"Acoma" is from the Acoma and Spanish acoma, or acu, meaning "the place that always was" or "People of the White Rock." "Pueblo" is from the Spanish for "village." It refers both to a certain style of Southwest Indian architecture, characterized by multistory buildings made of stone and adobe (pueblo), and to the people themselves (Pueblo). The Rio Grande Pueblos are known as eastern Pueblos; Zuni, Hopi, and sometimes the Acomas and Lagunas are known as western Pueblos.
Acoma is located roughly 60 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The reservation consists of three main communities: Sky City (Old Acoma), Acomita, and McCartys. The traditional lands of Acoma Pueblo encompassed roughly 5 million acres. Of this, roughly 10 percent is included in the reservation. The pueblo's population was perhaps 5,000 in 1550. Acoma is a western Keresan dialect.
All Pueblo people are thought to be descended from Ancestral Puebloan, perhaps Mogollon, and several other ancient peoples. From them they learned architecture, farming, pottery, and basketry. Larger population groups became possible with effective agriculture and the development of ways to store food surpluses. In the context of a relatively stable existence, the people devoted increasing amounts of time and attention to religion, arts, and crafts.
In the 1200s, the Ancestral Puebloans abandoned their traditional canyon homelands in response to climatic and social upheavals. A century or two of migrations ensued, followed by the slow reemergence of their culture in the historic pueblos. Acoma
Pueblo was established at least 800 years ago.
Pueblo governments are derived from two traditions. Elements that are probably indigenous include the cacique, or head of the Pueblos, and the war captain, both chosen for life. These officials were intimately related to the religious structures of the pueblo and reflected the essentially theocratic nature of Pueblo government. A parallel but in most cases distinctly less powerful group of officials was imposed by the Spanish authorities. They generally dealt with external matters and included a governor, two lieutenant governors, and a council. In addition, the All Indian Pueblo Council, dating from 1598, began meeting again in the twentieth century.
One mechanism that works to keep Pueblo societies coherent is a pervasive aversion to individualistic behavior. Children were traditionally raised with gentle guidance and a minimum of discipline. Pueblo Indians were generally monogamous, and divorce was relatively rare. The dead were prepared ceremonially and quickly buried. A vigil of four days and nights was generally observed. Acoma Pueblo recognized roughly twenty matrilineal clans. The economy was basically a socialistic one, whereby labor was shared and produce was distributed equally. In modern times photography by outsiders is discouraged. At Acoma, a formal, traditional education system under the direction of the kiva headmen includes courses on human behavior, the human spirit, the human body, ethics, astrology, child psychology, oratory, history, music, and dance.
The Acoma pueblo featured three rows of three-story, apartment-style dwellings, facing south
Pottery in the interior of an Acoma dwelling, photographed in 1900. (National Archives and Records Administration)
On top of a 350-foot-high mesa. The lower levels were reserved mainly for storage. The buildings were constructed of adobe (earth-and-straw) bricks, with beams across the roof that were covered with poles, brush, and plaster. The roof of one level served as the floor of another. The levels were interconnected by ladders. As an aid to defense, the traditional design included no doors or windows; entry was through the roof. Baking ovens stood outside the buildings. Water was primarily obtained from two natural cisterns. Acoma also features seven rectangular pithouses, or kivas, that served as ceremonial chambers and clubhouses. The village plaza is the spiritual center of the
Village, where all the balanced forces of the world come together.
Before the Spanish arrived, people living at the Acoma pueblo ate primarily corn, beans, and squash. Mut-tze-nee was a favorite thin corn bread. They also grew sunflowers and tobacco and kept turkeys. They hunted deer, antelope, and rabbits and gathered a variety of wild seeds, nuts, berries, and other foods. Favorite foods as of circa 1700 included a blue corn drink, corn mush, pudding, wheat cake, corn balls, paper bread, peach-bark drink, flour bread, wild berries, and prickly pear fruit. The Acomas also raised herds of sheep, goats, horses, and donkeys after the Spanish introduced these animals into the region.
Irrigation techniques included dams and terraces. Pottery was an important technological adaptation, as were weaving baskets and weaving cotton and tanning leather. Farming implements were made of stone and wood. Corn was ground using manos and metates.
All Pueblos were part of extensive Native American trading networks that reached for 1,000 miles in every direction. With the arrival of other cultures, Pueblo Indians also traded with the Hispanic American villages and then U. S. traders. At fixed times during summer or fall, enemies declared truces so that trading fairs might be held. The largest and best-known was at Taos with the Comanches. Nomads exchanged slaves, buffalo hides, buckskins, jerked meat, and horses for agricultural and manufactured pueblo products. Pueblo Indians traded for shell and copper ornaments, turquoise, and macaw feathers. Trade along the Santa Fe Trail began in 1821. By the 1880s and the arrival of railroads, the Pueblos were dependent on many American-made goods, and the Native American manufacture of weaving and pottery declined and nearly died out.
Acoma Pueblo was first visited by non-Indians in 1539, probably by Estevan, an advance scout of the Coronado expedition. The following year the people welcomed Hernando de Alvarado, also a member of Coronado's group. In 1598, Juan de Onate arrived in the area with settlers, founding the colony of New Mexico. However, that year Acomas killed some of his representatives, for which they faced a Spanish reprisal in 1599: The Spanish killed 800 people, tortured and enslaved others, and destroyed the pueblo. The survivors rebuilt shortly thereafter and began a process of consolidating several farming sites near Acoma, which were later recognized by the Spanish as two villages.
Onate carried on the process, already underway, of subjugating the local Indians, forcing them to pay taxes in crops, cotton, and work and opening the door for Catholic missionaries to attack the Indians' religion. The Spanish renamed the pueblos with saints' names and began a program of church construction. At the same time, they introduced such new crops as peaches, wheat, and peppers into the region. In 1620, a royal decree created civil offices at each pueblo; silver-headed canes, many of which remain in use today, symbolized the governor's authority. In 1629, the Franciscan Juan Ramirez founded a mission at Acoma and built a huge church there.
