The Apache Diaspora

Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival

Paul Conrad

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812299540
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Across four centuries, Apache (Ndé) peoples in the North American West confronted enslavement and forced migration schemes intended to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate them. While many Indigenous groups in the Americas lived through similar histories, Apaches were especially affected owing to their mobility, resistance, and proximity to multiple imperial powers. Spanish, Comanche, Mexican, and American efforts scattered thousands of Apaches across the continent and into the Caribbean and deeply impacted Apache groups that managed to remain in the Southwest.Based on archival research in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, as well Apache oral histories, The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Paul Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal. As Conrad argues, diaspora was deeply influential not only to those displaced, but also to Apache groups who managed to remain in the West, influencing the strategies of mobility and resistance for which they would become famous around the world.Through its broad chronological and geographical scope, The Apache Diaspora sheds new light on a range of topics, including genocide and Indigenous survival, the intersection of Native and African diasporas, and the rise of deportation and incarceration as key strategies of state control. As Conrad demonstrates, centuries of enslavement, warfare, and forced migrations failed to bring a final solution to the supposed problem of Apache independence and mobility. Spain, Mexico, and the United States all overestimated their own power and underestimated Apache resistance and creativity. Yet in the process, both Native and colonial societies were changed.

PART I

Becoming Apache in Colonial North America

Having issued a definitive sentence of death in just war in this Kingdom against the entire nation of Apache Indians, and those that join with them, infidel, irreducible, common enemies of our Holy Catholic Faith and of all the Christian Indians of this Kingdom … they may be taken out of the Kingdom and distributed [to labor] for a period of 15 years … these in no time shall be allowed to return to the kingdom.

—Governor Don Juan Manso, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1658

The Indians said through the interpreters … that they were very sad and discouraged because of the repeated attacks which their enemies, the Utes and Comanches, make upon them. These had killed many of their nation and carried off their women and children captives until they now no longer knew where to go to live in safety.

—General Don Antonio Valverde Cosio at the Plains Ndé village of La Jicarilla, 1719

[She] told María to shut up, that she was an Apacha, which means a descendant of Apache Indians.

—Testimony in the Inquisition trial of Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, Mexico City, 1664

CHAPTER 1

The Palace

The Palace of the Governors is not a dramatic building. Its beige adobe walls and wood-beamed portal that face the central plaza of Santa Fe blend with the surrounding streetscape. The history of the palace, though, belies its sedate exterior. It was probably built around 1618 by Governor Juan de Eulate and, through the coming decades, was the site of much intrigue—affairs, charges of heresy, robberies—until the Pueblo Indians revolted against Spanish rule and kicked the colonists out of New Mexico in 1680. The Indians moved into the palace for the next decade, until they were evicted upon the return of the Spanish. The coming centuries would bring new administrators, new scandals, and new political machinations, including Mexican independence and the invasion of the United States.¹

It was not just the political elites of different empires and nations who called this building home, however. Hundreds of Native men, women, and children spent their lives in the Palace of the Governors and places like it in the years after Don Juan de Oñate established the enduring Spanish presence in New Mexico in 1598. While Oñate and others complained that they had not found the riches they had hoped for, others learned that the gold of New Mexico was its people, and the ability to exploit them was a means to build wealth. Some scandalized observers criticized New Mexico residents for treating Natives like slaves or livestock, but most colonists participated in and welcomed the forced labor of Native people, whether a single captive acquired in a military campaign or two dozen wrangled for export to the mining district of New Spain.²

Spaniards and Natives alike shared certain beliefs about who could justifiably be held in bondage and exploited, views that facilitated slave trading in seventeenth-century New Mexico. This traffic was rooted in both Indigenous and European traditions and justified by certain shared principles: enemies taken in war could be made slaves, and so could someone already held in bondage by someone else. The Spanish colonists added another category: rebels, or “apostates,” those deemed to have already been subjugated by or submitted to Spanish rule who subsequently rose up in rebellion or were found to be engaging in pagan rituals. While colonists had various potential sources for slaves, including Africans and Asians transported through the transoceanic slave trade and their descendants, the Native population surrounding New Mexico represented a particularly accessible supply.³

Yet not all residents of New Mexico and its surroundings were equally vulnerable. From a Spanish perspective, for example, not all Natives were equally enslaveable. Military conquest and religious instruction had turned some into insiders—Christian Indian vassals who were required to pay tribute and were often exploited for their labor but were also generally viewed as off limits for enslavement unless they rebelled. Pueblos who received religious instruction from gray-robed Franciscan missionaries were contrasted with the pagan “Apaches” who surrounded them. Though these latter groups actually engaged with colonial newcomers in varied ways, including trade, diplomacy, and intermarriage, the Spanish interest in slave labor led them to simplify and generalize. They argued that nearly all mobile Indigenous people who surrounded New Mexico were “Apaches,” despite the reality of ethnic and political diversity. Belying evidence to the contrary, they also argued that all Apaches were at war with the Christian Kingdom of New Mexico and thus could justifiably be enslaved. Various bands of Ndé (Apache) and Diné (Navajo) people thus became “an entire Apache nation,” common enemies along with “those that join with them” of the Spanish and “Christian Indians.” The actions of any one group could be mobilized as supporting evidence to justify campaigns to acquire slaves from all in a “Just War.”⁴

