The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey (review)

Neil Goodwin is an independent filmmaker whose documentaries include Geronimo and the Apache Resistance and Seasons of a Navajo. He never got to know his father, noted ethnographer Grenville Goodwin (the author of two scholarly studies of Apaches, including The Social Organization of the Western Apache). His father died in 1940 of a brain tumor at thirty-three, when the author was only a few months old. In 1962 Neil Goodwin was helping his mother go through some of his father's field notes when she showed him the "Sierra Madre diary," a "big, leatherbound scrapbook" filled with "handwritten entries, photographs, watercolor drawings, maps, diagrams, and clippings." The younger Goodwin read this diary and glimpsed a side of his father he had never known. The author, fascinated and haunted by this intimate glimpse of his father, decided to retrace his search for the Sierra Madre Apaches, a search that his father had undertaken in the 1930s. In journal form, The Apache Diaries combines excerpts from the elder Goodwin's journey, filled with ethnographic observations and interpretations of the Sierra Madre Apaches, with entries from diaries from a series of journeys the son made starting some fifty years later.

In The Apache Diaries the elder Goodwin's diary appears in chronological order. Most of these entries contain a date and place notation. These entries are italicized. The author's entries, however, have been chosen from a number of diaries written over a period of twenty years and are inserted as companions and embellishments of his father's entries. This stylistic feature creates an intimate dialogue. As an example of this style here is a brief excerpt from the fourth section, titled "Geronimo's People?":

August 1930, Cibecue, Fort Apache Res., Arizona, Grenville's Diary

Got talking with an Apache Police here, and he said that sometimes in summer some of Geronimo's people came up from Old Mexico and run horses off the reservation. These had been seen in the summer of 1929 by an Apache, a friend of his, but were wild and would not stop to talk. He only saw them from a distance, but they appeared to be dressed in modern clothes.

Neil's Diary, Fort Apache

I try to imagine what it must have been like to hear from an Apache that "Geronimo's people" have been up from old Mexico as recently as one year ago. It must have had an electrifying effect, for when my father used to talk to my mother about these people, she told me that is how he referred to them: "Geronimo's people."

In addition to a son's quest for his dead father, Diaries is also an ethnography of an enigmatic band of Apache Indians that continued to lead a traditional life well after the recorded end of the Indian wars in the Southwest. And it is the "wild Apache," and the brutal war waged against them, in fact, that The Apache Diaries foregrounds in the opening section titled "Overture."

In 1886, the Apache resistance leader Geronimo surrendered to the United States military, after having led a long fight against American and Mexican invaders. He and his followers were imprisoned in Florida, then later in Oklahoma, and most never saw their homeland again. In addition to Neil Goodwin's father, these are the other ghosts that haunt The Apache Diaries, the lost dead of the Apaches. It turns out, however, that not all of Geronimo's people surrendered. A few dozen or so fled to a mountain refuge in Mexico, from which they conducted raids on Mexican ranches and villages. Called the Ndendaa'i ("the People who Make Trouble") by Apaches on American reservations, this group survived by raiding settlers and kidnapping children (whom they raised as Apaches).

Acting on reports of the continued existence of these "wild" Apaches, Grenville Goodwin searched the Sierra Madre mountains in the 1930s to find them. He...