CHIRICAHUA APACHE HOMELAND IN THE BORDERLAND SOUTHWEST

Fort Bowie National Historic Site is located in Apache Pass, which separates the Dos Cabezas Mountains from the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. The fort, a strategic site in the U.S. relations with the Chiricahua Apache, closed as a military installation in 1894 and opened in 1964 as a historic site administered by the National Park Service. According to its official Web site, "Fort Bowie commemorates the bitter conflict between Chiricahua Apaches and the U.S. military--a lasting monument to the bravery and endurance of U.S. soldiers in paving the way for settlement and the taming of the western frontier. It provides insight into a 'clash of cultures,' a young nation in pursuit of 'manifest destiny,' and the hunter/gatherer society fighting to preserve its existence" (NPs 2012). Neither the official Web site nor the public display at the historic site mentions the Chiricahua Apache ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, Chiricahua Apache were part of this borderland before it was either Mexico or the United States. The region is a homeland for the Chiricahua through their historic occupation of distinct environments and by way of negotiation with neighboring peoples over some five centuries. The creation of the present U.S.-Mexico boundary in the mid-nineteenth century ignored the traditional territorial spaces of this native group. Chiricahua Apache land claims led to the creation of a short-lived reservation in the United States; no reserve for them has ever existed in Mexico during the modern era. In time the U.S. government removed the Chiricahua Apache from their reservation and other lands in Arizona and New Mexico. In this article I assess the historic and contemporary geography of the Chiricahua Apache and interpret the legacy of the changed borderland for them. I explore how the dominant societies on either side of the international boundary largely ignore regional identity and suggest that history is not merely a way to understand the past but also a strategy to construct the present. THEMATIC FRAMEWORK Attachment to place is part of a larger association that cultures have with a land; and that bond can hold deep sentiment and thereby be considered part of a culture's place and regional identity. Identity is a theme that has concerned historical and cultural geographers over many generations. It is particularly concerned with how people and place intertwine to create meaning that becomes recognized as a quality of distinctiveness, so that a people come to represent the place they have collectively forged but that also has shaped them. Two conceptual contexts frame my interpretation of Chiricahua Apache geography: place-naming and homeland. Historical perspective establishes a time and place of Chiricahua belonging to the borderland. I then focus my attention on the Chiricahua, their preferred ecological habitation, and how they interacted with their native neighbors and with Euro-Americans in the region. The narrative is constructed chiefly through secondary accounts distilled from the anthropological and historical literatures about the Chiricahua, supplemented with native accounts of pilgrimages to the lost homeland and contemporary efforts to reclaim it. William Bright documented Native American place-naming authoritatively (2004), and Thomas Thornton traced the method to early anthropological research, including Keith Basso's work with the Cibecue Apache (1997). Like earlier place-name studies, Basso found descriptive naming to far exceed other naming typologies--commemorative, for example--for Native Americans. Richly descriptive names for places illustrate the power of words to convey meaning about the landscape, creating a vision of a place in the mind of those who have never been there. Descriptive place-names are important as well to discourse and storytelling, for they arm a speaker with a place narrative that imparts how "Wisdom Sits in Places" (Basso 1996). …