Jicarilla Apache Erotic

The Jicarilla call themselves Haisndayin, usually translated as "people who came from below." The name comes from their emergence story, not from any spot on a map. The name outsiders use is Spanish for "little basket," and most explain it as a nod to their coiled basketry. They are Apache, but their own kind of Apache. They were mountain people who went east to hunt buffalo on the plains and planted corn in river valleys. They also kept close ties with Taos and Picuris pueblos long before the United States arrived to tell them where to live.

Their old country spread across northeastern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Tradition marks its edges with four sacred rivers: the Rio Grande, the Chama, the Arkansas and the Canadian. The people divided into two bands. The Llaneros, the plains people, leaned east toward buffalo country. The Olleros, named by the Spanish for their pottery, held the mountain and river valleys and made shimmering micaceous clay pots. The split never produced separate tribes, and it still shows each September at Stone Lake. There, runners from the two sides meet in a ceremonial relay race tied to the harvest.

Jicarilla is a Southern Athabaskan language, closest to Lipan Apache and a more distant cousin of Navajo. It belongs to the Na-Dene family, which reaches north into Canada and Alaska. It is unrelated to the Tanoan languages of the nearby pueblos or to Ute in the north, and most fluent speakers today are older. Ceremonial life held on through everything. The Holiness Rite, often called the Bear Dance, is a healing ceremony, and girls still come of age through a feast held in their honor. Many families also attend Protestant or Catholic churches and don't see the two as rivals.

The nineteenth century was brutal. Jicarilla and Ute fighters defeated US dragoons at Cieneguilla in 1854. The campaigns that followed brought rations, unratified treaties and forced moves, including a failed relocation to the Mescalero reservation. A reservation of their own around Dulce came only in 1887, and tuberculosis tore through it in the early twentieth century. Oil and gas under that land changed things. In 1982 the tribe won Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe at the US Supreme Court, which confirmed its power to tax companies drilling on its territory. The ruling is still central to tribal control of natural resources. Today the Jicarilla Apache Nation runs its own government and a well-known trophy elk hunt, and its basket makers still practice the craft behind that old Spanish nickname.