Forgiving the Unforgivable

Abstract

Forgiving the Unforgivable Anna Badkhen (bio) oklahoma to texas On a Monday in early August I find myself spooning soil from Geronimo's grave at a prisoner-of-war cemetery in Oklahoma into a double Ziplock bag I bought at Target. I will carry this soil, by car and bus, to Guachochi, a town in the Sierra Madre Occidental. There, three Mexican sisters who have recently traced their ancestry to the famous Apache medicine man are about to hold a Ceremonia del Perdón—Ceremony of Forgiveness. The soil is my gift to them. Geronimo's grave is inside Fort Sill, a US Army base, so I must first stop at the visitor center to obtain a pass. The United States staked out Fort Sill in 1869, as a staging ground for punitive raids against the Native Americans who had survived deportation to Indian Territory, and even though the base dates back more than a hundred years, its visitor center bears the ubiquitous hallmarks of military efficiency that scream temporariness: insulated white metal wall panels mounted on a concrete foundation and facing a parking lot paved with ankle breaker gravel. I have seen structures and parking lots exactly like this on US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, which also were staging grounds for raids into quasi-occupied lands; most of those are now gone. Inside the visitor center, a jovial military policeman hands me Form 118a, Request for Unescorted Installation Access to Fort Sill. This is to ensure somehow that I am not a terrorist. I enter my full name, date of birth, driver's license number, social security number, gender, race. Under "purpose of visit" I check "other." Beef Creek Apache Cemetery was established in 1894, the year Geronimo and 341 other surrendered Chiricahua Apaches—adults and children—were transferred from a prisoner-of-war camp in Florida to Fort Sill under military escort. Here, in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, Geronimo's insurgency against white colonists came to an end. It had begun in 1851, when Mexican soldiers massacred more than a hundred women and children in Geronimo's encampment, among them his mother, his first wife, and all three of his young children. At Beef Creek, rows of identical upright headstones of white marble poke out of a manicured sloping field of green; think Arlington Cemetery minus the color guard. Among this impersonal personal misery, Geronimo's tomb stands [End Page 1] out, a pyramid of granite boulders perhaps five feet tall, topped with a stone eagle. A small grove of white hibiscus and fragrant abelia screens it slightly from the rest of the burial ground. Geronimo died technically of pneumonia but ultimately of the humiliation that accompanied his imprisonment. To be a POW of the United States back then was different than at Guantánamo: Apache prisoners could set up villages within the perimeter of the army base. They could marry and raise children and bury them. I check the stones. One couple lost three children in five years. Many grave markers have only one date. Some Apache prisoners got to travel outside the wire. With Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show, which advertised his cameo as "The Worst Indian That Ever Lived," Geronimo hawked his legend at county fairs. And he was one of six Native men to ride horseback in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade through the streets of Washington, DC, in 1901. When someone asked Roosevelt why he chose this "greatest single-handed murderer in American history" to join his parade, the president replied, "I wanted to give the people a good show." To the left of Geronimo's is the grave of the sixth of his nine wives, Zi-Yeh, who died in 1904 at the age of thirty-five, of tuberculosis. To the right, the grave of their daughter Eva Geronimo Godeley, who was forced to attend one of the Indian boarding schools the US government had created to strip Native children of their roots; her school was almost two hundred miles away. She was twenty-one when she died, in 1911. Eva's daughter, Evaline, died at birth the year previous; she is buried here, too. Geronimo was...