Apache

Apache religious life addresses a giver of life, usually rendered Usen or Yusn, together with a class of mountain spirits, the Gaan, whose masked impersonators appear at ceremonies. Keith Basso's ethnography of the Cibecue Apache records a religion practised as a set of specific competences rather than as congregational worship. A person acquires a particular power, learns the songs and prayers that belong to it, and is called on when that power is needed. Diagnosis and curing belong to individuals holding such powers, and the relation between a person and a power is described as negotiated, and as refusable on either side.

The ceremony most often named from outside is the girls' puberty ceremony, held over four days, in which the initiate is identified with Changing Woman, the figure whose renewal orders the Apache world. It is public in the sense that a whole community attends, and private in that its conduct belongs to the family and to the singer engaged for it. The atlas describes what it is and does not set out its procedure.

Basso's later work on Western Apache place names shows how the same ordering runs through geography. Names are compressed narratives, and quoting one at a person is a recognised form of moral instruction, so that the country itself carries the ethical tradition. Removal from that country removes access to it, which is why land questions here are religious questions.

Apache is an outsiders' term covering several Southern Athabaskan peoples who reached the Southwest from the north, probably in the centuries before Spanish contact, and who never formed a single polity. The Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, Western Apache and Plains Apache each had their own bands and leaders, and the descendant communities today hold separate federally recognised governments in Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

The nineteenth century is the part of the history most often told, and it is usually told wrongly as a single war. Fighting against Spanish, then Mexican and then United States forces ran across generations, ended in the 1880s with the surrender of a small band under Geronimo, and was followed by the removal of the entire Chiricahua people, including men who had served as army scouts, to imprisonment in Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma for twenty seven years.

The live religious question is land. Oak Flat, called Chi'chil Bildagoteel, is a ceremonial site for several Western Apache communities and sits above a copper deposit transferred for mining by a rider attached to a defence bill in 2014. Apache Stronghold has litigated against the transfer; the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled against it in 2024, and further proceedings have followed. The atlas records the dispute as open, because it is.