This book is the unforgettable story of a Comanche woman who has become one of the most influential, inspired, and determined Native Americans in politics. LaDonna Harris was born on a Comanche allotment in southern Oklahoma in the 1930s. From her earliest years, she was immersed in a world of resistance, reform, and political action. As the wife of Senator Fred R. Harris, LaDonna was actively involved in political advising, campaigning, and networking. Not content to remain in the background, LaDonna became a well-known political figure in her own right, serving on the National Indian...

Many readers may be familiar with the wartime exploits of the Apaches; this book relates the untold story of their postwar fate. It tells of the Chiricahua Apaches 27 years of imprisonment as recorded in American dispatches, reports, and news items: documents that disclose the confusion, contradictions, and raw emotions expressed by government and military officials regarding the Apaches while revealing the shameful circumstances in which they were held. First removed from Arizona to Florida, the prisoners were eventually relocated to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where, in the...

This study is based on interviews with Chiriccahua Apache women who emphasize the importance of ritual storytelling in preserving their culture. Ceremonies such as the puberty ritual - still practised today - are described, and stories are told of women warrior ancestors. Although many books chronicle the Apache tribes, this study concentrates on the women.

From the author of Survival of the Spirit and Women of the Apache Nation, this book offers a new approach to American history, American Indian history and medical history. Focusing on the bow and arrow, it also covers such subjects as early barber-surgeons, field surgeons in the Old West, a how-to on scalping, pre-Columbian surgeons, Old World healers, and several cases of recovery from arrow wounds.

Arriving on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in 1948, Robert Ove, a naive young school teacher, began his first teaching job at Whitetail, unaware of the culture and history of his Chiricahua students, descendants of the great chief Geronimo. The Chiricahuas gradually accepted this well-intentioned outsider into their community and shared parts of their history and culture with him. Living among this reminder of America's past, Ove glimpsed a way of life that few non-Indians had been allowed to know. He saw Apache mothers still carrying their infants in cradleboards, grandmothers and mothers...

White Painted Woman appears in ancient myths of the Chiricahua Apaches as the virgin mother of the people and the origin of women's ceremonies. Such Chiricahua myths and traditions have closely prescribed the roles of women in relation to their husbands and children, to relatives and extended families, and to the band or tribe. One of those roles is to safeguard and hand on to the next generation the lore and customs of the people. In this way, Chiricahua women have served as safekeepers of a heritage that is now endangered. For more than a decade, H. Henrietta Stockel has moved with...

Wisdom from the past . . . hope for the future . . . In 1945 the hot wind from a nuclear explosion at Trinity Site on a nearby missile range raged across the Mescalero Apache Reservation in south-central New Mexico, killing hundreds of head of livestock and causing sickness among the descendants of some of the most famous Apache heroes in American history. In many ways, this disaster typified what these Apaches had come to expect from the federal government: attention was often accompanied by undesired results. Four thousand Apaches of the Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Lipan bands now live on...