Apache Nation
There’s no single Apache Nation. There never was one government, and there still isn’t. There are Apache peoples, and today eight federally recognized tribes trace their roots to the Apache world: the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Tonto Apache Tribe and the Yavapai-Apache Nation in Arizona; the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico; and, in Oklahoma, the Fort Sill Apache Tribe and the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma.
Their languages belong to the Southern Athabaskan family, the same family as Navajo. Linguists trace both peoples to the far north. Most scholars place the move south somewhere between 1300 and 1500, though the timing is still debated. Many Apache people call themselves Ndee, Ndeh or a close variant, depending on the community. “Apache” is an outside name, often traced to a word meaning “enemy.”
One Landscape, Many Ways of Living
Apacheria isn’t a tidy map. It stretched across what is now Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas and southern Colorado, reached onto the southern plains of Oklahoma and Kansas, and ran deep into the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Apache groups didn’t live the same way across all that ground, and the differences matter.
The Jicarilla leaned toward the plains and the Pueblos. The Mescalero and Chiricahua held mountain and desert country. The Western Apache farmed along Arizona’s rivers. The Lipan and the Plains Apache lived as mounted buffalo hunters. Those differences mostly reflect adaptation to different land, not different origins.
Homes, Households and Leadership
The word to know is wickiup, or gowa. It’s a dome-shaped frame of poles lashed with yucca and covered with brush, and later with hides, cloth or canvas. It was the usual home for Chiricahua, Mescalero and Western Apache families. Women built and maintained them, and a family could break one down and carry the poles to the next camp.
The tipi belonged to other Apache communities. The Jicarilla, the Plains Apache and some Chiricahua used it, especially where buffalo hunting shaped life. Among the Plains Apache, tipi covers were sometimes painted to record war deeds or spiritual blessings.
Apache people moved with the seasons, but they weren’t aimless. Western Apache families returned each spring and fall to farm sites they held rights to. Local groups of roughly 35 to 200 people were built around matrilineal extended families, and by 1850 there were about twenty bands in Western Apache country, each tied to a watershed.
In many Apache communities, leadership rested on ability and judgment more than inheritance, and decisions came out of long discussion among respected members of the group. The Chiricahua did recognize hereditary chiefs, such as Naiche, son of Cochise, so practice varied from group to group.
The Major Apache Groups
The Apache are best understood as a family of peoples that share language roots and customs, not a single tribe. Early outsiders gave them labels that don’t line up cleanly with how Apache communities describe themselves. Here are the main groups.
Chiricahua
Homeland: southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and northern Mexico.
Lifeway: Chiricahua families moved with the seasons to hunt game and gather wild plants, living in wickiups. Horses, gained from Spanish and Native neighbors, widened the range of hunting and raiding.
History: The Chiricahua defended their homeland against Spain, Mexico and the United States. Cochise, Naiche and Geronimo are the names most people know. Geronimo wasn’t a chief. He was a war leader and medicine man of the Bedonkohe band, and at times only 30 to 50 people followed him.
After Geronimo’s final surrender at Skeleton Canyon on September 4, 1886, the Army didn’t send the Chiricahua to a reservation. It shipped them east as prisoners of war, including the Apache Scouts who had helped bring about the surrender. They were held at Fort Marion in Florida, then at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, and finally at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. By one count, about half had died by October 1894. Geronimo died at Fort Sill in 1909, still a prisoner.
The prisoner-of-war status ended in 1913, after 27 years. Of roughly 257 survivors, 67 chose to stay at Fort Sill, and roughly 180 to 190 moved to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. The Fort Sill Apache remember April 2, 1913 as “the Parting.” The people who stayed in Oklahoma are the ancestors of today’s Fort Sill Apache Tribe.
Jicarilla
The name is Spanish for “little basket,” a nod to the Jicarilla’s skill as basket makers. They’re also known for beadwork and micaceous clay pottery.
Homeland: northeastern New Mexico and southern Colorado, including the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the edge of the plains.
Lifeway: The Jicarilla were hunters and gatherers who traded with Taos and Picuris Pueblos and learned farming from them. Of all the Apache groups, they felt the strongest influence from the Plains, including buffalo hunting and the tipi.
History: Hispanic land grants pushed into Jicarilla country through the 1700s, and the Jicarilla never agreed to them. New Mexico declared war on them in 1854. Treaties went unratified and removal plans failed, and a permanent reservation wasn’t created until February 11, 1887, by executive order.
