The White Mountain Apache Tribe

The White Mountain Apache live in eastern Arizona, where they also believe their ancestral roots are. According to creation stories such as the one below passed from generation to generation via oral tradition, the Creator made Mother Earth and the animals, then formed man and woman from the land on which the reservation sits. These First People were surrounded by darkness, until finally they were able to see the colors blue, red, yellow, and white, also known as the four sacred colors. The land is surrounded by sacred mountains named after these colors—the Black Mountain in the East, the Blue Mountain (or Chief Mountain) to the South, the Western Red Mountain, and the White Mountain which is North of the reservation. Medicine men, in addition to holding wisdom about herbs and medicines, are the members of the tribe who know all the creation songs and details of the creation story from beginning to end.

As the White Mountain Apache territory is in a somewhat isolated region of Arizona, the people of the tribe were not in any significant contact with colonial powers until 1848, when the land was established as a part of the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Before colonial contact, White Mountain Apache settlements were dotted along waterways where they grew crops such as corn, beans, sunflowers, and squash. The land was not only good for farming, but also for hunting—the land is home to some of the world's largest bull elk. The l.67 million acres of land on which the reservation now sits ranges from 2,600 to 11,400 feet in elevation and holds over 400 miles of rivers and streams, which are teeming with Apache trout after conservation efforts by the tribe.

Pre-colonialization, the White Mountain Apache were not confined to a specific and defined piece of land, but rather remained somewhat nomadic. They built an economy off of hunting and gathering, agriculture, and trading with or raiding neighboring settlements. The tribe's deeply rooted connection with the land through their creation story touches most areas of life—the continuation of oral tradition paired with the tribe's reverence for tradition and nature simultaneously defines and solidifies White Mountain Apache identity.

Amerman, Stephen Kent. “‘THIS IS OUR LAND’: The White Mountain Apache Trophy Elk Hunt and Tribal Sovereignty.” The Journal of Arizona History, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002. 

“Fire Control Map of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. Arizona. 1928.” Arizona Memory Project, Arizona State Library, https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/forestmaps/id/10. 

Goddard, Pliny Earle. Myths and Tales from the White Mountain Apache. The American Museum of Natural History, 1919. 

Sabau, Isabelle, and Mircea Sabau. Review of Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. 

“White Mountain Apache.” Cline Library - Indigenous Voices of the Colorado Plateau, https://library.nau.edu/speccoll/exhibits/indigenous_voices/white_mountain_apache/overview.html.