If such generalization helped assuage Spanish moral and legal concerns about a burgeoning slave trade, it also had enduring historical consequences. By the mid-seventeenth century, the very terms “Apache” and “slave” in Spanish New Mexico had become almost synonymous. This was merely the latest regional example of a ubiquitous phenomenon. The term “esclavo” (slave) had its origins in the reduction of conquered Slavic peoples to bondage in medieval times. After 1492, slavery became associated with new peoples in particular places: Carib in the Caribbean and Chichimec on the frontiers of central New Spain. This was not a phenomenon unique to Spanish colonization, as the association between “Pani” and slave in New France reveals.⁵

Though it took decades for the threat to be felt in full, New Mexico’s thirst for Indian slaves ultimately posed a significant challenge to Apache groups. Some turned to slaving in order to protect their own communities, offering up Ute, Wichita, or Pawnee enemies at trading fairs. Others experimented with appeals to Spanish missionaries, perhaps out of genuine interest but also probably in the hopes that it might shield them from slave raids. Communities felt the enduring loss of kin captured and taken into bondage.⁶

Yet displacement and exploitation were experienced most viscerally by the hundreds of Native men, women, and children transported to places like the Palace of the Governors. Here diverse Native people were categorized as Apache slaves, confronted by masters who sought not only to put them to work but also to turn them into valuable human commodities that might be used to pay off debts or sold in distant markets at a premium price. Though the context of their exploitation was particular, in other respects the experience of these residents of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe evoke slavery in other colonial contexts. Exploited people, alienated to a significant degree from the protection of kin and community and often confined within locked chambers, learned the language of their masters, engaged with new religious and cultural traditions, and sought to better their circumstances within colonial society or by fleeing beyond it. Told day after day they were “Apaches,” subjugated enemies, they adapted to new lives not of their own choosing by forging alliances with each other and with those more powerful than they. The diaspora that they faced is one that would endure for generations.⁷

Captivity, Mobility, and Colonization

Captivity, “isda’ nliiní”—“they have to live with them,” as the phrase in Apache translates into English—is an experience that predated the arrival of Europeans. Before the Spanish came, the ancestors of Apaches had migrated south from what is now Alaska and Canada, learning to hunt new game, to gather new plants, and to sow and harvest crops in new environments. Captives have always represented a useful way of learning things, of acquiring knowledge about a foreign place or people. Captive exchange fosters cultural change. Similarities in brush-covered homes, rituals, and origin stories in the very least suggest intimate contact between the Shoshonean people of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains and the ancestral Apaches who had traveled through their lands.⁸

A slave, “na’ l’ a,” was someone “sent around,” “he who is commanded.” One related Mescalero expression meant to “slave till death.”⁹ This was an experience that also predated the arrival of the Spanish in the Southwest. Native oral traditions and archeological evidence point to the physical domination of outsiders for their labor, especially at particular times and places, such as at Chaco Canyon. Ancestral Apaches, however, lacked the need or desire for slaves in any significant numbers. They had no large-scale public works projects or temples to build. Their own families provided sufficient labor to produce the hides, pemmican, baskets, or pottery that dog trains hauled to trade. By the time Spanish invaders began trekking north, the same was largely true for Apaches’ neighbors as well.¹⁰

Though war and captive taking were not the norm, they were always possible when drought made food scarce. In such times, corn was no longer traded willingly and might be taken by force instead. Descending out of the mountains to a Pueblo village, a small group of Apache men might snatch the young man guarding the storehouse rather than kill him, a choice that could lead to a counterattack, or facilitate a return to peaceful relations when he was offered up and returned to his people in exchange for something they desired later.¹¹

Following the potential life trajectory of such a captive provides a means to introduce Apache societies, their ways of life, and understandings of captivity and exploitation. Among Apaches, a captive would be put to use, forced to do menial work for a time—to tend the dogs and their halters used for transport or to bring water or wood. He might be traded or given to another group before he was given a name or before he even learned enough of their language to converse. If kept among them, he might seek to prove himself as a man. He would do the work assigned to him dutifully to earn trust, to show his loyalty and valor in hunting or against an enemy, to gain the favor of a family.¹²