The Pueblo Indians organized and instituted a general revolt against the Spanish in 1680. For years, the Spaniards had routinely tortured Indians for practicing traditional religion. They also forced the Indians to labor for them, sold them into slavery, and let Spaniard-owned cattle overgraze Indian land, a situation that eventually led to drought, erosion, and famine. Pope of San Juan Pueblo and other Pueblo religious leaders planned the revolt, sending runners carrying cords of maguey fibers to mark the day of rebellion. On August 10, 1680, a virtually united stand on the part of the Pueblos drove the Spanish from the region. The Indians killed many Spaniards but refrained from mass slaughter, allowing them to leave Santa Fe for El Paso.
The Pueblos experienced many changes during the following decades: Refugees established communities at Hopi, guerrilla fighting continued against the Spanish, and certain areas were abandoned. By the 1700s, excluding Hopi and Zuni, only Taos, Picuris, Isleta, and Acoma Pueblos had not changed locations since the arrival of the Spanish. Although Pueblo unity did not last, and Santa Fe was officially reconquered in 1692, Spanish rule was notably less severe from then on. Harsh forced labor all but ceased, and the Indians reached an understanding with the Church that enabled them to continue practicing their traditional religion. The Aco-mas resisted further Spanish contact for several years thereafter, then bowed to Spanish power and accepted a mission.
In general, the Pueblo eighteenth century was marked by smallpox epidemics and increased raiding by the Apache, Comanche, and Ute. Occasionally Pueblo Indians fought with the Spanish against the nomadic tribes. The people practiced their religion, more or less in secret. During this time, intermarriage and regular exchange between Hispanic villages and Pueblo Indians created a new New Mexican culture, neither Spanish nor strictly Indian, but rather a blend of the two.
Mexican "rule" in 1821 brought little immediate change to the Pueblos. The Mexicans stepped up what had been a gradual process of appropriating Indian land and water, and they allowed the nomadic tribes even greater latitude to raid. As the presence of the United States in the area grew, it attempted to enable the Pueblo Indians to continue their generally peaceful and self-sufficient ways and recognized Spanish land grants to the Pueblos. Land disputes with neighboring Laguna Pueblos were not settled so easily, however.
During the nineteenth century, the process of acculturation among Pueblo Indians quickened markedly. In an attempt to retain their identity, Pueblo Indians clung even more tenaciously to their heritage, which by now included elements of the once-hated Spanish culture and religion. By the 1880s, railroads had largely put an end to the traditional geographical isolation of the pueblos. Paradoxically, the U. S. decision to recognize Spanish land grants to the Pueblos denied the Indians certain rights granted under official treaties and left them particularly open to exploitation by squatters and thieves.
After a gap of more than 300 years, the All Indian Pueblo Council began to meet again in the 1920s, specifically in response to a congressional threat to appropriate Pueblo lands. Partly as a result of the Council's activities, Congress confirmed Pueblo title to their lands in 1924 by passing the Pueblo Lands Act. The United States also acknowledged its trust responsibilities in a series of legal decisions and other acts of Congress. Still, especially after 1900, Pueblo culture was increasingly threatened by highly intolerant Protestant evangelical missions and schools. The Bureau of Indian Affairs also weighed in on the subject of acculturation, forcing Indian children to leave their homes and attend culture-killing boarding schools. In 1922, most Acoma children had been sent away to such schools.
Following World War II, the issue of water rights took center stage at most pueblos. Also, the All Indian Pueblo Council succeeded in slowing the threat against Pueblo lands as well as religious persecution. Making crafts for the tourist trade became an important economic activity during this period. Since the late nineteenth century, but especially after the 1960s, Pueblos have had to cope with onslaughts by (mostly white) anthropologists and seekers of Indian spirituality. The region is also known for its major art colonies at Taos and Santa Fe.
See also All Indian Pueblo Council; Land, Identity and Ownership of, Land Rights; Pueblo Revolt; Water Rights.
"Chiricahua" is a name taken from their stronghold in the Chiricahua Mountains, in southeast Arizona, and "Apache" is from the Zuni word apachu, meaning "enemy." The Apaches call themselves Ndee, or Dine'e, "the People."
The Apaches arrived in the Southwest from present-day Canada around 1400. By the early 1600s, the Chiricahua were living in southwestern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, and northern Mexico. Late twentieth-century Chiricahua communities include the Mescalero Apache Reservation in southeastern New Mexico and a presence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Ancestors of today's Apaches began the trek from Asia to North America relatively late, in roughly 1000 BCE. Most members of this group, which included the Athapaskans, were known as the Nadene. By 1300, the group that was to become the southern Athapaskans (Apaches and Navajos) broke away from other Athapaskan tribes and began migrating southward, reaching the American Southwest around 1400 and crystallizing into separate cultural groups.
The Apaches generally filtered into the mountains surrounding the Pueblo-held valleys. This process ended in the 1600s and 1700s, with a final push southward and westward by the Comanches. Before contact with the Spanish, the Apaches were relatively peaceful and may have engaged in some agricultural activities.
Traditionally, the Chiricahuas knew little tribal cohesion and no central political authority. They were a tribe based on common territory, language, and culture. As much central authority as existed was found in the local group (thirty-five to 200 people), composed of extended families. Its leader, or chief, enjoyed authority because of personal qualities, such as persuasiveness and bravery, often in addition to ceremonial knowledge. (All the famous Apache "chiefs" were local group leaders.) Decisions were made by consensus. One of the chief's most important functions was to minimize friction among his people.
Local groups joined to form three Chiricahua bands. One was the eastern, or Cihene (Red Paint People), also known as Mimbrenos, Coppermine, Warm Spring, or Mogollon Apaches; the second was the central (Chokonen). The third band was the southern (Nednai, Enemy People, also called Pinery or Bronco Apaches), who lived mainly in Mexico. Some intermarriage occurred between bands.
Women were the anchors of the Apache family. Residence was matrilocal. Besides the political organization, society was divided into a number of
Matrilineal clans. Apaches in general respected the elderly and valued honesty above all other qualities.
