The Apache Diaspora

Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival

By: Paul Conrad

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Across four centuries, Apache (Nde) peoples in the North American West confronted enslavement and forced migration schemes intended to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate them. While many Indigenous groups in the Americas lived through similar histories, Apaches were especially affected owing to their mobility, resistance, and proximity to multiple imperial powers.

Based on archival research in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, as well Apache oral histories, The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. As Conrad argues, diaspora was deeply influential not only to those displaced, but also to Apache groups who managed to remain in the West, influencing the strategies of mobility and resistance for which they would become famous around the world.

Through a broad chronological and geographical scope, The Apache Diaspora sheds new light on a range of topics, including genocide and Indigenous survival, the intersection of Native and African diasporas, and the rise of deportation and incarceration as key strategies of state control. As Conrad demonstrates, centuries of enslavement, warfare, and forced migrations failed to bring a final solution to the supposed problem of Apache independence and mobility. Yet in the process, both Native and colonial societies were changed.

©2021 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2022 Tantor

Very Informative ... and Biased

I really enjoyed this book, which detailed Apaches' varied and mostly traumatic experiences with European invaders of their homeland beginning in the 17th century and continuing through roughly the 1910s. From slavery to the Spanish, to conciliation and violence by the Mexicans, to the Americans who imprisoned many in Florida following the capture of Geronimo and his followers. The government even imprisoned those Apache scouts that helped capture Geronimo to begin with, a terrible miscarriage of justice.

The narrator was good and did a fine job of sounding disapproving when reading the judgments of author Paul Conrad towards Europeans and Anglo-Americans who subjugated Apache peoples. As a historian myself, I try not to put my own 21st century morality on that of people dozens or hundreds of years in the past, but Conrad makes clear his own bias in that regards. His bias is pro-Native, which to me is merely the other swing of the pendulum from pro-Anglo-American which it has, admittedly, been for so many years. It is easy to sympathize with the plight of the Apaches because they still continue to struggle with remnants of the past, however.