given full protection in United States law. The ceremonies survived the suppression and are strong now. The Sunrise Ceremony is danced each summer, and a girl becomes White Painted Woman on the fourth morning. The Gaan still come out of the dark to the fire, crowned and hooded, to heal and to guard the camp. The pollen is still yellow, and it still means what it has always meant.

Everything the outside knows of this it knows at a remove. The ethnographic record of the Apache — the reports, the photographs, the transcriptions — was made mostly by outsiders looking in, and it must be read for its lens: for what a visitor could see and what he could not, for what was shared with him under conditions he may not have honored, and for the older habit of calling a coherent sacred world by names that diminished it. That record has its uses, and it is used here. But it sits beside, and always second to, what the Nde hold and carry themselves — the sacred history that is theirs to tell, and the ceremonies that are theirs to keep. The Mountain Spirits step out of the rock and into the firelight, and the people who watch them know exactly who has come.

→ Related: The Dine · The Hopi · Changing Woman · The Holy People · Spider Woman · The Hero Twins · Talking God · Canyon De Chelly · Shiprock · Mount Taylor · The San Francisco Peaks