Gender roles were clearly defined but not rigidly enforced. Women gathered, prepared, and stored food; built the home; carried water; gathered fuel; cared for the children; tanned, dyed, and decorated hides; and wove baskets. Men hunted, raided, and waged war. They also made weapons and were responsible for their horses and equipment. They also made musical instruments.
Girls as well as boys practiced with the bow and arrow, sling, and spear, and both learned to ride expertly. Although actual marriage ceremonies were brief or nonexistent, the people practiced a number of formal preliminary rituals, designed to strengthen the idea that a man owed deep allegiance to his future wife's family. Out of deference, married men were not permitted to speak directly with their mothers-in-law. Divorce was relatively easy to obtain.
All Apaches had a great fear of ghosts. Chiric-ahuas who died had their faces painted red and were buried the same day. Their personal possessions were burned or destroyed, including their house and favorite horse.
Chiricahua Apaches lived in dome-shaped brush wikiups, which they covered with hides in bad weather. The doors always faced east. Eastern Chiricahuas sometimes used teepees.
Chiricahua Apaches were primarily hunters and gatherers. They hunted buffalo prior to the sixteenth century, and afterward they continued to hunt deer, elk, antelope, rabbits, and other game. They did not eat bear, turkey, or fish.
Wild foods included agave; cactus shoots, flowers, and fruit; berries; seeds; nuts; honey; and wild onions, potatoes, and grasses. Nuts and seeds were often ground into flour. The agave or century plant was particularly important. Baking its base in rock-lined pits for several days yielded mescal, a sweet, nutritious food that was dried and stored.
Traditional farm crops were obtained from the Pueblos by trade or raid. The Chiricahuas, particularly the eastern band, also practiced some agriculture: Corn, for instance, was used to make tiswin, a weak beer.
The Chiricahuas traditionally wore buckskin clothing and moccasins. As they acquired cotton and later wool through trading and raiding, women tended to wear two-piece calico dresses, with long, full skirts and long blouses outside the skirt belts. They occasionally carried knives and later ammunition belts. Girls wore their hair over their ears, shaped around two willow hoops. Some older women wore their hair Plains-style, parted in the middle with two braids. Men's postcontact styles included calico shirts, muslin breechclouts with belts, cartridge belts, moccasins, and headbands.
Historically, the Apache made formidable enemies. Raiding was one of their most important activities. The main purpose of raiding, in which one sought to avoid contact with the enemy, was to gain wealth and honor. It differed fundamentally from warfare, which was undertaken primarily for revenge. Chiricahua Apaches did not generally take scalps, nor did they maintain formal warrior societies.
Thrust into contact with the Spanish, the Apaches, having acquired horses, began raiding Spanish and Pueblo settlements. This dynamic included trading as well as raiding and warfare, but the Spanish habit of selling captured Apaches into slavery led to Apache revenge and increasingly hostile conditions along the Spanish frontier. After 1821, the Mexicans put a bounty on Apache scalps, increasing Apache enmity and adding to the cycle of violence in the region.
Following the war between Mexico and the United States (1848), the Apaches, who did their part to bring misery to Mexico, assumed that the Americans would continue to be their allies. They were shocked and disgusted to learn that their lands were now considered part of the United States and that the Americans planned to "pacify" them. Having been squeezed by the Spanish, the Comanches, the Mexicans, and now miners, farmers, and other landgrabbers from the United States, the Apaches were more than ever determined to protect their way of life.
Some Chiricahua bands tried to stay out of trouble in the 1850s by planting fields under the supervision of federal agents, but when raiding resumed as a result of broken promises of food and protection, all sides were caught in a spiral of violence. Mangas Coloradas, a peaceful Mimbreno chief, turned to war after he was bullwhipped by U. S. miners in 1860. Cochise, son-in-law of Mangas Coloradas and leader of the central band of Chiricahua, began a guerrilla war along the Butterfield Trail after whites killed some of his men. Cochise began as central band war chief, but by force of personality and integrity he eventually claimed authority over other Chiricahua bands as well. Resistance continued until 1874, when Cochise, hungry and exhausted, surrendered. He
Could no longer control other Chiricahua bands, though, and their raiding continued.
Meanwhile, the U. S. policy of concentration via forced marches resulted in thousands of Chiricahua and western Apaches living on the crowded and disease-ridden San Carlos Reservation. There, a handful of dissident chiefs, confined in chains, held out for the old life of freedom and self-respect. Victorio fled in 1877, taking 350 Indians with him. He battled the army and Apache scouts until he was killed in Mexico in 1880. Nana, his successor, continued the raids until joining the Mescalero Reservation.
When soldiers killed a White Mountain Apache medicine man in 1881, Geronimo, a southern band shaman, led a group of Chiricahua away from San Carlos. In 1883 he agreed to return peacefully, but two years later, when soldiers banned the Indians' ceremonial drink tiswin, the Chiricahua fled again. In 1886 Geronimo surrendered in Mexico but on the way back to the United States escaped with thirty-six other Apaches. Their final surrender and the effective end of Apache military resistance came several months later: General Nelson Miles and one-quarter of the U. S. Army, plus Apache scouts, were needed to find and capture them. Geronimo regretted his surrender until his death as a prisoner of war in 1909.
As punishment for the freedom fighting activities of some of their group, the U. S. government sent all the Chiricahuas, including those who had been living peacefully at San Carlos, to prison in Alabama and Florida, where roughly one-quarter of them died over the following few years. Since the citizens of New Mexico opposed the return of the Apaches to San Carlos, the Chiricahuas who remained alive were sent in 1894 to the Kiowa Reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where they took up cattle raising and farming. In 1913, the Chiricahua were granted full freedom, although no reservation. Although some remained at Fort Sill, most moved back to New Mexico and life on the Mescalero Reservation.
Cattle raising and timber sales proved lucrative in the early twentieth century. Eventually, day schools replaced the hated, culture-killing boarding schools. By the late 1940s, every family had a house, and the economy at Mescalero was relatively strong. The reservation is managed cooperatively with the Mescalero and the Lipan Apaches.
