The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival. By Paul Conrad

Abstract

I evaluate books on the ancestral Apache by the frequency and nature of markings I add to the margins. Having studied the southern Apache (ancestral Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache) and their Indigenous neighbors for four decades, I have pretty much read the full range of scholarly material on these groups. My markings may reflect disappointment at the lack of citation of previous work or alternatively will highlight something refreshingly new, either as source material or new way of interpretation. In this book I have markings of both types. In the first chapters especially, but also elsewhere throughout, my markings are of the first type. The disappointment is in the author’s discussion that fails to cite important literature on the origins of the southernmost Apache, distinctions in their life ways such as the lack of farming by the most mobile, differences in dialects between, for example, the Western Apache and the Chiricahua, and a range of other treatments published over the last several decades. This indicates a lack of penetration into the ample regional historical and archaeological literature, including “Gateways for Athabascan Migration to the American Southwest” (2012), From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest (2012), and “Platform-Cache Encampments” (2013). As a result of these types of issues, the book misses some of the important nuances that local scholars have labored to flush out through the decades, and perhaps that is why it seems that discussions flit between Apachean groups without regard to important differences.