From Fort Marion To Fort Sill

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 Their biographies are often poignant and revealing, and more than 60 previously unpublished photographs give a further glimpse of their humanity. This masterful documentary work, based on the unpublished research notes of former Fort Sill historian Gillett Griswold, at last brings to light the lives and experiences of hundreds of Chiricahua Apaches whose story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.

During the 1870s, Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, graphically recorded their responses to incarceration in drawings that conveyed both the present reality of imprisonment and nostalgic memories of home. The Silberman Collection is an unusually complete group of images that illustrate the artists' fascination with the world outside the southern plains, their living conditions and survival strategies as prisoners, and their reminiscences of pre-reservation life.

War Dance at Fort Marion tells the powerful story of Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho chiefs and warriors detained as prisoners of war by the U.S. Army. Held from 1875 until 1878 at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida, they participated in an educational experiment, initiated by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, as an alternative to standard imprisonment. This book, the first complete account of a unique cohort of Native peoples, brings their collective story to life and pays tribute to their individual talents and achievements. Throughout their incarceration, the Plains Indian leaders followed Pratt’s rules and met his educational demands even as they remained true to their own identities. Their actions spoke volumes about the sophistication of their cultural traditions, as they continued to practice Native dances and ceremonies and also illustrated their history and experiences in the now-famous ledger drawing books. Brad D. Lookingbill’s War Dance at Fort Marion draws on numerous primary documents, especially Native American accounts, to reconstruct the war prisoners’ story. The author shows that what began as Pratt’s effort to end the Indians’ resistance to their imposed exile transformed into a new vision to mold them into model citizens in mainstream American society, though this came at the cost of intense personal suffering and loss for the Indians.

Following Geronimo's final surrender, nearly 400 Chiricahua Apaches were uprooted and exiled from their San Carlos, Arizona home--moved first to Florida, then to Alabama and finally to Fort Sill Oklahoma. The author discusses the conflicting interests of the war and interior departments that held them hostage there, as well as the campaign for their release from military custody, their efforts to retain Fort Sill as their permanent home, and the outcome of the Chiricahua's 27-year captivity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Narratives of Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and Caddo prisoners taken to Ft. Marion, Florida, in 1875 interspersed with the author's own history and contemporary reflections of place and identity"--

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as “trouble causers,” arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners. Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy’s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners’ predicament.

A gripping story of the cultural resilience of the descendants of Geronimo and Cochise This book reveals the conflicting meanings of power held by the federal government and the Chiricahua Apaches throughout their history of interaction. When Geronimo and Naiche, son of Cochise, surrendered in 1886, their wartime exploits came to an end, but their real battle for survival was only beginning. Throughout their captivity in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma, Naiche kept alive Chiricahua spiritual power by embodying it in his beautiful hide paintings of the Girl’s Puberty Ceremony—a ritual at the very heart of tribal cultural life and spiritual strength. This narrative is a tribute to the Chiricahua people, who survive today, despite military efforts to annihilate them, government efforts to subjugate them, and social efforts to destroy their language and culture. Although federal policy makers brought to bear all the power at their command, they failed to eradicate Chiricahua spirit and identity nor to convince them that their lower status was just part of the natural social order. Naiche, along with many other Chiricahuas, believed in another kind of power. Although not known to have Power of his own in the Apache sense, Naiche’s paintings show that he believed in a vital source of spiritual strength. In a very real sense, his paintings were visual prayers for the continuation of the Chiricahua people. Accessible to individuals for many purposes, Power helped the Chiricahuas survive throughout their history. In this book, Griffin-Pierce explores Naiche’s artwork through the lens of current anthropological theory on power, hegemony, resistance, and subordination. As she retraces the Chiricahua odyssey during 27 years of incarceration and exile by visiting their internment sites, she reveals how the Power was with them throughout their dark period. As it was when the Chiricahua warriors and their families struggled to stay alive, Power remains the centering focus for contemporary Chiricahua Apaches. Although never allowed to return to their beloved homeland, not only are the Chiricahua Apaches surviving today, they are keeping their traditions alive and their culture strong and vital.

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.