Farming on the original reservation failed because the elevation was high and the growing season short. Poverty, hunger and disease peaked around the turn of the 20th century. Today the Jicarilla Apache Nation holds more than 879,000 acres around Dulce, New Mexico, and oil and gas are its main economic engine.
Lipan
The Lipan were the easternmost Apache group, ranging across the southern plains from Kansas to Texas. They were among the first plains peoples to obtain horses, and they became known as formidable riders.
After Texas independence, the Lipan allied with the Republic of Texas against their enemies, the Comanche. Texas settlers soon demanded their removal anyway. Warfare, disease and displacement cut the Lipan to roughly 300 people by 1875, scattered across Texas, Coahuila and the Mescalero Reservation.
Lipan people didn’t disappear. In 1905 a group held in Chihuahua was brought to Mescalero, and in 1936 the Mescalero tribe’s new constitution made the Lipan full members. Lipan descendants are enrolled today in the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma and the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. No Lipan tribe holds federal recognition.
Mescalero
The name comes from the mescal plant, a staple food. Mescalero homeland centered on the Sacramento and Guadalupe mountains of south-central New Mexico, and their range ran east into Texas and west toward Arizona. They were hunter-gatherers who took to horses quickly, and Mescalero women gathered the foods, medicines and plant materials the community depended on.
The Mescalero reservation was established in 1873. Over time it became home to people of other Apache groups too. Lipan families arrived in the early 1900s and Chiricahua families after 1913. They’re neighbors and relatives on shared land, not sub-bands of the Mescalero.
Plains Apache (Apache Tribe of Oklahoma)
Outsiders long called them the “Kiowa Apache.” Because that name was misleading, the tribe’s official designation changed in the 1980s to the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. They call themselves Na-i-shan Dené, “Our People.” Historically they were the Ka-ta-ka, the northernmost Apache.
They lived on the plains, built their lives around buffalo and lived in tipis. Their alliance with the Kiowa is old, and each summer they joined the Kiowa camp circle for the Sun Dance while staying politically independent. The 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge created a shared reservation with the Kiowa and Comanche in southwestern Oklahoma, and in 1972 the three tribes legally separated.
The Plains Apache language, Na’isha, is the most distinct member of the Apachean family. Recordings and documentation, including interviews with elder Alfred Chalepah, are held at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. The tribe is headquartered in Anadarko.
Western Apache
The Western Apache live in east-central Arizona. The anthropologist Grenville Goodwin sorted them into five groups: White Mountain, Cibecue, San Carlos, Northern Tonto and Southern Tonto. Some researchers dispute the tidy boundaries, but the names are still how many communities identify themselves.
Western Apache families farmed corn and beans near streams, hunted and gathered through a seasonal round and lived in wickiups. Thousands of people still speak Western Apache. Three federally recognized tribes descend from these groups (the White Mountain, San Carlos and Tonto Apache), and the Yavapai-Apache Nation includes Dilzhe’e (Tonto) Apache people.
The Apache Sunrise Ceremony
Lists of “Apache symbols” circulate widely online, but few trace back to Apache sources. What’s well documented is ceremony.
The Sunrise Ceremony is the most important Apache ritual, a four-day coming-of-age rite for girls. The young woman takes on the role of White Painted Woman, also called Changing Woman, the first woman and the mother of the Apache. During the ceremony she’s never called by her own name, and on the final day she’s painted with white clay.
The Crown Dancers, or gaan, represent mountain spirits and dance to drive away illness and harm. They’re sometimes called “devil dancers,” a label scholars call incorrect.
U.S. religious policy restricted the ceremony for decades, until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. Today some communities hold one large ceremony each year for all the girls who’ve come of age, in part because a full ceremony is costly for a single family.
Horses, Raiding and Weapons
Horses reached the Apache world through trade and raiding. When the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, large numbers of Spanish horses spread among Native communities. Apache groups built herds, but unlike the Comanche, only a few specialized in hunting from horseback. For many, horses meant mobility for trading, raiding and moving camp.
The Apache fought with bows and arrows, lances, knives and clubs, and added firearms as they could get them. Firearms mattered on the southern plains, where Comanche, Wichita and Tejas groups received a steady supply of French trade guns, which pushed many Apache bands west and south.
