#Mescalero Apache

[arsnof]

Ruidoso and the surrounding area are engulfed in flames, including Mescalero Apache tribal land. Mass evacuation are underway and people are losing everything.

I've got a friend with Community Power New Mexico who is taking donations (we're giving a bed) and I'm wondering if any of y'all would be able to help?

I don't have an official donation link yet, but anything donated to me for the next couple of days, or until I can get an official link, will be going to them.

Link in pinned post. If anyone wants to buy some comics, 50% of any sale will also go to them.

[bayareabadboy]

Apache Tribe

Mescalero reservation

[punk-antisystem]

Tipis Apache Mescalero en un campamento, Nuevo México. Fotografía tomada por H. F. Robinson en 1906.

[hakaiika]

I, Hakaii'ka of the Mescalero, Ute, and Sámi, will do everything I can to support our cousins, the Maori, across the sea. We will not be erased nor have our rights stripped for the betterment of colonizers and capitalists. The New Zealand government should be ashamed for considering the re-evaluation of the treaty with Maori, and should they terminate or violate the treaty, let no gods or spirits have mercy upon them. Let Indigenous folk around the world stand united!

So for anyone who doesn’t keep up with nz politics, which i’m assuming is most of you, our new radical right government have decided one of their main aims of their term will be to re-interpret the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Treaty is an agreement between Maori and the Crown, now the NZ government. It is the founding document of new zealand and is recognised as a constitutional document today; it is the only treaty of its kind/time still honoured, and it is the steps we’ve taken through the Treaty to provide restitution and build an ongoing relationship with Maori and their iwi (tribes) that has allowed the relationship between Maori and the government to thrive where other indigenous groups have struggled to achieve recognition of their rights.

This is going to be entirely undone. Not only is this issue inflammatory and a threat to race relations in Aotearoa, leaked documents show the proposed “reinterpretation” wants to negate pretty much the entirety of the legal rights provided to Maori under the treaty. For example, the treaty article that guarantees land rights for Maori will be reinterpreted to guarantee land rights for “all New Zealanders”. Which means this article would be essentially meaningless for Maori.

By removing Maori from the context they are trying to put Maori on an “equal footing” with all New Zealanders; they are riding the idea that Maori have special rights and privileges above that of the average New Zealander. Obviously this is bullshit but it’s effective rhetoric and there’s a grain of truth to in that the extent of Maori rights hadn’t been clearly defined due to the ongoing nature of the process. So this has got a lot of people with a poor grasp of the issues very upset and baying for change.

There is a hui (meeting) being held today for all the iwi to begin discussions of how Maori will respond to this. New Zealand politics isn’t very interesting usually, but our progress on indigenous rights, until now, has been absolutely ahead of the field. If you care about indigenous rights globally, you should care about this, because in the same way Australia’s referendum loss has spurred on this action, the loss of rights here will spur other right wing governments to be similarly bold to their own indigenous groups.

Indigenous rights in New Zealand are under attack. They are meeting today to discuss it, and New Zealand will be listening, but I want the world to be listening. Because our government needs the shame of being called out by more than just the people who they’ve already decided don’t vote for them.

Maori have a long and proud history of fighting for their rights, and they’ll do it again here. And I’ll be on the pickets beside them, but there’ll be plenty of my own pickets to attend, because this government is radical in every sense of the word.

So please, even if you’re very far away, stand behind them in this. Keep your eyes on us. Amplify their voices. Don’t let the racism drown them out.

[navii-blaze]

Thinking about her the other day

[dakota-76]

Yanozha; Chiricahua Apache

~

Taken in Florida, circa 1885

#trueamericans

[entheognosis]

Dahteste was a famous Apache woman warrior, and it was widely known that she could out-ride, out-shoot, out-hunt, out-run, and out-fight her peers, both male and female. She took part in battles and raiding parties alongside her husband and best friend Lozen, another Apache woman warrior. She and Lozen were good friends with Geronimo, and he chose her to be his official translator in his talks with the US Cavalry. After negotiating treaties with the US government, she was imprisoned in Alabama and Florida, and later, Fort Sill, surviving both tuberculosis and pneumonia. 19 years later, she was released and lived out the rest of her life on the Mescalero Apache reservation.