See also Apache Wars; Geronimo: His Own Story; Mangas Coloradas; Relocation; Victorio.
See Apache, Western.
See Apache, Chiricahua.
"Jicarilla" is from the Spanish for "little basket" or "chocolate basket," and "Apache" is from the Zuni word apachu, meaning "enemy." The Apaches call themselves Ndee, or Dine'e, "the People." Jicaril-las spoke a dialect of southern Athapaskan, or Apachean.
Beginning around the nineteenth century, the Jicarillas recognized two distinct bands. The Llaneros lived in the eastern Sangre de Cristo Mountains in adobe houses with nearby farms. From the pueblos, especially Taos, they learned pottery and social and religious customs. The Olleros gave up plains life somewhat later. In addition to hunting buffalo, they had picked up some Plains technology, such as teepees, parfleches, and travois.
Jicarilla Apaches were primarily hunters and gatherers. They hunted buffalo into the seventeenth century, and afterward they continued to hunt deer, mountain sheep, elk, antelope, rabbits, and other game. They did not eat bear, turkey, or fish.
Wild foods included agave shoots, flowers, and fruit; berries; seeds; nuts; honey; and wild onions, potatoes, and grasses. Nuts and seeds were often ground into flour. The agave or century plant was particularly important. Baking its base in rock-lined pits for several days yielded mescal, a sweet, nutri-fious food that was dried and stored.
In the late 1600s they learned farming from the Pueblos, and by the early nineteenth century they farmed river bottomlands and built irrigation ditches, growing some corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, peas, wheat, and melons. When supplies ran low, crops were obtained from the Pueblos by trade or raid.
Following the war between Mexico and the United States (1848), the Apaches, who did their part to bring misery to Mexico, assumed that the Americans would continue as allies. They were shocked and disgusted to learn that their lands were now considered part of the United States and that the
Americans planned to "pacify" them. Having been squeezed by the Spanish, the Comanches, the Mexicans, and now miners, farmers, and other land-grabbers from the United States, the Apaches were more than ever determined to protect their way of life.
Increased military activity led to a treaty in 1851 that called for the cessation of hostilities on all sides and, in exchange for aid, bound the Jicarillas to remain at least fifty miles from all settlements. When U. S. promises of food and protection went unkept, however, the Jicarillas returned to raiding, and the region was plunged into a spiral of violence. Another treaty in 1855 created agencies: Options for the Jicarillas now included either begging for food at the agency or raiding.
In the 1860s, the tribe escaped confinement at the deadly Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner) only because the camp failed before they could be rounded up. By 1873 they were the only Southwestern tribe without an official reservation. At about this time, leaders of the two Jicarilla bands, the Olleros and the Llaneros, began consulting with each other, creating a new tribal consciousness. They sent a joint delegation to Washington, D. C., where they lobbied for a reservation, but in 1883 the tribe was moved to the Mescalero Reservation. Finding all the good land already taken, the Jicaril-las began shortly to drift back north to their old lands. In 1887, the government granted them an official home.
Unfortunately, the climate on the new reservation was unfavorable for farming, and in any case non-Indians owned whatever good arable land existed. This, plus the existence of individual allotments and centralized government control, slowed economic progress. The tribe sold some timber around the turn of the century. In 1903, the government established a boarding school in Dulce, the reservation capital, but turned it into a sanatorium in 1918 following a tuberculosis epidemic (90 percent of the Jicarillas had tuberculosis by 1914). The Dutch Reformed Church of America opened a school in 1921.
A major addition to the reservation in 1907 provided the Jicarillas with land suitable for herding sheep. They began this activity in the 1920s, and the tribe soon realized a profit. Livestock owners and the "progressive" proacculturation group tended to be Olleros, whereas the Llaneros were the farmers, the conservatives, and guardians of tradition. In the early 1930s bad weather wiped out most of the sheep herd, although by 1940 it had largely been rebuilt. Also by this time the people were generally healthy again, and acculturation quickened.
The postwar years saw a huge increase in tribal income from oil and gas development. With part of this money, the tribe bought out most non-Indian holdings on the reservation. Education levels, health, and morale all rose. In the 1950s, a decline in the sheep industry brought much of the population to live in Dulce. The tribe began per-capita payments at that time, partly to offset a lack of economic opportunities in Dulce. This action kept families going until more help arrived with the federal programs of the 1960s as well as an increasingly diversified economy. In the 1970s the tribe won $9 million in land claims.
See also Agriculture; Assimilation; Land, Identity and Ownership of, Land Rights; Relocation.
"Lipan" may mean "warriors of the mountains." "Apache" comes from the Zuni word apachu, meaning "enemy." The Apaches call themselves Ndee, or Dine'e, "the People." The Apaches arrived in the Southwest from present-day Canada around 1400. By about 1700, the Lipans were living on the south central Texas plains, as far south as Texas's Colorado River. Today they live on the Mescalero Reservation in southeast New Mexico.
Lipan Apaches generally lived in hide teepees. Occasionally, and especially when they were moved off the Plains, they used dome-shaped brush wiki-ups, which they covered with grass thatch or with hides in bad weather.
Lipan Apaches were primarily hunters and gatherers. They hunted buffalo into the eighteenth century, and afterward they continued to hunt deer, elk, antelope, rabbits, and other game. They ate few birds and did not eat fish, coyote, snake, or owl.
Wild foods included agave; cactus shoots, flowers, and fruit; berries; seeds; nuts; honey; and wild onions, potatoes, and grasses. Nuts and seeds were often ground into flour. The agave or century plant was particularly important. Baking its base in rock-lined pits for several days yielded mescal, a sweet, nutritious food that was dried and stored. The Lipans moved often to follow animal migrations as well as the ripening of their wild foods. Traditional farm crops were obtained by trade or raid and by practicing some agriculture.
By about 1700 the Lipans had become separated from the Jicarillas and had migrated into the central and south Texas plains. They had also acquired horses and had become expert buffalo hunters and raiders of the western Plains from Kansas to Mexico. Caddoan villages felt the wrath of Lipan raiders and slavers until they acquired guns from French traders and were able to drive the Lipan back into Texas.
