Chief Loco: Apache Peacemaker (review)

In Indians in Unexpected Places, Phillip Deloria proposed the Bedonkohe Apache Geronimo as a metaphorical identity model for Indigenous resistance: "If you had to pick a single person to stand for Indianness, you could do worse than Geronimo," continuing, "[he is] the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere and the defeated prisoners we imagine they became." ¹ With this statement Deloria succinctly describes the conventional framework in which scholars understand and interpret "Chiricahua" history. In his long-overdue text, Loco: Apache Peacemaker, Bud Shapard turns our focus away from the resistant warriors and imprisoned victims of earlier writings and, using Chief Loco as a counternarrative, offers a necessary window into the Apachean third-way: Loco's Warm Springs Apache as agents of peaceful Indigenous resistance through political diplomacy and philosophical cosmopolitanism.

So, who are Chief Loco and the Warm Springs Apache? The Warm Springs Apache were a related but politically autonomous band or principality within a larger, decentralized Apache "nation" that also included the Chiricahua, Nednai, and Bedonkohe peoples. These groups were conflated during the Apache wars, more a result of American administration than political unanimity. Shapard fleshes out the details of their reluctant consolidation in the pages of his book as he describes Loco's 1869 overtures for American peace; his commitment to enforcing treaty obligations among his community despite the influence of his more-aggressive political rival, Victorio; his steadfast reinforcement of a Warm Springs political identity over broader "Chiricahua" interests in securing a land-base for his people; and (with considerable long-term consequences for his community and their descendents) his commitment to seeking reservation settlement at Ojo Caliente (also called Warm Springs, near Cañada Alamosa, New Mexico).

The narrative arc of Loco is one common to the literature on the "Chiricahua" Apache, beginning with a broad biographical sketch of Loco and then jumping right into the early reservation era, the Geronimo campaign era between 1882 and 1886, and subsequent imprisonment in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. The chapters on southwestern violence provide much-needed accounting for Warm Springs' activities on three separate reservations and during their 1882 abduction into Mexico. Loco and family play only a secondary role in the later chapters on Florida and Alabama imprisonment, however. Shapard's contribution in those chapters is his detailed portraiture of the imprisonment years in the East (which, as subtext, acts as a critique of the polemical nature of some Chiricahua histories). One can argue with his bottom line. But Shapard's persuasive analyses of the prisoners' imprisonment living conditions, the origins of their illness, and the role of citizen activism and public relations in shaping Apache lives rigorously evaluate the unexpected politics and experiences of imprisonment in a manner worthy of debate.

There are a few issues that complicate my full embrace of this work. Like most writings on the "Chiricahua," Shapard's materials are derived from surviving American military and bureaucratic reports. Shapard develops little of the Mexican perspective during the violence of the 1880s. Loco is also light on describing intertribal connectivity and power among southwestern Indigenous nations. Loco's own actions and words are often reported secondhand in state documents. In the end, the focus of Loco's depiction is soft due to the scant documentation directly linked to the chief and the need to stick close to the established American-centric narrative of the Apache Wars. These are mostly limitations imposed by available materials. I was personally most disappointed that Shapard dealt with the seven years the Apache prisoners spent in Alabama in two full chapters but allowed only one brief chapter (that doubles as a hasty conclusion) to describe the decade that Loco lived and died at Fort Sill—a later period in which readily available documentation is more abundant. Given his considerable access to Loco family oral histories, an important question Shapard may want to develop in future publication is, What was it like for the peaceful Loco to live in imprisonment alongside Geronimo, particularly...