[queercontrarian]

this is the bitch responsible

also wdym germans are obsessed w native americans. I thought they were nice to me cuz they felt bad. I didn’t think I was a weird little fetish doll thing

[staudnhuckn]

Oh, the glow

Big Bend National Park, Texas, USA

Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Mescalero Apache, Coahuiltecan, Jumanos, and Chiso land

[haggishlyhagging]

Descriptions of female hunting in several North American Indian societies have been provided by Regina Flannery, Ruth Landes, and Louise Spindler. In the cases cited by them, certain females adopted "masculine styles" that they learned from men and performed out of necessity. When she lived among the Eastern Cree of the James Bay region of Canada during the summers of 1933 and 1935, Regina Flannery came to know several old women reputed to have been excellent hunters in the old days. They hunted either because of the illness or death of their male relatives or, as the women said but no man ever admitted, because of "just plain incompetence of the men at hunting." While living among the Mescalero Apache in the mountains of southeastern New Mexico, Flannery was told by a "shriveled-up, decrepit old woman" that in the past "young married women might go hunting with their husbands, not merely to accompany them, but actually to take part in the chase." Flannery found it hard to believe that such a woman "was once active and skilled enough to rope a buffalo, wind the rope around a tree, and kill the animal with an axe." However, she received corroborating information from others that in the past this was not an uncommon feat for women who, if they needed food, would kill whatever animals they came upon.

-Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 29, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 30, 2024

In 2008, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an act making the day after Thanksgiving National Native American Heritage Day.

About a month ago, on Friday, October 25, President Joe Biden became the first president to visit Indian Country in ten years when he traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Maricopa County, Arizona, near Phoenix. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland traveled with him. The trip was designed to highlight the investments the Biden-Harris administration has made in Tribal Nations.

At a press gaggle on Air Force One on the way to Arizona, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that under Biden, Tribal Nations have seen the largest direct federal investment in history: $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan and $13 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build roads and bridges, bring clean water and sanitation, and build high-speed Internet in Tribal communities.

Jean-Pierre added that First Lady Jill Biden has also championed Native communities, visiting them ten times to highlight investments in youth mental health, the revitalization of Native languages, and to improve access to cancer screening and cancer care in Native communities.

Secretary Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, agreed that the Biden-Harris administration has brought “transformational change” to Native communities: “electricity on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona for homes that have never had electricity; protecting cultural resources, like salmon, which Pacific Northwest Tribes have depended on for thousands of years; new transportation infrastructure for the Mescalero Apache Nation in New Mexico that will provide a safer travel route and boost their economic development, their local economy; addressing toxic legacy pollution and abandoned oil and gas infrastructure that pollutes our air and water for the Osage Nation in Oklahoma; providing clean drinking water for Fort Peck in Montana.”

“Tribal leaders are experiencing a new era,” Haaland added. “They’re at the table. They’re being consulted.”

When Biden spoke at the Gila Crossing Community School, he said he was there “to right a wrong, to chart a new path toward a better future for us all.” As president of the United States, Biden formally apologized to the Native peoples—Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans—for the U.S. government policy that forced Native children into federal Indian boarding schools.

The apology comes after the release of an Interior Department study, The Federal Boarding School Initiative, that Secretary Haaland directed the department to undertake in 2021. According to Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen and former president of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), the initiative was “a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of Federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past.”

The initiative set out to identify federal Indian boarding schools and sites, to identify the children who attended those schools and to identify their Tribal identities, to find marked and unmarked burial sites of the remains of Indian children near school facilities, and to incorporate the viewpoints of those who attended federal Indian boarding schools and their descendants into the story of those schools.

The report looked at the Indian education system from 1819 to 1969 as a whole, bringing together federal funding for religious schools in the early 1800s with later explicitly federal schools and their public school successors during and after the 1930s. But historians generally focus on the period from 1879 to the 1930s as the boarding school era.

In 1879, the government opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school for American Indian children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, explicitly designed to separate children from their families and their culture and to train them for menial jobs.

The boarding school era was the brainchild of Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War veteran who, in the years after the war, commanded the 10th United States Cavalry, a Black regiment stationed in the American West whose members Indigenous Americans nicknamed the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Pratt fought in the campaigns on the Plains from 1868 through 1875, when he was assigned to oversee 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida (now known as the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument).

Many Indigenous prisoners at Fort Marion, taken from the dry Plains to the hot and humid coast of Florida where they were imprisoned in a cramped stone fort, quickly sickened and died. Pratt worked to upgrade conditions and to assimilate prisoners into U.S. systems by teaching them English, U.S. culture, Christianity, and how the American economy worked. He cut their hair, dressed them in military-type uniforms, and urged them to make art for sale to local tourists—it’s from here we get the world-famous collection of ledger art by the artists of Fort Marion—but focused on turning the former warriors and their families into menial workers.

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and the subsequent pursuit and surrender of leading Lakota bands throughout that year and the next, leading to the murder of Crazy Horse in 1877, popular opinion ran heavily toward simply corralling Indigenous Americans on reservations and waiting either for their assimilation or extermination. At the same time, with what seemed to be the end of the most serious of the Plains Wars, Army officers like Pratt had reason to worry that the downsizing of the U.S. Army would mean the end of their careers.

Indigenous survivors of Fort Marion returned home to see that the American government had no real plans for a thriving American Indian populace. There was little infrastructure to link them to the rest of the country to sell their art, and Indian agents rejected tribal members for jobs in favor of white cronies.