A Lipan request for Spanish protection against the Comanches, who were pressing them from the north and east, resulted in the establishment of a mission in 1757, which the Comanches promptly destroyed the following year. By the late eighteenth century, the Comanches had forced most Lipans from Texas into New Mexico to join other Apache bands there.
By the early nineteenth century, the remaining Lipans had established good terms with the Texans, serving as their scouts, guides, and trading partners. Following the war between Mexico and the United States (1848), the Apaches, who did their part to bring misery to Mexico, assumed that the Americans would continue as allies. Instead, the Texans adopted an extermination policy, and the Lipans who escaped went to live in Mexico. In the late 1870s, some Lipans fought with the Chiricahua leader Victorio in his last stand against the United States and captivity. He and they were killed in Mexico.
In 1873, the U. S. government had granted the Mescalero Apaches a small reservation surrounding the Sierra Blanca Mountains. The Mescaleros absorbed Apache refugees and immigrants in hopes that the increased numbers would help them gain the elusive title to their land. In 1903, thirty-seven Mexican Lipan Apaches arrived, followed in 1913 by 187 Chiricahuas from Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Eventually, largely through intermarriage, these peoples evolved into the modern Mescalero community.
The United States engaged in extreme repression and all-out assault on traditional culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Cattle raising and timber sales proved lucrative in the early twentieth century. Eventually, day schools replaced the hated, culture-killing boarding schools. By the late 1940s, every family had a house, and the Mescalero economy was relatively stable. The reservation is managed cooperatively with the Mescalero and the Chir-icahua Apaches.
See also Apache Wars; Land, Identity and Ownership of, Land Rights; Victorio.
"Mescalero," from mescal, a food derived from the agave, or century, plant and an important part of their diet. "Apache" comes from the Zuni apachu, or "enemy." The Apaches call themselves Ndee, or Dine'e, "the People." Mescalero is a southern Atha-paskan, or Apachean dialect.
The Mescaleros traditionally lived from east of the Rio Grande to the Pecos and beyond to the west Texas plains. The Mescalero Reservation is located in southeast New Mexico, northeast of Alamogordo.
The Mescaleros had moved into southern New Mexico by the early sixteenth century and had acquired horses at about the same time. They and the Jicarillas raided (and traded with) Spanish settlements and pueblos on the Rio Grande, and after 1680 they controlled the Camino Real, the main route from El Paso to Santa Fe. They hunted buffalo on the southern Plains and were the de facto masters of the Plains.
Some Mescalero bands tried to stay out of trouble in the 1850s by planting fields under the supervision of federal agents, but, when raiding resumed owing to broken promises of food and protection, all sides became caught up in a spiral of violence. By 1863, General James Carleton forced them off their informal reservation in the Sierra Blanca Mountains to Fort Sumner, at Bosque Redondo, on the Pecos. It was a concentration camp: Living with 9,000 Nava-jos, the Mescalero endured overcrowding, disease, bad water, and starvation. Two years later they escaped into the mountains, where they lived for seven years.
In 1873, the U. S. government granted the Mescaleros a small reservation surrounding the Sierra Blanca, which included their traditional summer territory. This land made for a harsh home in winter, however, and in any case it was too small for hunting and gathering. That decade was marked by disease, white incursions, and violence directed against them. In 1880, in retaliation after some Mescaleros joined the Chiricahuas in their wars against the United States, the army placed the Mescaleros under martial law, disarmed them, and penned them in a corral filled deep with manure.
By the mid-1880s, gambling had replaced traditional raiding. Missionaries arrived, as did a day school, which the Indians hated for separating the children from their elders. Meanwhile, their population plummeted from 3,000 in 1850 to 431 in 1888. These were years marked by dependency, agent
Thievery, tyranny, disease, starvation and malnour-ishment, and uncertainty about the status of their reservation. Still, they survived the epidemics and efforts to steal their reservation by turning it into a national park (a move that proved unsuccessful in the long run).
The Mescaleros had absorbed Apache refugees and immigrants in hopes that increased numbers would help them gain the elusive title to their land. In 1883, the Jicarillas arrived, although they left by 1887. In 1903, thirty-seven Lipan Apaches arrived, followed in 1913 by 187 Chiricahuas from Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Eventually, largely through intermarriage, all evolved into the modern Mesca-lero community.
The United States engaged in extreme repression and all-out assault on traditional culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Cattle raising and timber sales proved lucrative in the early twentieth century. Eventually, day schools replaced the hated, culture-killing boarding schools. By the late 1940s, every family had a house, and the reservation economy was relatively strong. The reservation is managed cooperatively with the Chiricahua and the Lipan Apaches.
See also Apache Wars; Assimilation; Gambling;
Land, Identity and Ownership of, Land Rights.
See Apache, Chiricahua.
See Apache, Western.
See Apache, Western.
See Apache, Western.
The word "Apache" comes from the Zuni apachu, meaning "enemy." These people are properly known as Ndee, or Dine'e, "the People." "Western Apache" is a somewhat artificial designation given to an Apache tribe composed, with some exceptions, of bands living in Arizona. After 1850 these bands were primarily the San Carlos, White Mountain, Tonto (divided into northern and southern Tonto by anthropologists), and Cibecue. Apaches spoke southern Athapaskan, or Apachean.
Traditionally, western Apache bands covered nearly all but the northwesternmost quarter of Arizona. Their territory encompassed an extreme ecological diversity. Today's reservations include Fort Apache (Cibecue and White Mountain); San Carlos
An Apache hride. (National Archives and Records Administration)
(San Carlos); Camp Verde, including Clarkdale and Middle Verde (mostly Tonto, shared with the Yavapai); and Payson. Tontos also live in the Middle Verde, Clarkdale, and Payson communities.