Raiding was part of the regional economy for everyone in it. Spanish colonists in New Mexico bought and took Native captives and called it “ransom.” Apache, Comanche, O’odham and Mexican communities took captives too. The Apache didn’t invent this system, and they weren’t the only ones inside it.
War, Scalp Bounties and Survival
Warfare existed between Native nations long before Europeans arrived. What changed was scale and purpose. The Spanish, Mexican and United States governments each tried to control or remove Apache people, and they used methods that went well beyond battle.
In the 1830s, the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora began paying bounties for Apache scalps. A bounty could equal a year’s wages for a Mexican worker, and bounty hunters couldn’t reliably tell Apache scalps from anyone else’s. Grant County, New Mexico, was still offering a bounty on Apache scalps in the mid-1880s.
The Camp Grant Massacre shows what that world looked like. In early 1871, about 500 Aravaipa and Pinal Apache people sought protection near Camp Grant, Arizona. On April 30, a group from Tucson (Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans and Tohono O’odham men) attacked the camp at dawn. They killed 144 people, mostly women and children, and carried off more than two dozen children. A Tucson jury acquitted more than 100 defendants in under 20 minutes.
Not every Apache person fought the Army. Apache Scouts served the United States in large numbers, and General George Crook leaned on them in the Geronimo campaign. Alchesay, a White Mountain Apache leader, earned a Medal of Honor as a scout. The story isn’t clean. At Cibecue Creek in August 1881, most of the Apache scouts present turned on the Army after the arrest of a Cibecue medicine man, in what one account calls the largest mutiny of its kind in U.S. history. Three scouts were hanged for it in March 1882. The unrest helped send Geronimo and others out of the reservation system, and the pursuit ended with the surrender of September 1886.
Apache Communities Today
| Tribe | State | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| San Carlos Apache Tribe | Arizona | Reservation of about 1.8 million acres, established by executive order |
| White Mountain Apache Tribe | Arizona | Fort Apache Reservation, with communities at Whiteriver and Cibecue |
| Tonto Apache Tribe | Arizona | Dilzhe’e (Tonto) Apache community |
| Yavapai-Apache Nation | Arizona | Includes Yavapai and Dilzhe’e Apache people |
| Jicarilla Apache Nation | New Mexico | More than 879,000 acres around Dulce |
| Mescalero Apache Tribe | New Mexico | Home to Mescalero, Lipan and Chiricahua descendants |
| Fort Sill Apache Tribe | Oklahoma and New Mexico | Descendants of Chiricahua and Warm Springs prisoners of war; a New Mexico reservation was proclaimed in 2011 |
| Apache Tribe of Oklahoma | Oklahoma | Headquartered in Anadarko |
The hard numbers matter. On the San Carlos Reservation, 44.4 percent of residents live below the poverty line and unemployment is 19.4 percent, against 12.5 and 5.3 percent for the United States as a whole (2018-2022 American Community Survey). On the Fort Apache Reservation, poverty is 40.4 percent and unemployment is 11.1 percent.
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe’s own history ties the loss of a viable land base to the loss of cultural identity, including a spoken language. The Jicarilla Nation relies on oil and gas, which brings income and also raises water-quality concerns.
Oak Flat
The most visible Apache land fight today is Oak Flat, in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. Many Apache people hold it sacred. It sits above one of the largest known copper deposits in the world, which Resolution Copper, owned by Rio Tinto and BHP, plans to mine.
Apache Stronghold sued on religious freedom grounds. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in May 2025, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented, calling the decision a “grievous mistake.” The land transfer to Resolution Copper was completed in March 2026, and Apache Stronghold filed a new lawsuit in federal court in Arizona on April 22, 2026. As of spring 2026, the fight was still in court.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources and Further Reading
- Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, official history apachetribe.org
- Fort Sill Apache Tribe, official history fortsillapache-nsn.gov
- Jicarilla Apache Nation, Ten Tribes Partnership profile
- National Park Service, Lipan Apache, Fort Davis National Historic Site
- Grenville Goodwin, The Social Divisions and Economic Life of the Western Apache (1935)
- William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858 (University of Oklahoma Press)
- Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (University of Arizona Press)
- Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press)
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2018-2022, via the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona
Related reading: Life of Geronimo, Pueblo Nation, Sioux Nation and Wichita Nation.