A captive was no longer a captive when he became a relative, such as when he was adopted as someone’s son or married into the group, thus becoming obligated to others and obligating others to him. Kin to a new people, he might also still be recognized as kin to his natal community. This would be a further enticement to exchange resources or to provide aid in war in the future.¹³

Transformed into an Apache (Ndé) man, a former captive would join his wife’s extended family. This family joined together with other extended family households to form a local group under the leadership of a nantan (spokesman, headman). The Spanish later called these local groups rancherias, or small settlements. The local group, or gotah, was the heart of an Apache person’s world, encompassing the relationships—and obligations—that defined their humanity and ensured their survival.¹⁴

Captives would have learned that women and men each made distinctive contributions. Men mastered the manufacture and use of the bow, arrow, and war club for hunting and fighting, crafting them from the resources of the landscapes in which they lived, from rocky deserts to cool mountain forests. Women built homes, tended children and crops, and also knew all about the edible wild plants of the region. They gathered wild potatoes, walnuts, piñon nuts, grapes, mulberries, and mesquite beans. The century plant, or agave, was especially important for Apache groups residing in the southernmost lands. From it they obtained mescal crowns, which could be roasted overnight in pit ovens and eaten, or ground into a pulp and buried to ferment into a potent alcoholic beverage.¹⁵

Captives among Apaches would also have learned about the seasonal movement of their encampments—to harvest crops, gather and process plants, hunt, and trade. They would come to know that they were anchored to particular places, however. The names of local groups indicated as much: “ni-ki-ya-dé-ne” (people of the land that is their native land) was the name of one Apache local group in the nineteenth century. The names of the networks of local groups that together composed bands also usually referenced the lands in which they lived or the resources they harvested from them, for example: Cúelcahén Ndé, “people of the tall grass.”¹⁶

Only later, if they remained with Apaches for a longer time, would a captive have become familiar with their stories and belief in the creator, Ussen, who had made the universe, and White Painted Woman, mother of Child of the Water, who had then created people. Only later would they come to understand the power of the mountain spirits, or gahe, and ceremonies like the Crown Dance, in which masked dancers invoked the gahe, usually joined by a clown who entertained the crowd but also possessed curative power. Only later would they have come to fully understand the moral code that divided insiders from outsiders, sanctioning the taking of enemy property through raids designed to avoid pursuit and making it imperative to retaliate for loss of kin by mobilizing war parties.¹⁷

If captivity and mobility had played a role in the Apache past, they would play an even more important role in the future, beginning in the sixteenth century, when the Spanish began entering into Apache territories periodically. Although these expeditions failed to establish a permanent Spanish colony, they succeeded in taking a number of captives. The Chamuscado-Rodriguez Expedition of 1581 was not the first such incursion, and it was not atypical when its members seized a captive to serve as a guide from an Apache settlement they encountered on the banks of the Pecos River, in what is now southeastern New Mexico. After traveling further out onto the plains, they decided to return to the Rio Grande but now had to decide what to do with their captive. They freed him and gave him some meat, a parting gift for goodwill. They continued east without him very cautiously, however, “fearing that the natives might try to avenge the seizure of the guide.”¹⁸

A few years later, Spanish wrangling over “Querecho” captives, likely either Chihene Apaches or Navajos, sparked a series of raids and counterraids in the vicinity of Acoma Pueblo. One Spaniard, Francisco Barreto, had acquired a Querecho woman before she managed to escape back to her people. He was not willing to let her go easily. He and other members of his expedition devised a plan to orchestrate a surprise attack on her people’s settlement to recover her. It failed to recapture the woman but destroyed a field of corn.¹⁹

In another raid the next day, the Spanish destroyed another field of corn, captured a different woman, and negotiated a parley to exchange her for Barreto’s slave. They did not realize that the interpreter negotiating on their behalf—another captive woman—was secretly in collusion with the Apache/Navajo group in question. She convinced the group they could avoid having to give up any of their people. They dressed a woman up to look like Barreto’s slave, whom they had already sent back to her family. Meanwhile, they planned to surprise the Spaniards with a volley of arrows at the meeting arranged to exchange captives. In the chaos, they hoped that both the impersonator and the interpreter would be able to escape. Ultimately this plan succeeded in wounding Barreto but not in recovering the women. They remained among the Spanish, though the interpreter reportedly fought “like a lioness” for her freedom.²⁰

News of kidnapped guides and stolen women probably raised concerns among Apaches, but during the sixteenth century these Spanish expeditions retreated like flash floods that wreak havoc but recede quickly with the sun. Even the conquest of New Mexico led by Don Juan de Oñate, in 1598, did not have a significant impact on Apache groups initially. In this period they continued to draw upon the precedent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Fantastic and Terrible Stories
• Part I. Becoming Apache in Colonial North America
• Part II. Apaches, Nations, and Empires
• Epilogue. Strange Places Contrary to Their Natural Homelands
• Archival Sources and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments