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 their permission and even blessing, she has observed and recorded aspects of their traditional culture that otherwise might be lost to history. Chiricahua Apache Women and Children, written in a familiar, personal style, focuses on the duties and experiences of historical Chiricahua Apache women and the significant influences they have exerted within the family and the tribe at large. After beginning with a look at creation myths, Stockel turns to family patterns and roles. She describes in detail the puberty ceremony she has repeatedly witnessed, a ceremony little known by those outside the band. Stockel looks also at the alternative lifestyle, also culturally prescribed, of four women warriors. She concludes with Mildred Cleghorn, a contemporary "woman warrior" who was chairperson of the Fort Sill Chiricahua/Warm Springs Apache Tribe in Oklahoma for nearly twenty years and who was also Stockel's close friend and "Apache mother". Beautifully complemented with thirty-two black-and-whiteillustrations of women, children, and family life, Chiricahua Apache Women and Children offers a vivid glimpse into traditional Chiricahua Apache women's lifestyles.

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 in 1886, infants who lived only a few days, children removed from families and sent to Indian boarding schools, and second-generation POWs who lived well into the twenty-first century. Their biographies are often poignant and revealing, and more than 60 previously unpublished photographs give a further glimpse of their humanity. This masterful documentary work, based on the unpublished research notes of former Fort Sill historian Gillett Griswold, at last brings to light the lives and experiences of hundreds of Chiricahua Apaches whose story has gone untold for too long.

After the United States imprisoned the Chiricahua Apaches in damp, humid regions of the East, contagious diseases devastated this group of Native Americans. Numerous books have been written about Geronimo's infamous band, but none have focused specifically on the Chiricahua Apaches' healing practices, or on the dramatic effects captivity had on the health of these first Americans. In clear and precise prose, the author addresses the medical maladies suffered by the Chiricahuas while they were incarcerated for nearly thirty years. By harvesting information from diverse and often obscure sources, Stockel describes the arrival of the Chiricahua Apaches in the Southwest, their use of natural medicines, and their reliance on cultural customs and sacred ceremonies to promote healing. She provides the reader with a thorough background on the most contagious ailments of the Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo frontier-folk, including popular and often amusing remedies. Records of "the white man's diseases" that assaulted the Chiricahua Apaches during their confinement have been painstakingly researched by the author from data at the imprisonment sites in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Her interviews with contemporary Chiricahua Apaches present their points of view about the experiences of their imprisoned ancestors and add an important dimension to the author's primary research accounts. Survival of the Spirit contains many previously unpublished photographs. Stockel's book, the first full-length study of the medical catastrophes endured by the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war, makes a significant contribution to Native American history.

Studies the mysteries surrounding traditional and contemporary Chirichua Apache culture.

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 Apaches’ 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 didn’t know what misery was until they dumped us in those swamps." Pulmonary disease took its toll—by 1894, disease had killed nearly half of the Apaches—and after years of pressure from Indian rights activists and bureaucratic haggling, Fort Sill in Oklahoma was chosen as a more healthful location. Here they were given the opportunity to farm, and here Geronimo, who eventually converted to Christianity, died of pneumonia in 1909 at the age of 89, still a prisoner of war. In the meantime, many Apache children had been removed to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for education—despite earlier promises that families would not be split up—and most eventually lost their cultural identity. Henrietta Stockel has combed public records to reconstruct this story of American shame and Native endurance. Unabashedly speaking on behalf of the Apaches, she has framed these documents within a readable narrative to show how exasperated public officials, eager to openly demonstrate their superiority over "savages" who had successfully challenged the American military for years, had little sympathy for the consequences of their confinement. Although the Chiricahua Apaches were not alone in losing their ancestral homelands, they were the only American Indians imprisoned for so long a time in an environment that continually exposed them to illnesses against which they had no immunity, devastating families even more than warfare. Shame and Endurance records events that ought never to be repeated—and tells a story that should never be forgotten.

Winner of a National Council on Public History Book Award On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O’odham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona’s territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of “phantom history” lurking beneath the Southwest’s official history, strangely present and absent at the same time. Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.

A band of Indians flee their reservation in 1885 Arizona in a bid to escape the tutelage of the United States. Led by the Apache warrior, Chiricahua, they head for Mexico, but their trek is doomed.