Western Apache Erotic

Western Apache people call themselves Ndee, the People, and what holds them together is less a single tribal government than a web of matrilineal clans and local bands spread across the mountains, rims and river valleys of east-central Arizona. Twentieth-century ethnographers sorted them into five groups: White Mountain, Cibecue, San Carlos, Northern Tonto and Southern Tonto. The clans cut across those lines, many named for the place where the clan is said to have first farmed, and membership still matters for marriage and for who owes help at a ceremony. They are not Geronimo's people. That was the Chiricahua, and Western Apache men served in large numbers as Army scouts in the campaigns against them. The old economy paired small streamside plots of corn, beans and squash with hunting and a seasonal round of gathering: acorns, pinyon nuts, saguaro fruit, and agave hearts slow-roasted in rock-lined pits. The language is Southern Athabaskan, close kin to Navajo and Chiricahua and distant kin to languages of Alaska and western Canada, and it is still spoken at home on the Fort Apache and San Carlos reservations, more by grandparents than by teenagers. At Cibecue, fieldworkers documented how place-names carry compact stories, so that naming a spot on the land can remind someone how a person ought to behave. Silence carries weight too, expected when meeting strangers or facing someone whose mood is uncertain.

Lutheran missionaries arrived in the 1890s, and Catholic and evangelical churches followed, but ceremonial life never gave way. Early in the twentieth century Silas John Edwards founded the Holy Ground religion, complete with its own system of written prayer symbols. The best-known rite today is the Sunrise Dance, Na'ii'ees, a four-day coming-of-age ceremony in which a girl takes on the power of Changing Woman, is blessed with cattail pollen, and dances for hours while masked Crown Dancers, the Gaan, embody the Mountain Spirits. Sponsoring one takes months of preparation and a serious outlay of food and gifts. In 1871 the Camp Grant Massacre killed more than a hundred Aravaipa and Pinal Apache, most of them women and children, and in 1875 Tonto Apache and Yavapai were force-marched out of the Verde Valley to San Carlos. Today the White Mountain Apache Tribe governs the Fort Apache Reservation and owns a ski resort in its high country. The San Carlos Apache have turned Oak Flat, a ceremonial ground near Superior that Congress approved trading to a copper-mining company, into a national cause. Smaller communities at Payson and Camp Verde, the latter shared with the Yavapai, complete the map.