Apache is an outsiders' term covering several Southern Athabaskan peoples who reached the Southwest from the north, probably in the centuries before Spanish contact, and who never formed a single polity. The Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, Western Apache and Plains Apache each had their own bands and leaders, and the descendant communities today hold separate federally recognised governments in Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
The nineteenth century is the part of the history most often told, and it is usually told wrongly as a single war. Fighting against Spanish, then Mexican and then United States forces ran across generations, ended in the 1880s with the surrender of a small band under Geronimo, and was followed by the removal of the entire Chiricahua people, including men who had served as army scouts, to imprisonment in Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma for twenty seven years.
The live religious question is land. Oak Flat, called Chi'chil Bildagoteel, is a ceremonial site for several Western Apache communities and sits above a copper deposit transferred for mining by a rider attached to a defence bill in 2014. Apache Stronghold has litigated against the transfer; the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled against it in 2024, and further proceedings have followed. The atlas records the dispute as open, because it is.