Dr. Paul Conrad is an Assistant Professor of Native American history in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Arlington. He is particularly interested in the lives of ordinary people as they crossed borders, navigated intercultural encounters, and negotiated and shaped colonialism and empire in the past and present. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from such organizations as the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Association, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.
Fronteras: Congratulations on the publication of your book, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival, published by University of Pennsylvania Press. Before we discuss the book, can you talk a little bit about the term “Apache?” We tend to think of the Native peoples of the Southwest as having distinct tribal identities. That’s clearly an oversimplification. How do you define the people you examine in Apache Diaspora?
Dr. Paul Conrad: Of course! I often here people talk about “the” Apache, “the” Comanche, and so on. To do so is problematic. First, most tribal names familiar to readers of this newsletter are what we call exonyms—terms outsiders applied to a group, rather than that group’s name for itself in its own language. Such terms are also often derogatory, meaning something along the lines of “enemy,” or “people who fight all the time,” in the case of Apache and Comanche, for example.
While people sometimes say that Apaches called themselves Ndé, “the people,” this is actually also an oversimplification, because Apaches did not have a sense of themselves as belonging to the same collective people or nation, either historically or in the present. So-called “Apaches,” like many Native peoples, generally understood themselves in closer-knit terms based on the places they lived and who they were related to: “Cúelcahén Ndé,” People of the Tall Grass, for example.
So why do I use the term “Apache” in my book? One of my key arguments is that Apache histories became interconnected through colonialism. The very term “Apache” was ascribed to peoples that saw themselves as distinct by colonizing powers such as the Spanish to justify waging war, enslaving, or forcibly removing them from their homelands. The fact that outsiders often treated those they deemed to be “Apaches” as one nation thus was historically influential even if it was inaccurate. This wasn’t unique to the Spanish, who were often more nuanced in their understandings of Indigenous peoples than their successors. When one U.S. general was sent to establish reservations for Apaches in the Southwest in the 1870s, for example, he reported back to his superiors that it had taken him months to learn that “the” Apache were not in fact one tribe, though the policy he was tasked with enacting had assumed this to be the case.
One last thought. The task of writing history is always an act of translation. While I very much respect historians that have made a different decision, I decided to use terms most of my readers (including contemporary Apache people) are familiar with, even if I also tried to make clear whenever possible the historical self-identifications of the people I was writing about. I was influenced in this decision by the fact that the very term “Apache,” like “Indian,” often became meaningful for Native people themselves.
“My aim in the book is not to say that Apaches did not fight against empires or nation-states, but rather to explain more fully what they were fighting for, and the human costs of their centuries-long struggle for autonomy.“
Fronteras: The term “diaspora” isn’t the first word that comes to mind for most Americans when they think of Apaches. Obviously, you believe they should. Why?
Dr. Paul Conrad: I think the first word that comes to mind for many Americans is “Geronimo.” For people that have some idea about Apaches, they often think of famous men like him and about raiding and warfare. I’ve also learned to be careful about assuming that people necessarily have any sense of Apache history already, though.
My aim in the book is not to say that Apaches did not fight against empires or nation-states, but rather to explain more fully what they were fighting for, and the human costs of their centuries-long struggle for autonomy. To do so requires making sense of the fact that in the context of colonialism, Apaches frequently faced long-distance forced migrations that scattered them from Canada to Cuba. To understand Apache history requires making sense of how and why those displacements happened and what they meant for those sent away from their kin and homeland. It also means understanding that Apaches who managed to remain in the Southwest were also impacted by the frequent loss of their loved ones and adapted their politics and survival strategies accordingly. They strove to recover kin whenever possible and also to make alliances to protect their communities and retaliate against those who targeted them. Resistance and diaspora went hand in hand.
With this said, I should note that I long shied away from using the term “diaspora,” even if I was very much influenced by scholarship on diaspora and migration. It’s not a term in common usage among contemporary Apaches or among Americans more generally. Even now, my own mother trips up over the word every time she mentions the title. Ultimately, though, I decided it was the term that best expressed what I was finding through my research and I embraced it.
