On the Bloody Road to Jesus: Christianity and the Chiricahua Apaches (review)

The Chiricahuas' long and heartbreaking road to Jesus began in the 1600s, when their ancestors first encountered and resisted Jesuit missionaries in what is today northwestern Mexico and southern Arizona. The road continued into twentieth-century Oklahoma and New Mexico, where the federal government allowed Chiricahuas to live after holding them as prisoners of war in Florida and Alabama, from 1886 to 1913.

In The Bloody Road, Stockel begins the Chiricahuas' story in the Spanish era, but with modest results. Spanish missionaries operated in the lands of people that would eventually be known as Chiricahuas, but she has located few identifiable Chiricahuas in those missions, much less Chiricahua responses to them. Thus, her lengthy discussion of the Jesuit missions seems disproportionate to her subject. Stockel's sources become fuller in the period after 1767, when Spain expelled the Jesuits, Franciscans entered the scene, and the Spanish military established reservations for those Apaches who agreed to settle down in a food-for-peace program. But she assumes incorrectly that Chiricahuas who settled on two reservations—Janos and Bocoachi—were all mission Indians, and she wrongly suggests that Spanish officers deported Apaches to central Mexico and Cuba in order to thin the population of those reservations (Spanish officials did deport Apaches, but not for that reason). Because Stockel's reconstruction of Chiricahuas' encounters with Spanish missionaries is not convincing, the parallels between Chiricahuas' experiences with Spanish Catholics and Anglo-American Protestants that she draws later in book rest on a weak foundation.

The United States' acquisition of the Southwest shifts the scene of Stockel's story to the north of the present U.S.-Mexico border, where it remains for the rest of the book. Back on U.S. soil, where she is more at home, Stockel offers a nuanced case study of Indian acculturation—both forcible and voluntary, built on insights from anthropology and oral interviews with Apaches, some of which she conducted herself. One of her original insights is that the conversion of Chiricahua adults began when their highly acculturated children returned from Carlisle Indian school and their parents, still incarcerated as prisoners of war, decided to join them rather than lose them.

Stockel offers many Indian voices and eschews glib generalizations, arguing that Chiricahuas responded to Christianity in a variety of ways—some as true believers, some by professing belief while remaining true to older religious traditions, and some by living in both religious worlds. She acknowledges that neither the depth nor the quality of Chiricahuas' religious life can be known.

Stockel begins and ends this well-illustrated and sensitive book by apologizing that she, as a non-Indian, has written it and that she has done so in the language of the colonizers. She expresses hope that Chiricahuas will one day write their own history in their own language. Yet, as she makes clear, Chiricahuas have adopted Christianity, to one degree or another, along with other aspects of the colonizers' cultures. What Chiricahua will speak with a voice that is more "authentic" than Stockel's?