Apaches in Unexpected Places

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Apaches in Unexpected Places
• Maurice Crandall (bio)

Paul Conrad, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 366 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95.

In the interest of full disclosure, this essay has taken me far too long to complete (the better part of two years). I’ve made abortive attempts at writing this essay no fewer than three times. During the writing process, I switched institutions and moved my family from one corner of the United States to another. Even more so, as a Dilzhe’e (“The Hunters,” commonly known as “Tonto”) Apache and member of the Yua’né clan (“Over the Rim People”), I have felt the weighty responsibility to review this work carefully and thoughtfully. It is not often that books come along that so powerfully engage with central elements of the Apache experience, and Paul Conrad’s The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival is clearly one such work. The questions at the heart of Conrad’s book are these: “How does one exist in a world that does not want you to exist as you are? How does one survive that which so many are not surviving? How does one start over in a foreign land or on land made foreign by colonialism?” (pp. 1–2) Conrad has attempted to answer those questions through the lens of diaspora, while utilizing as many Apache voices as he can locate in the archive.

For starters, diaspora is an interesting choice for an overarching framework. Conrad admits that he struggled to find what felt like the right term to recount the Apache experience with colonialism. For him, survival/survivance, resistance, displacement, even genocide, are all important concepts and part of the Apache experience, but fall short. Previous frameworks, even those emanating from Apaches attempting to make sense of the recent past, have often stressed Apache mobility. For example, White Mountain Apache, Eva Tulene Watt, stated in her classic as-told-to autoethnography, Don’t Let the Sun Step over You: A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860–1975 (2004):

I don’t remember too much from when I was small. It seems like the family was always traveling, though, I remember that. That’s how it was in those days—people traveled all the time, looking for something to eat, looking for something to do. People went where they were needed. Wherever we went, it seems like we had [End Page 321] relatives that we stayed with. My grandmother Rose used to tell us, me and my brothers, “You have to know who your relatives are. If something happens, they’re the ones that will try to help you out.” So wherever we went, I guess that’s what we did—we got to know our relatives and learned about them.

Fittingly, Conrad carries this idea of Apache mobility further, with diaspora the most extreme example, largely characterized by what he terms “forced migration” (p. 6).

Conrad identifies five elements of diaspora: migration; collective memory of ancestral homelands; continued ties to that home; sustained group consciousness; and a sense of kinship with other members of the group living in different locations (pp. 2–3). According to Conrad, Apaches meet all five of these criterion, and the bulk of his book is spent explaining how they responded to a series of existential challenges—wars of extermination, being forcibly removed deep into the interior of Mexico and even Cuba, coercive labor in mines and public works projects, Indian boarding schools, and military imprisonment—by retaining an Apache identity, banding together with other Apaches, and building relationships with non-Apaches over several generations. While I was initially skeptical, Conrad ultimately convinced me of the general utility and appropriateness of diaspora as a way to frame the Apache experience, at least that of some Apaches (more on that later). Through this process, Conrad has illuminated the “fantastic and terrible” (p. 10) in his telling of Apache history.

Conrad has organized his book in essentially a chronological way, following Apaches across varied landscapes from the earliest Spanish encounters in colonial New Mexico through the latter part of the twentieth century. In many...