Fronteras: Historians have tended to follow two very different narrative arcs when they talk about Native American encounters with Hispanos and Anglos in the Southwest. On the one hand, it’s a story of conquest and domination. More recently, historians have tended to emphasize Native American agency and persistence. Your book seems to straddle the two. Is that a fair characterization?
Dr. Paul Conrad: Yes, I think that’s fair. When I’m teaching, I often hear myself say the words, “well, it’s complicated,” when answering a student’s question. This can feel like a dodge, but the reality is that history is complicated, and I think that it’s essential to both highlight the destructiveness of colonialism and also Native agency and ingenuity that made possible their survival. I very much admire scholars that have focused on Native power. The reality is that Indigenous people did control the majority of the territory of North America well into the 19th century. But there has also been a degree of romance to that scholarship that I think can be misleading. In the case of Apaches, for example, continued control of their homelands came at the cost of thousands of their kin being killed, captured, and shipped off into diaspora because of confrontations with imperial foes. I’m not saying they should not have resisted, to be clear, but I do think the costs of colonialism and resistance to it need to be made clear.
“From the very beginning of my research one of the things I was most interested in was trying to recover people’s experiences. One of my most exciting moments in archives in Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. was whenever I found a firsthand account from a Native person.”
Fronteras: The voices of indigenous actors are all too often absent from even the most scholarly studies of Native Americans. Your book, however, does a terrific job recovering what you call their “fantastic and terrible stories.” Can you discuss one story you found that helps us to better understand the Apache experience?
Dr. Paul Conrad: From the very beginning of my research one of the things I was most interested in was trying to recover people’s experiences. One of my most exciting moments in archives in Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. was whenever I found a firsthand account from a Native person. One that has stuck with me is an interview that U.S. army officers conducted with an Apache woman who had escaped incarceration in northern Mexico in 1884. Her Apache name was Taayzslath, but she was known to outsiders as Mañanita. She had been among a group of 23 Apaches captured in Chihuahua after their families had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in flight from poor conditions on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona. The group of captives included eleven children. Mañanita explained in the interview that while Mexican officials separated the children from their mothers, they brought them to visit them in the jail in Chihuahua City every eight days. The children “could not tell us where they were kept or how they were getting along,” she explained, “because they were too small to know anything about the city.” On one occasion, officials allowed her to stay overnight at the home of the family where her daughter was being kept because the girl was “so low-spirited that she would not eat or drink and did nothing but cry.” In the middle of the night, Mañanita escaped and headed north back towards Arizona, though she had not been able to take her daughter with her. She lived on what she could find, “herbs, roots, berries.” At last, after forty-four days travel, she located the camp of her husband on the San Carlos reservation. She pleaded with U.S. military officials to help her obtain the release of her daughter, sister, and nephew, among other kin. What do I make of all of this? This is one of many such stories of diaspora—of scattering and return—in Apache history. I’m struck by flights across national borders for safety, and the palpable pain of parents and children separated from each other. More than anything, though, I hope people will read my book and remember stories like Mañanita’s, and maybe focus a little bit less on those of people like her husband, Geronimo.
Fronteras: Can you tell us a little bit about your next book project?
Dr. Paul Conrad: I would love to. I’m currently in the early stages of a new project examining Indigenous interpreters in the North American West that emerged out of research for The Apache Diaspora. Omnipresent in the documentary record are the interpreters that helped make communication across linguistic and cultural divides in the region possible. Yet scholars of the North American West have often neglected such interpreters and treated their words as literal translations of the speech of the political leaders for whom they interpreted. My research to-date has suggested to me that these interpreters must be recognized as influential actors in of themselves. In some cases, this was due to their imperfect linguistic abilities and lack of any formal education, which could result in serious misunderstandings. Particularly in the case of Native interpreters, however, a different dynamic often came into play, as they were orators and diplomats valued for their proven skills of persuasion. I see this project as contributing to understandings of key themes in Native American history and the history of colonialism—such as cross-cultural communication and interaction—while also furthering my interest in centering Native cultural practices and historical actors in understandings of the history of the North American Southwest.
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