The Light Gray People: An Ethno-History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico (review)

This is one of the very few full-book treatments available on the ethnohistory of the eastern Apache groups who came to be known as the Lipans. Minor presents a great amount of ethnographic data in seventeen chapters divided into two sections. The first section deals with the history of the early Apachean groups on the Great Plains and later in Texas. The most important contribution in this section is the discussion of an interview known as the Zuazua history recorded by anthropologist Harry Hoijer in the 1930s but never published. Augustina Zuazua memorized stories told to her by her grandmother, Nààdà-ìníí, and told in the classical circular style of oral histories. Nààdà-ìníí's personal memories stretched back to the early 1800s, but many of the stories seem to take place earlier. To my knowledge, this is the first time the Zuazua history has been published in any detail, and this makes the book highly valuable by itself. This is an important synthesis based on a number of highly dispersed historic references that Minor has systematically mined and consolidated into a readable and valuable ethnographic record.

The second section of the book is a fairly detailed ethnographic description starting with the material culture, dress, subsistence, trade, kinship, social organization, leadership, and religion of the Lipans. There is much here that will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. As an archaeologist, one question that these data present to me is why archaeologists have failed to identify any Apachean sites in Central Texas. There are some seventeenth-century sites excavated in the Panhandle, but none to my knowledge in Central Texas where there was a dense Apachean occupation for at least 200 years. Archaeologists would benefit from a careful reading of the settlement information in this book and then begin a specific search for proto-historic and historic Apachean sites.

The great value of the manuscript, however, is compromised by the uncritical inclusion of a small number of recent, invalidated documents that describe the later history of the Lipan groups in Texas and Mexico. In summary, these documents primarily produced in the 1990s, are the product of individuals who claim to be descendants of Lipan Indians who became members of the Hispanic communities of Texas and Mexico. This group of individuals, some now known as the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, may be correct and they may actually be descendants of Lipan Indians, however Minor has not clearly verified, by independent means, that these groups are the descendants of the Lipan Indians. This task must be accomplished, and there is no avoiding it. There are ways that this verification could be accomplished: more detailed recent family histories based on birth, marriage, death and other historic records as well as modern DNA. Also the unpublished documents of Castro Romero, referenced by Minor, should undergo the scrutiny of peer-review publication. I am not saying these claims are incorrect, but they are unverified. There is no excuse for not verifying these claims. The result may mimic the results of a recent study on the San Juan Indian descendants (Reassessing Cultural Extinction: Change and Survival at Mission San Juan Capistrano, Texas, by Alston Thoms (ed.), 2001) where the lack of evidence was due to the poor survival of documents. But the detailed historical research is missing here.