Apache communities once resided in villages along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains and across the plains. Apache villages stretched from Montana to Mexico. When the Castellano speaking invaders from Mexico City arrived to colonize Indetah (Land of the Apache) and Tehuayo (Land of the Tehuas), everything changed. First, under Coronado and then under Oñate, guns, horses and human trafficking were introduced. They imposed Christianity, capitalism and the slave trade. The Indigenous body became a commodity traded for guns and horses. Young men, women and children were captured, sold into slavery and forced to work as domestic servants, in the fields, in the silver mines or conscripted as soldiers to defend the invaders against “savage” Indians. The Apache villages were abandoned and the Apache became nomadic.
Apache Nation of Colorado
We are still here.
The mission of the Apache Nation of Colorado is to serve the Apache people of Colorado.
Culture · community · agency · autonomy
Our mission
The mission of the Apache Nation of Colorado is to serve the Apache people of Colorado.
We look to assure that our members have adequate housing, food, healthcare, education and the cultural anchors that will serve them as an Indigenous community. This is accomplished through building individual and community agency and autonomy.
The Apache Nation of Colorado was formally incorporated as The Apache Tribe of Colorado in 2007. It has been recognized as the Genízaro Apache Nation referencing a history of capture and enslavement.
The Apache are the largest Native community in Colorado. We are not federally recognized or state recognized, which precludes us from receiving any state or federal assistance, although we are recognized as an entity conducting business with the municipalities, counties and the State of Colorado. Our community owns and stewards several properties across Colorado. We have a forty-acre ceremonial space where regular ceremonies are held in the Boulder/Denver Metro Area. Other ceremonial sites are located in Southern Colorado.
Wellness
The Apache Nation of Colorado provides our members with holistic health and wellness services, we advocate for post-secondary education, and encourage a sober, healthy, spiritual lifestyle. We encourage our members to strive for financial independence while respecting Indigenous values related to and congruent with our relationship to Mother Earth.
A living community
Members of the community are diverse, educated, and contribute to a variety of services and industries utilizing multiple languages, skills and abilities. We engage in a variety of Indigenous religious and spiritual practices. We are accustomed to adopting and adapting beliefs, concepts, ideas and practices that best serve our resilience as one of the Original Communities of Colorado.
The political terrain
Apacheria is homeland, memory, and continuance.
“We regard all of Apachería as our homeland and not some small pocket of earth set aside for our incarceration.”
We resist the onslaught of racism and genocide and hold on to our traditional knowledge, teachings and community cohesiveness.
We advocate with the social services industrial complex to assure that our children are not taken from their parents and instead are raised culturally in our community. We strive to keep our children out of the prison industrial complex and reeducate our children in response to the indoctrination of the educational system. We hold monthly ceremonies, drumming circles, talking circles, tribal council meetings, language classes, and rites of passage. We prepare our children for navigating the genocidal world into which they are born.
Despite the ethnic cleansing and displacement, we as an Apache community have endured two invasions, the theft of our land, the kidnapping and incarceration of our relatives into internment camps. We continue to suffer from imposed poverty, white supremacy, racism and lateral violence from American Indian communities that subscribe to the genocidal policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ declarations of who can be “officially” regarded as American Indian. We continue to live in the traditional homeland of our original communities from Montana to the Mipimí Desert in Mexico, from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi. Our Apache community refuses to acknowledge the imposed geopolitical borders that serve only to further divide our Indigenous communities. We recognized one another, without the need for impositions from white institutions perpetuating paper genocide.
We have the capacity to stand out as the unique community that we are or we can blend into the scenery disregarded by the invaders.
We remain culturally intact, socially connected, spiritually connected, cognizant of who we are as individuals, families, community and as a people who continue to reside on the homeland of our ancestors. As a community we have always taken care of our own therefore surviving centuries of invasion and occupation.
Religious expressions
Sweatlodge, Sundance, Peyote Road, Čanupa way, Mexicayotl, Danza Azteca, Velaciónes and vision quests are all a part of our religious expressions because these ceremonies reground us in who we are and who we have been as a part of our survival and resiliency.
Community in ceremony
We are still here.
History
From Indetah to the present day.
Homeland
From Montana to Mexico.
From the Rockies to the Mississippi.
Native captives were originally regarded within the invader’s caste system as Genízaros – captive Indians. Apaches were only one of the communities of people who were enslaved. Apache communities were raided and our people stolen. As nomads, the Apache were constantly being displaced by refugees from the northeast and the east. Apache homeland is now regarded as the territory of the refugees: Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux and many others that passed through or briefly resided in Indetah.
The slave trade and human trafficking has endured into the twentieth century with the indentured servitude of the migrant farmworker and into the twenty-first century as slave labor in the prison industrial complex. A quarter of our Indigenous male population is incarcerated.
04 · A place in perpetuity
#Land
back
The Apache Nation of Colorado was able to acquire four properties in Boulder County.
We have a ceremonial space where we hold monthly ceremonies through our church: Indigenous People’s Community Church, and our ceremonial grounds are in New Mexico where we hold our annual spirit camp.
Governance
Leadership is a service not a title.
We have a traditional infrastructure to address community issues but eschew formal infrastructure promoted by gringismo. Leadership, according to Apache custom, is temporary, event specific and at the discretion of the community. Central governance is a rejected notion and leaders are appointed by the community based on needs, skills and ability. Apache leaders, within the family, the clan or the band are individuals who hold great influence within the community. Leadership is a service not a title. Apache citizens are under no obligation to follow leaders or fancies of a council when the decisions are contrary to Apache custom or community needs. Strict social customs that have traditionally maintained order and harmony within Apache communities are still practiced today. Apache governance is restricted to exercising, by any means necessary, the protection and well-being of the Nation. Each Band of the Apache Nation of Colorado is autonomous and self-governing. No Band has any jurisdiction over another Band.
In the event of a larger, community wide concern, leaders are appointed by each Band of the Nation to convene collectively as a Tribal Council to address and remedy the concern through consensus as the leaders deem appropriate. Decisions of the Tribal Council do not apply to those Bands who for whatever reason cannot or chose not to participate in the Council gathering.