Western Apache

Keith Basso's work with Western Apache people at Cibecue produced one of the clearest accounts anywhere of a religion carried by geography. Western Apache place names are descriptive sentences: water flows downward on a succession of flat rocks, or shades of shades of shades. Each names a place precisely enough to picture it, and many are attached to a historical tale about something that happened there to someone who behaved badly.

Those tales are used. To quote a place name at a person who has done wrong is to remind them of the story attached to it, and the technique is described by Apache speakers as shooting someone with an arrow. It is meant to sting, and then to keep working on them afterwards every time they see the place. Basso records people saying that the land stalks them, and that this is what keeps them living right.

The consequence is that Western Apache moral instruction is stored in the country rather than in a scripture or a code, and it is available to anyone who knows the names. It also means that removal from the land removes access to the tradition, and that the destruction of a place destroys what that place taught. Neither of those is a metaphor, and together they are the reason land questions in this article are religious questions.

The Western Apache are the Apache peoples of east-central Arizona, distinct from the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla and Lipan groups, with their own dialect, clan system and ceremonial life. Their descendants today are organised principally as the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and Keith Basso's earlier ethnography of the Cibecue community describes the clan and kinship structure and the religious specialists who work with particular powers.

The best known ceremony is the girls' puberty ceremony, held over four days, in which the initiate is identified with Changing Woman. It is sponsored by the family, conducted by an engaged singer, and attended by the whole community. It was suppressed under federal policy during the reservation era and is now held openly, and the atlas describes its place in Apache life without setting out its procedure.

Oak Flat, Chi'chil Bildagoteel, is the ceremonial ground where it is held for several Western Apache communities, and it 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 ruled against it sitting en banc in 2024, and further proceedings have followed since. The atlas records the matter as open rather than concluded.