The Apache Diaspora by Paul Conrad (review)

This is the first comprehensive examination of Apache (Ndé) groups from the 1500s, when they entered the Spanish documentary record, to the twentieth century. Previous scholars have examined a variety of aspects of Apache history: Some have looked at Apaches during the Spanish colonial era while others have studied the protracted wars along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the long nineteenth century, focusing on such figures as Mangas Coloradas, Victorio, and, of course, Geronimo. Paul Conrad's treatment reveals the astounding range of Apache experiences in a broad region of the American Southwest and northern Mexico and reaching as far south as Veracruz, as far east as Florida and Cuba, and as far north as Canada. The Apache Diaspora surveys a multi-secular struggle that spanned multiple empires and nations across much of North America. The notion of a "diaspora" in the title and through the manuscript is very flexible and allows Conrad to analyze the scattering forces of colonialism, enslavement, deportation, incarceration, and boarding schools to which Apaches were subjected through the centuries as well as their will to overcome such forces of dispersion, survive, and endure as a people.

The book is organized chronologically in two parts. Each chapter usually features a specific locale to underscore the range of Apache experiences. Thus, Chapter 1 is centered on Santa Fe, New Mexico and sometimes more specifically on the Palace of the Governors. In Chapter 2, Conrad moves to the mining town of Parral in what is now southern Chihuahua. Chapters 3 and 4 are anchored on the Southern Plains, Chapter 5 follows the deportation of Apaches through Mexico City, Veracruz, and Cuba, and so on.

One strength of The Apache Diaspora is definitional. Instead of considering "Apaches" as an identifiable set of peoples or a collection of groups, Conrad helpfully emphasizes that "Apache" was a convenient label applied to a variety of mobile peoples (initially around New Mexico) who were deemed at war with Christians and therefore enslaveable. Such rhetorical convolution was necessary in colonial times because the Spanish crown generally forbade the enslavement of Native peoples except in extraordinary circumstances, and being at war with the Spanish kingdoms and Christendom in general was one of them. By the seventeenth century, as Conrad rightly notes, the terms "Apache" and "slave" were virtually interchangeable among Spanish settlers of New Spain's northern provinces.

The Apache Diaspora combines great depth of archival research along with engagement with the work of many scholars working on multiple aspects of this history. In the first part of the book, Conrad is primarily in conversation with historians of Indigenous enslavement, teasing out forced-labor arrangements and clarifying patterns of coercion with numerous cases and examples, some known to previous scholars and others drawn from the author's archival work. In the middle chapters, Conrad shifts the focus from slavery to deportation or banishment campaigns that New Spain waged against specific Apache groups in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author argues persuasively that deportation required more nuanced understandings of family and kinship ties among Apache peoples. Whereas the slave trade was predicated on the fiction that all Apaches were enemies and indistinguishable from one another—and therefore all enslaveable—the deportation campaigns had to be far more discriminating and attuned to local bands and groupings known as gotah among southern Apaches and rancherías to the Spanish. Conrad shows how Spanish officials in northern New Spain got to known Apache headmen and understood their primary and more distant group belongings and loyalties and used this knowledge either to negotiate peace with them or wage war and deportation campaigns.

In the last three chapters, Conrad treads over familiar ground around the Apaches de Paz program—an early Spanish version of the U.S.-run Indian reservations—and the later American social experiments that included reservations and banishment to distant forts and boarding schools. Here the author dwells less on explanations for...