From Indetah to the present day.

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.

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.