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Geronimo's Kids A Teacher's Lessons on the Apache Reservation by Robert S. Ove and H. Henrietta Stockel |
Totally ignorant of what the Chiricahuas had endured and survived, in my one-room classroom at Whitetail I taught Geronimo's kids American history, including the 'fact' that the Indians of the Southwest had to be subdued by every means possible so that the settlers, the miners, the ranchers, the sheep farmers, the adventurers, the missionaries, and everyone else who wanted the Apache homelands could live peacefully on the land. If only I had known . . .Arriving on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in 1948, a naive young Robert Ove began his first teaching job. Ignorant of the culture and history of his students, who were descendants of the great chief Geronimo, Ove discovered a way of life that few outsiders had been allowed to know.
In Geronimo's Kids, Robert Ove gives a stirring account of his life from 1948 to 1950 when he taught day school at the Whitetail community on the reservation. His personal observations and photographs, along with Henrietta Stockel's scene-setting history, help to preserve and provide insight into this people and their place in history.
The Chiricahuas gradually accepted the well-intentioned outsider into their community. Living among this reminder of America's past, Ove witnessed Apache mothers still carrying their infants in cradleboards, grandmothers and mothers still sewing traditional beaded buckskin dresses for their daughters' puberty ceremonies, and men still making traditional Apache bows and arrows.
Through the stories of the elders, he also learned how this way of life had changed in the years since 1886, when Geronimo's people finally surrendered after the long fight to defend their homeland. It had taken nearly one quarter of the entire United States Army to find and persuade the last Apache holdouts, thirty-five Chiricahua men, women, and children, to surrender. They did so then only because Geronimo feared that if they kept fighting, the entire Apache people would be destroyed.
Decades of incarceration followed their surrender—first in Florida, then in Alabama, and finally in Oklahoma. More than half died in hot, humid prison camps, because the Chiricahuas had no inborn resistance to the virulent diseases brought to North America by Europeans. In 1913, with fewer than three hundred left, the Chiricahuas were released, and some received land allotments near their last prison site, Fort Sill. Others went to the Mescalero Apache Reservation where Ove found them thirty-five years later, living in poverty but in a tightly knit, loving family community. Protecting cultural customs had become a way of life for many, particularly for those who had been prisoners of war. Even the children's traditional games were understandably treasured by those whose trust of white people had been destroyed.
Those interested in the fate of Geronimo's people and their transition to the life they live today will find Ove's account enlightening and insightful. With Stockel's contributions, scholars will find this book an invaluable resource on daily reservation life in the 1940s.
ROBERT S. OVE, a retired Evangelical Lutheran minister, is a missionary in Nepal. H. HENRIETTA STOCKEL of Albuquerque, cofounder of the Albuquerque Indian Center, is the author of several books on Native Americans.
Number Sixteen:
The Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and
Southwest
Geronimo's Kids
0-89096-774-1
$26.95
6x9. 200 pp. 24 b&w photos.
Native American Studies. Western History
Publication Date: November 1997.
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