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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad Kiara M. Vigil (bio) The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival paul conrad University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 366 pp. Paul Conrad's ambitious and powerful work The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival offers historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars in-depth discussions and analyses of "apacheness"—the various identities through which Native people, while living in diasporic relation to their Indigenous homelands, both defined themselves and contended with the ways they were being defined by [End Page 616] the colonial states of Mexico and the United States. As the title notes, this is a sweeping work covering four hundred years of history in order to highlight pre- as well as post-conquest experiences of Apache life in regard to captivity, mobility, and colonization. The chronological range of this work enables Conrad to contend with both Spanish and Euro-American efforts at colonization and the shifting geopolitical and cultural spaces of the USMexico borderlands. Although this work is clearly for historians of Native America and Indigenous Studies, its geographical reach will also make it of interest to scholars working in Latin American history and LatinX Studies. Given Conrad's ability to focus on the life stories and experiences of specific individuals and groups, the book will be of great interest to scholars working in American literature, as will his adept use of diaspora as both a theoretical framing device and lived-experience. Centering "diaspora" in these ways enables Conrad to add new dimensions to Native American and Indigenous Studies approaches and will also interest scholars from African American Studies, literary studies, and American Studies. Similarly, by focusing on experiences of Apache peoples in terms of mobility and also enslavement and other experiences of life in exile, there are ample opportunities for scholars working at the intersection of Afro-Native Studies to consult Conrad's work for Indigenous-centered responses to these ways of being and knowing in the world that might further enhance that growing field. Conrad's book opens with a specific example built around the story of Sam Kenoi, who had been taken prisoner by the United States at the age of eleven, when he was sent to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1898, a critical moment for many of his Apache kin who were experiencing life as prisoners of war, living in exile in Florida, Alabama, and later Oklahoma after being taken from their homes in Arizona. Kenoi's life in exile, his first time being exposed to the conditions of diaspora, was full of "tragedy and triumph," Conrad notes, as the settler state promised him a better life through the attainment of industrial skills and an education that would assimilate him into American culture and society, even if he had to leave all traces of his Native identity behind (1). As many scholars of Native history have pointed out, this period of assimilation and allotment marks the end of violent resistance by Native people to settler colonialism. In many ways it also represents a period of growth in the colonial state's infrastructure and reach, as the Indian Office (which would [End Page 617] later become the Bureau of Indian Affairs) created new ways to confine and limit the power of its Indigenous wards. Mobility, then—for all Native people, including those the state called "Apache"—became a new site of resistance and survival. Kenoi's particular story, Conrad asserts, points us to a broader portrait of Apache life and death across North America and the Caribbean. "As Kenoi knew so well, the history of colonialism for Native people was one of pain and loss, slavery and dispossession, but it was also a history of resistance, adaptation, and return. These fantastic and terrible stories are Apache history, Native history, all of our histories" (13). Drawing on the poetry of Joy Harjo, Conrad reminds readers of the core themes of American Indian history: "rootedness and displacement, pain and laughter, a seemingly impossible but true survival" (2). Conrad uses these themes to expand on the example of Kenoi's life, arguing that his...