Each of the western Apache tribes was considered autonomous and distinct, although intermarriage did occur. Tribal cohesion was minimal; there was no central political authority. A tribe was based on a common territory, language, and culture. Each was made up of between two and five bands of greatly varying size. Bands formed the most important Apache unit, which were in turn composed of local groups (thirty-five to 200 people in extended families, themselves led by a headman) headed by a chief. The chief lectured his followers before sunrise every morning on proper behavior. His authority was based on his personal qualities and perhaps his ceremonial knowledge. Decisions were made by consensus. One of the chief's most important functions was to mitigate friction among his people.
Having acquired the horse, the western Apache groups established a trading and raiding network with at least a dozen other groups, from the Hopi to Spanish settlements in Sonora. Although the Spanish policy of promoting docility by providing liquor to Native Americans worked moderately well from the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth, Apache raids remained ongoing into the nineteenth century. By 1830, the Apaches had drifted away from the presidios and resumed a full schedule of raiding.
Following the war between Mexico and the United States (1848), the Apaches, who did their part to bring misery to Mexico, assumed that the Americans would continue to be their allies. The Apaches were shocked and disgusted to learn that their lands were now considered part of the United States and that the Americans planned to "pacify" them. Having been squeezed by the Spanish, the Comanches, the Mexicans, and now miners, farmers, and other land-grabbers from the United States, some Apaches were more than ever determined to protect their way of life.
Throughout the 1850s most of the anti-Apache attention was centered on the Chiricahuas. The White Mountain and Cibecue people never fought to the finish with the Americans; out of range of the mines and settlements, they continued their lives of farming and hunting. When Fort Apache was created (1863), these people adapted peacefully to reservation life and went on to serve as scouts against the Tontos and Chiricahuas.
The Prescott gold strike (1863) heralded a cycle of raid, murder, and massacre for the Tonto. By 1865 a string of forts ringed their territory; they were defeated militarily eight years later. A massacre of San Carlos (Aravaipa) women in 1871 led to Grant's Peace Policy, a policy of concentration via forced marches. The result was that thousands of Chiric-ahuas and western Apaches lived on the crowded and disease-ridden San Carlos Reservation. There, a handful of dissident chiefs, confined in chains, held out for the old life of freedom and self-respect. The Chiricahua Victorio bolted with 350 followers and remained at large and raiding for years. More fled in 1881. By 1884 all had been killed or had returned, at least temporarily. In general, the western Apaches remained peaceful on the reservations while corrupt agents and settlers stole their best land.
The White Mountain people joined Fort Apache in 1879. As the various bands were spuriously lumped together, group distinctions as well as traditional identity began to break down. A man named Silas John Edwards established a significant and enduring religious cult at Fort Apache in the 1920s. Though not exactly Christian, it did substitute a new set of ceremonies in place of the old ones, contributing further to the general decline of traditional life. In 1918 the government issued cattle to the Apaches, and lumbering began in the 1920s. In 1930, the government informed the Apaches that a new dam (the Coolidge) would flood old San Carlos. All residents were forced out, and subsistence agriculture ended for them. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) provided them with cattle and let all Anglo leases expire; by the late 1930s these Indians were stock-herders.
See also Apache Wars; Horse, Economic Impact;
Victorio; Warfare, Intertribal.
See Apache, Western.
"Chemehuevi" is Yuman for "nose in the air like a roadrunner," referring to a running style of the original settlers of the Chemehuevi Valley. These Indians traditionally called themselves Nuwu, "the People,"
Or Tantdwats, "Southern Men." Chemehuevis spoke Paiute, a group of the Shoshonean branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.
Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these people have lived in the Cheme-huevi Valley, California (part of the Colorado River Valley east of Joshua Tree National Monument), and southwestern California. Their traditional territory was located in southwestern Utah, the Mojave Desert, and finally the Chemehuevi Valley, near the present Lake Havasu.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Chemehuevis and the Las Vegas band of southern Paiutes may have exterminated the Desert Mojaves. In the midnineteenth century, the Chemehuevis took over their territory as well as that of the Pee-Posh (Maricopa) Indians, who had been driven away by the Mojave Indians and who had gone to live on the Gila River. The Mojaves either actively or passively accepted the Chemehuevis. On the Colorado River, the Chemehuevis developed a crop-based economy and at the same time began to think of themselves as a distinct political entity. They also became strongly influenced in many ways by the Mojaves, notably in their interest in warfare and their religious beliefs. Some Chemehuevis raided miners in northern Arizona from the 1850s through the 1870s.
In 1865 the Chemehuevis and Mojaves fought each other. The Chemehuevis lost and retreated to the desert. Two years later, however, many returned to the California side of the Colorado River, where they resumed their lives on the Colorado River Reservation, established two years earlier. Many Chemehuevis also remained in and around the Chemehuevi Valley, combining wage labor and traditional subsistence. By the turn of the century, most Chemehuevis were settled on the Colorado River Reservation and among the Serranos and Cahuillas in southern California. In 1885, after a particularly severe drought, a group moved north to farm the Chemehuevi Valley. When a reservation was established there, in 1907, the tribal split became official.
The creation of Hoover Dam in 1935 and Parker Dam in 1939 spelled disaster for the Chemehuevis. The Hoover stopped the seasonal Colorado River floods, which the Chemehuevi people had depended on to nourish their crops. The Parker Dam created Lake Havasu, placing most of the Chemehuevi Valley under water. At that point, most Indians in the Chemehuevi Valley moved south again to join their people at the Colorado River Reservation. A government relocation camp operated on the reservation from 1942 to 1945.
By the end of World War II, 148 Navajo and Hopi families had also colonized the reservation; they, with the Chemehuevis and Mojaves, became known as the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT). As a result of a 1951 lawsuit, the Chemehuevis were awarded $900,000 by the United States for land taken to create Lake Havasu. The tribe was not formally constituted until they adopted a constitution in 1971. At about that time, some Chemehuevis began a slow return to the Chemehuevi Valley, where they remain today, operating a resort on their tribal lands.
Before their move to the Colorado River, the Chemehuevis had little tribal consciousness or government per se. They roamed their territory in many bands, each with a relatively powerless chief. They assumed a tribal identity toward the midnineteenth century. At the same time, the chief, often a generous, smart, wealthy man succeeded by his eldest son, assumed a stronger leadership role.
