the Tropic of Cancer to 38 degrees north latitude, including Baja and Alta California, New Mexico, southern Utah, southern Colorado, and western Texas (see map, Figure 0.2). This writer would extend the line north to 42 degrees north latitude or the northern boundaries of California, Nevada, and Utah (including the Great Basin area) with the northern boundary extending from California to 97 degrees west longitude near Wichita, Kansas (see maps, Figures 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5).
Figure 0.2 Charles Di Peso’s La Gran Chichimeca: The Greater Southwest (including Central Rockies and Great Basin).
Figure 0.3 Indigenous Communities of the Greater Southwest. Abridged from Map 1-a, Native Tribes of North America, Map Series No. 13 (University of California Press).
Figure 0.4 Tribal Communities of the Northwestern and Central Parts of the Greater Southwest.
Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 11, Great Basin, ed. by Warren L. D. Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1986), p. ix.
Figure 0.5 Tribal Communities of the Southern Part of the Greater Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico).
Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest. ed. by Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979).
More importantly, this is an ecological and historical zone of cultural interaction. It was here that Mesoamerican societies made commercial contact with the Indian cultures of the US Southwest. For example, in pre-contact time turquoise and buffalo hides came from Chaco Canyon to be exchanged for Macaw feathers and chocolate from Guatemala and Mesoamerica. This was where Anglos first confronted Spaniards in North America. This was the homeland of the Tejano–Mexicano conflict prior to 1845, or the area where Geronimo roamed freely between two nation states after 1850.
For the purposes of this study history does not stop at the border, even though there has been an international boundary since 1848. Not only did Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches fight, hunt, and raid in this region (paying no heed to the boundary), but treasure seekers, settlers, surveyors, munitions dealers, US Army Indian scouts, and others constantly travelled back and forth. O’odham traders exchanged goods and slaves between Mexico and the Gila Indians in the north. The Yaqui Indians of Sonora sought refuge in southern Arizona. Mormon pioneers and colonists went out from Zion in the Salt Lake Valley northward to southern Idaho and southward and westward to southern Utah, Nevada, southern California, Arizona, and Chihuahua, Mexico. The history of Gran Chichimeca, named by the Aztecs for their “barbarian” neighbors who lived a nomadic life in the region, is the story of cultural, economic, and social interaction from Mesoamerican times to MexAmerica today.
Finally, it should be noted that the theme of “relocation and removal” must be expanded to include its global and contemporary dimensions. The cultural struggle between westernized and non-westernized people or between colonial and indigenous peoples is both world-wide and on-going. The ideological, spiritual, and economic imperatives of colonial expansion were not exclusively European, and the occupation of indigenous lands took place throughout India, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Thus it is that immigrants from North India confronted the Veda (forest dwellers) of Sri Lanka; the Japanese government refused to recognize the Ainu who inhabited Hokkaido in the northern archipelago until the 1990s; the Bushmen or desert-based hunter-gatherers of southern Africa face extinction today because of limited resources and outsider populations; and the Yanomami and Uru Eu Wau Wau of the Amazon Basin are confronted with challenges to their traditional way of life from scholars, tourists, loggers, miners and other developers.11
In the annals of Indian–white relations in southern South America, the Selk’nam Genocide is often recalled. When the Selk’nam was first encountered by Europeans in their homeland of Tierra del Fuego they were a hardy and vigorous people. They lived mostly undisturbed until the late 1800s, when an influx of gold prospectors and sheep ranchers who desired their land started to make intrusions. Bounties were placed on their heads. One hunter boasted that he had received a pound sterling per corpse, redeemable with a pair or two of ears. In a brief time the Selk’nam were reduced from four thousand to around three hundred, and resettled on reservations administered by missionaries. The last speaker of the Selk’nam language died 40 years ago.12
In North America confrontations with indigenous groups include Canadian authorities and the Inuit in the Arctic as well as the Blackfoot on the Canadian plains and the Innu of Labrador. And, of course, most individuals are familiar with the struggles between Europeans and the Maori of New Zealand, the aboriginal Tasmanians, and the Aborigines of Australia.13
But if the nineteenth century history of indigenous peoples was one of “struggle,” the twentieth century story bears witness to the idea of “survival.” Even this dichotomy is too simplistic. Not all nineteenth century Indians of the Southwest were victims of the colonizers. Human relationships are complex and some disruptions in native life were due to indigenous factors and pressures from other tribal groups. For example, several White Mountain Apaches and Chiricahuas chose to live on the reservation and adopt the white man’s way of life, and held no brief for Geronimo and the other rebels. Chief Chatto, an accomplished Chiricahua raider, served as first sergeant of Apache scouts during the final campaign against Geronimo. As for the colonizers, the voices of the past are many and many soldiers, like Brigadier General George Crook, held a grudging admiration for Geronimo and his Apache followers. To only consider the indigenous peoples as victims and the colonizers as victimizers is to strip native societies of agency.
If anything, Indian people have found new ways to remain distinctive despite the power of global economies, colonial militaries, and national governments. The “vanishing American” of the late nineteenth century refused to be vanished! Reports by non-indigenous observers of cultural demise and death were wrong in the 1870s, misguided in the 1920s, and overly pessimistic today.
While many groups are losing their languages, many societies have continued to survive even stripped of their language.14 While the boarding school experience from 1878 to 1930 discouraged the use of Indian languages by their pupils, the Navajo, Hopi, Comanche, Sac and Fox code-talkers of World War II revived their tribal tongues. Contemporary technology is being used to initiate language comeback programs, ranging from apprenticeship programs pairing fluent elders with young students to YouTube videos, or native speaker’s language-learning apps for Indian students with iPads.15 For example, the summer of 2013 saw the release of the classic George Lucas “Star Wars” movie that was dubbed by Navajo voice actors, a use of native language designed to appeal to a younger generation.16 Evidently, while the colonial empires that first colonized indigenous societies no longer exist, the native groups have persisted.
No better example of that persistence can be found than that of the Apache painter, muralist, and sculptor Allan Houser. Born in 1914 near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he was the first of his Chiricahua community to be born outside of captivity. He lived 80 years dying in 1994. He is a likely candidate for the title of “best Southwestern Indian artist of the
