Apache Odyssey

"A fascinating account of Apache history and ethnography. All the narratives have been carefully chosen to illustrate important facets of the Apache experience. Moreover, they make very interesting reading....This is a major contribution to both Apache history and to the history of the Southwest....The book should appeal to a very wide audience. It also should be well received by the Native American community. Indeh is oral history at its best."---R. David Edmunds, Utah Historical Quarterly

In 1933, famed anthropologist Morris Opler met a Mescalero Apache he called Chris and worked with him to record the man's life story, from the bloody Apache Wars into the reservation years of the mid-twentieth century. Chris's vivid recollections are enriched at strategic moments with crucial background information on Apache history and culture, supplied by Opler. Chris was born around 1880, the son of a Chiricahua man and a Mescalero woman. At the age of six, he and his family and other Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war and were relocated by the U.S. government to Florida and Alabama. Eventually settling on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Chris grew up expecting to become a shaman like his parents. Although Chris apprenticed as a shaman, his confidence in his healing ability waned after he was forced at the age of seventeen to attend federal government schools. Nonetheless, his interest in Mescalero religion, healing, and other traditional customs and beliefs remained, and that intimate knowledge of his people's world underscores and deepens the story of his own life.

This volume makes available the entire autobiographical account of an Apache man as a database for the subsequent narrative analyses. The life story reveals an individual who has experienced radical social changes, and his account provides clues for his struggles to make sense of what has happened to him as well as his attempts to prevent his life from falling apart. The reconstructive processes of his past reveal socio-collective frames, cultural themes and cultural styles of expression. The intended audience includes sociolinguists, narrative analysts, psycholinguists, conversation analysts, and cultural semanticists.

**2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award Silver Winner for Western Biographies and Memoirs** Two Native American leaders who left a lasting legacy, Geronimo and Sitting Bull. Most Americans and many people worldwide have heard these two famous names. Today, however, the general public knows little about the lives of these great leaders. During the second half of the nineteenth century when they opposed white intrusion and expansion into their territories, just the mention of their names could spark fear or anger. After they surrendered to the army and lived in captivity, they evoked curiosity and sympathy for the plight of the American Indian. Author Bill Markley offers a thoughtful and entertaining examination of these legendary lives in this new joint biography of these two great leaders. .

"A fascinating account of Apache history and ethnography. All the narratives have been carefully chosen to illustrate important facets of the Apache experience. Moreover, they make very interesting reading....This is a major contribution to both Apache history and to the history of the Southwest....The book should appeal to a very wide audience. It also should be well received by the Native American community. Indeh is oral history at its best."---R. David Edmunds, Utah Historical Quarterly

"These oral histories offer new versions--from Warm Springs, Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache--of events previously known only through descriptions left by non-Indians."--Cover.

From 1866 through 1886, the U.S. Army occupied southern Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to claim it for settlement by Americans. Through a postcolonial lens, Janne Lahti examines the army, its officers, their wives, and the enlisted men as agents of an American empire whose mission was to serve as a group of colonizers engaged in ideological as well as military, conquest. Cultural Construction of Empire explores the cultural and social representations of Native Americans, Hispanics, and frontiersmen constructed by the officers, enlisted men, and their dependents. By differentiating themselves from these “less civilized” groups, white military settlers engaged various cultural processes and practices to accrue and exercise power over colonized peoples and places for the sake of creating a more “civilized” environment for other settlers. Considering issues of class, place, and white ethnicity, Lahti shows that the army’s construction of empire took place not on the battlefield alone but also in representations of and social interactions in and among colonial places, peoples, settlements, and events, and in the domestic realm and daily life inside the army villages.