Following their move to the river, a diet based on foods obtained by hunting and by gathering desert resources was partially replaced by crops such as corn, beans, pumpkins, melons, grasses (semicultivated), and wheat. The Chemehuevis also ate fish from the river; game, including turtles, snakes, and lizards; and a variety of wild plants, such as mesquite beans (a staple) and pinon nuts.
See also Environment and Pollution; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions; Warfare, Intertribal.
"Cochiti" comes from the original Keresan via a Spanish transliteration. The word "pueblo" comes from the Spanish for "village." It refers both to a certain style of Southwest Indian architecture, characterized by multistory, apartment-like buildings made of adobe (pueblo), and to the people themselves (Pueblo). Rio Grande Pueblos are known as eastern Pueblos; Zunis, Hopis, and sometimes Aco-mas and Lagunas are known as western Pueblos. Cochiti is a Keresan dialect.
In the sixteenth century, Cochiti Pueblo featured two - to three-story, apartment-style dwellings as well as individual houses, facing south. The buildings were constructed of adobe (earth-and-straw) bricks, with beams across the roof that were covered with poles, brush, and plaster. Floors were of wood plank or packed earth. The roof of one level served as the floor of another. The levels were interconnected by ladders. As an aid to defense, the traditional design included no doors or windows; entry was through the roof. Pithouses, or kivas, served as ceremonial chambers and clubhouses. The village plaza, around which all dwellings were clustered, is the spiritual center of the village where all the balanced forces of the world come together.
Cochitis were farmers. Before the Spanish arrived, they ate primarily corn, beans, and pumpkins. They also grew sunflowers and tobacco. They hunted deer, mountain lion, bear, antelope, and rabbits. Occasionally, men from Cochiti and Santo Domingo pueblos would travel east to hunt buffalo. Cochitis also gathered a variety of wild seeds, nuts, berries, and other foods. The Spanish introduced wheat, alfalfa, sheep, cattle, and garden vegetables, which soon became part of the regular diet.
All Pueblos were part of extensive Native American trading networks. With the arrival of other cultures, Pueblo Indians also traded with the Hispanic American villages and then U. S. traders. At fixed times during summer or fall, enemies declared truces so that trading fairs might be held. The largest and best-known was at Taos with the Comanches. Nomads exchanged slaves, buffalo hides, buckskins, jerked meat, and horses for agricultural and manufactured pueblo products. Pueblo Indians traded for shell and copper ornaments, turquoise, and macaw feathers. Trade along the Santa Fe Trail began in 1821. By the 1880s and the arrival of railroads, the Pueblos were dependent on many American-made goods, and the Native American manufacture of weaving and pottery declined and nearly died out.
Though often depicted as passive and docile, most Pueblo groups regularly engaged in warfare. The great revolt of 1680 stands out as the major military action, but they also skirmished at other times with the Spanish and defended themselves against attackers such as Apaches, Comanches, and Utes. They also contributed auxiliary soldiers to provincial forces under Spain and Mexico, which were used mainly against raiding Indians and to protect merchant caravans on the Santa Fe Trail. After the raiding tribes began to pose less of a threat in the late nineteenth century, Pueblo military societies began to wither away, with the office of war captain changing to civil and religious functions.
See also Agriculture; All Indian Pueblo Council;
Pueblo Revolt.
"Cocopah" is from the Mojave kwi-ka-pah. The Coco-pahs called themselves Xawil Kunyavaei, "Those Who Live on the River." The traditional home of the Cocopahs is near the Colorado River delta. Presently, many tribal members live in northwestern Mexico and on a reservation near Somerton, Arizona. Coco-pahs spoke River Yuman, a member of the Hokan-Siouan language family.
The Cocopahs traditionally maintained little political leadership. They lived in small settlements, or rancherias, of ten to twelve families. Society was organized into clans, with each clan having a leader. Other quasi officials included dance and war leaders and funeral orators. Leadership was generally determined by experience, ability, and, as with everything else, dreams.
Originally concentrated in nine rancherias, the Cocopahs built two different types of homes. In winter they built conical, partially excavated (later four-post rectangular) structures, covering the walls of sticks with earth. In summer they built oval-domed, brush-covered huts. They also used a circular, unroofed ramada for dwelling and/or cooking and small granaries with elevated floors for storing food.
Corn, beans, black-eyed peas, pumpkins, and later melons were planted, usually in July. Gathered food, such as the seeds of wild saltgrass, roots, fruits, eggs, and especially mesquite, were also important, as was fish (such as mullet and bass) from the river and the Gulf of California. Wild game included deer, boar, and smaller animals. Much of the food was dried and stored for the winter. In general, the women gathered and cooked food, and the men hunted.
The Cocopahs planted seeds in holes rather than plowed rows in order to preserve topsoil. They used pottery (jars, seed-toasting trays), crude baskets, fire drills, vegetable-fiber fishing nets, clubs and bow and arrow for warfare, stone and wooden mortars, and stone and clamshell tools. Their musical instruments included a scraped and
Drummed basket, gourd rattles, and cane flutes and whistles. They also used small earthen dikes for irrigation.
Warfare united the Cocopahs. They observed formalized war patterns and respected special war leaders. They prepared for war by dreaming, fasting, and painting their bodies and underwent purification rituals upon their return. Traditional enemies included the Mojave and the Quechan; allied peoples included the O'odham, Pee-Posh, and Pai. Their weapons were the war club, bow and arrow, lance, and deerskin shield.
By 1540 the Mojave and Quechan Indians had forced them down the Colorado River, to a place where they farmed 50,000 acres of delta land, made rich by the annual spring floods. The Cocopahs encountered Spanish soldiers and travelers during the mid-sixteenth century but remained in place and relatively unaffected by contact with the Europeans until U. S. dams stopped the Colorado from flooding in the late nineteenth century.