But Pratt considered his experiment at Fort Marion a great success, and he came to believe he could make his system work even more thoroughly by using a loophole in the treaties between Plains Tribes and the U.S. government to force Indigenous Americans to assimilate as children. He planned, he said, to “Kill the Indian and save the man.”

Treaties between Plains Indian Tribes and the government required the U.S. government to educate American Indian children—something their parents cared deeply about—but the treaties didn’t actually specify where the schools would be. So Pratt convinced the U.S. Army and officials at the Interior Department to give him the use of the Carlisle Barracks to open an industrial school, designed to teach American Indian children the skills necessary to be servants and menial workers.

In summer 1879, Pratt traveled to western reservations of the Lakotas and Dakotas, primarily, to gather up 82 children to begin his experiment in annihilating their culture from their minds. He forbade the practice of any aspect of Indigenous culture—language, religion, custom, clothing—and forced children to change their names, use English, practice Christianity, and wear clothing that mirrored that of Euro-American children.

Crowded together, many children died of disease; bereft of their family and culture, many died of heartache. Some found their newfound language and lessons tolerable, others ran away. For the next fifty years, the Carlisle model was the central model of government education for Indigenous children, with tens of thousands of children educated according to its methods.

In the 1920s the Institute for Government Research, later renamed the Brookings Institution, commissioned a study funded by the Rockefeller Institute—to make sure it would not reflect government bias—to investigate conditions among Indigenous Americans.

In 1928 that study, called the Meriam Report, condemned the conditions under which American Indians lived. It also emphasized the “deplorable health conditions” at the boarding schools, condemned the schools’ inappropriate focus on menial skills, and asserted that “[t]he most fundamental need in Indian education is a change in point of view.” In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act reversed the policy of trying to eradicate Tribal cultures through boarding children away from their families, and introduced the teaching of Indian history and culture in federal schools.

But the boarding schools remain a central part of the experience of American Indians since the establishment of the U.S. government in North America, and the Federal Boarding School Initiative recommended that “[t]he U.S. Government should issue a formal acknowledgment of its role in adopting a national policy of forced assimilation of Indian children, and carrying out this policy through the removal and confinement of Indian children from their families and Indian Tribes and the Native Hawaiian Community and placement in the Federal Indian boarding school system.”

It continued: "The United States should accompany this acknowledgment with a formal apology to the individuals, families, and Indian Tribes that were harmed by U.S. policy."

On October 25, 2024, President Joe Biden delivered that apology.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ungarmax]

I haven't seen anyone talk about it here, but there's a huge wildfire in Ruidoso, New Mexico, and it's displaced and unhoused a lot of people, including the Mescalero Apache Tribe.

They are asking people to donate to Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico, and the Tribe has set up a GoFundMe.

If you donate at least $10 USD to either of those charities (or another vetted charity) and send me a copy of your receipt (any identifying information removed, of course), I will draw you an icon in the style above. They can be like my pride portraits or like my emoji portraits, too (under the cut below).

I will draw:

fanart AND OCs (with refs) (please include refs for podcast characters)

1 character per icon

humanoid furries (nothing full animal, sorry)

faces only (and maybe an arm/shoulder)

I won't/can't draw:

real people (characters portrayed by actors are okay)

mechs/robots (UNLESS they are very humanoid, i.e. Aradiabot from Homestuck)

animals

incest/pedophilia/anything USFW

anything racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist/etc

anything with AI generated refs

Just email me at zack@houjun.com with a copy of your receipt and the character you want (refs needed for OCs).

More examples of my work:

[littlefeather-wolf]

Naiche - Chiricahua Apache

Naiche 1856-1919

Naiche, the youngest son of Cochise, was born in 1856. His mother, Dos-teh-seh, was the daughter of Mangas Coloradas. As a young man he took part in raids on white settlers and in 1872 was with his father when he met Brigadier General Oliver Howard. This resulted in the establishment of the Chricahua Reservation in Arizona ... Taza, Cochise's older son, became chief when his father died in 1874. Two years later Taza died and Naiche became the leader of the Chiricahuas Apaches ... In September 1880, Naiche joined Geronimo and Juh in an attempt to lead their people from the San Carlos Reservation into the Sierra Madre. However, in 1883 General George Crook managed to persuade the Apaches to return to Arizona ... Naiche and Geronimo broke out again in May 1885. Once again General Crook was sent after them. Naiche lived in the Sierra Madre until he was caught by Crook in September, 1886. Natchez now joined the all-Indian "I" Company, 12th Infantry at Fort Sill, Oklahoma ... In 1897 Naiche worked as a scout for Captain Hugh Scott and the 7th Cavalry ... After leaving the army he moved to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico ...

Naiche died on 16th March, 1919

[indigenous-character-tournament]

Tye Longshadow is canonically Mescalero Apache.

Lilo Pelekai is canonically Kānaka Maoli.

[dakota-76]

Apache people on horseback

~

Circa 1903