As we grew up, going back to Mexico was a foreign idea. “They mentioned the country was so beautiful, and it had everything. “For years, our grandparents indicated they wanted to go back to Mexico and eastern Arizona,” he said over dinner one night in Benson. What he knew of his ancestors came from the stories of his grandparents who had warm memories of the terrain that had been home to them and their ancestors. For the most part, the stories are the strongest link to their past and distinguish them from other ethnic groups who, of course, have their own memories and stories.Īs a child, the stories Kanseah heard were about southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Anthropologists refer to many contemporary Indian groups as memory cultures, meaning that while they may not live like their ancestors or practice esoteric rituals, they share common memories and stories they’ve all heard at family gatherings. What he knew about his ancestral past in Sonora and Arizona came from his grandparents and other relatives who still had relatively fresh memories. Kanseah, 59, was born on the Mescalero Reservation. The majority, 181 of them, chose Mescalero, an area almost directly east of the mountain ranges in eastern Arizona that had been their homeland. government said the Chircahuas were no longer prisoners of war and gave them a choice of remaining at Fort Sill or moving in with the Mescalero and Lipan Apaches on the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. Like all other Chiricahua Apaches who were evicted from southern Arizona at the end of the Indian wars in 1886, his ancestors were shipped to an overcrowded camp in Florida as prisoners of war, later to Alabama and Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In the next six and a half hours he drove south and west 362 miles to Tucson, the first leg in a journey that would take him 129 years back in time. ON OCTOBER 9 Berle Kanseah loaded his pickup truck and left the high country of the Mescalero Apache Reservation in western New Mexico. Reprinted courtesy of the Tucson Weekly December 10-16, 1998 Chiricahua Memories Descendants of Apache Warriors Revisit Cochise’s Final Battleground
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