In 1853, the Gadsden Treaty separated the four bands of Cocopahs: Two remained in Mexico, and two moved north near Somerton, Arizona. By the mid-1800s, with the cessation of warfare with their ancient enemies, the Quechans, the Cocopahs lost a certain sense of purpose. A generation of men obtained employment as river pilots and navigators along the Colorado River, whetting their appetite for American goods and foods. Riverboat traffic ended when the railroad reached Yuma in 1877. In 1905, an accidental diversion of the Colorado River (the Salton Sea debacle) led to the Cocopahs' final displacement. Lacking strong political, religious, or social leadership, they quickly fell further into disintegration and impoverishment.
mainly to the work of Frank Tehanna, the U. S. government established a reservation in 1917 for the Cocopahs and some Quechans and Pee-Posh. The government then almost completely abandoned them for the next sixty years. By the end of World War II, fewer than sixty Cocopahs remained on the desolate reservation; the rest lived elsewhere, generally in even worse poverty. In the 1960s, the tribe organized and won from the government electricity and improved housing, building their first tribal building and rewriting their constitution.
In 1986, the tribe received an additional 615 acres, now known as the North Reservation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the tribe made improvements in education as well as other social and cultural programs. That period also witnessed a revival of crafts such as beadwork and the development of fine arts.
See also Agriculture; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions; Warfare, Intertribal.
"Havasupai" is a name meaning "People of the Blue-Green Water." With the Hualapais, from whom they may be descended, they are also called the Pais (Pa'as) Indians ("the People"; Hualapais are western Pais, and Havasupais are eastern Pais). With the Hualapais and the Yavapais, the Havasupais are also Upland Yumans, in contrast to River Yumans such as the Mojaves and Quechans. The Havasupais spoke Upland Yuman, a member of the Hokan-Siouan language family.
Since approximately 1100, the Havasupais have lived at Cataract Canyon in the Grand Canyon as well as on the nearby upland plateaus.
The Havasupais probably descended from the prehistoric Cohoninas, a branch of the Hakataya culture. Thirteen bands of Pais originally hunted, farmed, and gathered in northwest Arizona along the Colorado River. By historic times, the Pais were divided into three subtribes: the Middle Mountain People; the Plateau People (including the Blue Water People, also called Cataract Canyon Band, who were ancestors of the Havasupais); and the Yavapai Fighters.
The Blue Water People were comfortable in an extreme range of elevations. They gathered desert plants from along the Colorado River at 1,800 feet and hunted on the upper slopes of the San Francisco peaks, their center of the world, at 12,000 feet.
Formal authority among the Havasupais was located in chiefs, hereditary in theory only, of ten local groups. Their only real power was to advise and persuade. The Havasupais held few councils; most issues were dealt with by men informally in the sweat lodge.
The Havasupais were individualists rather than band or tribe oriented. The family was the main unit of social organization. In place of a formal marriage ceremony, a man simply took up residence with a woman's family. The couple moved into their own home after they had a child. Women owned no
Property. Babies stayed mainly on basket cradle boards until they were old enough to walk. With some exceptions, work was roughly divided by gender.
In winter and summer, dwellings consisted of domed or conical wickiups of thatch and dirt over a pole frame. People also lived in rock shelters. Small domed lodges were used as sweat houses and clubhouses.
In Cataract Canyon the people grew corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. During the winter they lived on the surrounding plateau and ate game such as mountain lion and other cats, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, fowl, and rabbit, which were killed in communal hunting drives. Wild foods included pinon nuts, cactus and yucca fruits, agave hearts, mesquite beans, and wild honey.
Traditional implements included stone knives, bone tools, bows and arrows, clay pipes for smoking, and nets of yucca fiber. The Havasupais tilled their soil with sticks. Baskets and pottery were used for a number of purposes. Grinding was accomplished by means of a flat rock and rotary mortars.
The Havasupais often traded with the Hopis and other allied tribes, exchanging deerskins, baskets, salt, lima beans, and red hematite paint for food, pottery, and cloth. They also traded with tribes as far away as the Pacific Ocean.
Buckskin, worked by men, was the main clothing material. Women wore a two-part dress, with a yucca-fiber or textile belt around the waist, and trimmed with hoof tinklers. In the nineteenth century they began wearing ornamental shawls. Moccasins, when worn, were made with a high upper part wrapped around the calf. Men wore shirts, loincloths, leggings, headbands, and high-ankle moccasins. Personal decoration consisted of necklaces, earrings of Pueblo and Navajo shell and silver, and occasionally painted faces.
With the possible exception of Francisco Garces, in 1776, few if any Spanish or other outsiders disturbed them into the 1800s. Spanish influences did reach them, however, primarily in the form of horses, cloth, and fruit trees through trading partners such as the Hopis.
In the early 1800s, a trail was forged from the Rio Grande to California that led directly through Pai country. By around 1850, with invasions and treaty violations increasing, the Pais occasionally reacted with violence. When mines opened in their territory in 1863, they perceived the threat and readied for war. Unfortunately for them, the Hualapai War (1865-1869) came just as the Civil War ended. After their military defeat by the United States, some Pais served as army scouts against their old enemies, the Yavapais and the Tonto Apaches.
Although the Hualapais were to suffer deportation, the United States paid little attention to those who returned to their isolated homes. At this point the two tribes became increasingly distinct. Despite their remote location, Anglo encroachment eventually affected even the Havasupais, and an 1880 executive order established their reservation along Havasu Creek. The final designation in 1882 included just 518 acres in the canyon; the Havasu-pais also lost their traditional upland hunting and gathering grounds (some people continued to use the plateau in winter but were forced off in 1934, when the National Park Service destroyed their homes).
The Havasupais intensified farming on their little remaining land and began a wide-scale cultivation of peaches. In 1912 they purchased cattle. Severe epidemics in the early twentieth century reduced their population to just over 100. At the same time the Bureau of Indian Affairs, initially slow to move into the canyon, proceeded with a program of rapid acculturation. By the 1930s, Hava-supai economic independence had given way to a reliance on limited wage labor. Traditional political power declined as well, despite the creation in 1939 of a tribal council.
World History
