By Ruben Leyva

The train carried many Apaches east, but not all of them went. Some stayed behind in the rocks, canyons, and wind, where memory and spirit still moved. The story of the Gila Apache, known administratively as the Chihene Nde Nation, is one such tale. Their continued presence in their ancestral homelands affirms survival, but not without cost.

One enduring form of exclusion facing the Gila Apache is the ongoing denial of authenticity—a kind of erasure rooted not in their absence but in the dominance of a single Chiricahua narrative and a widespread lack of public knowledge about those who have continued their culture in secrecy, fearing deportation.
Though ancestrally tied to the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war taken to Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma, the Gila Apache have remained in their ancestral territory, hidden yet resilient. They are a politically distinct people whose culture was never extinguished, only overlooked—hidden in plain sight.

To remain was not to be fully recognized. Instead, the Gila Apache found themselves walking the borderlands of identity—insiders to the land, outsiders to the law. Their survival is not simply an act of endurance, but a refusal of the "taken-for-granted" histories that erase those who stayed. This is not just storytelling; it is critical ethnography in motion.

While patterns of survival and hidden trauma appear across many Indigenous histories, the experience of the Gila Apache stands apart in critical ways. Scholars such as M. Grace Hunt Watkinson have documented the displacement of the Mescalero Apache and the Navajo during their internment at Bosque Redondo. However, these comparisons risk a false equivalence. Contrary to the story of the Gila Apache, the Mescalero, and many Navajo eventually returned to largely intact homelands. Their ability to reunite with relatives who had never been captured and to reoccupy and repopulate traditional territories ultimately supported reestablishing federally recognized reservations in their ancestral lands.

For the Gila Apache, no such path of return existed. By the time Chiricahua prisoners of war were released after 27 years, and Gila Apache families cautiously emerged from hiding, much of their ancestral land had already been taken by settlers and incorporated into public lands. Their reappearance was unwelcome, and their political and social presence was suppressed. Unlike their Chiricahua relatives, whose trauma was marked by forced removal and captivity, the Gila Apache endured a different kind of loss: the trauma of prolonged invisibility. A challenged heritage for not riding the train east, they were excluded not from a distant territory, but from the very land they had never left.

Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi people, emerged from California's wilderness in 1911 after decades of seclusion that followed the near extermination of his tribe. While undeniably Native, he remained outside the federal identity constructs of "American Indian." Like Ishi, some Gila Apache privately preserved their cultural identity by rolling their children in the dirt of their homeland and cutting their hair in mourning, as was the ritual. Unlike Ishi, they did so through dispersed family networks, retaining knowledge of kin and place. Yet the cost of survival was real: traditions and language eroded due to a lack of use outside the immediate family. As survival did not mean complete disconnection, as many Gila Apache today are reconnecting and remembering together.

Watkinson's essay, "In the Land of the Mountain Gods," powerfully examines the forced removal of the Mescalero to Bosque Redondo and the Chiricahua exile to Florida. Drawing on oral testimony and historical sources, she articulates the nature of cultural genocide through spiritual displacement. Yet this lens overlooks the Apachean peoples who were never entirely removed. The Gila Apache, denied a permanent reservation of their own, remained targets of violence well into the 20th century in the U.S. and Mexico. These violent campaigns, often justified by labeling the Gila Apache as "Bronco Apaches"—a pejorative term—were not simply about capture. They were about eradication.

In 1929, a heavily armed posse composed of men from Douglas, Arizona, and northern Mexico searched the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains to recover a three-year-old Mexican boy, Gerardo. He had been taken captive after witnessing the murder of his mother, as his father, Francisco Fimbres, watched helplessly from a distance. Historian Leah Candolin Cook describes this act as retaliation for the earlier abduction of an Apache girl from the Sierra Madre by local Mexicans. Fleeing reprisal, the Apache took Gerardo deep into the canyons and rugged landscapes they called home.

Pronounced 'Tseh-yee' N-DEH,' Tseyi' Ndee means 'People Within the Rocks,' referencing not only geographic orientation but also a Gila Apache cultural practice: seeking shelter, ceremony, and spiritual distance in canyoned and mountainous terrain. This name conjures the image of the prayer runner—swift, sure-footed, and in communion with the spirit of the land and wind. What was labeled wild was instead land-based intelligence: sacred motion through ancestral ground.

Some families found ways to remain in their ancestral Gila Apache homelands after 1886. Like their Navajo and Mescalero kin [kíí], who avoided reservations through resilience and quiet motion, the Gila Apache turned to mountainous areas like Catron County, at the time a part of Socorro County, New Mexico, and the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Today, these regions remain sparsely inhabited. Catron County, New Mexico's largest by land, has one of the state's smallest populations. To remain was not to escape hardship—it was to endure exclusion, violence, and invisibility.

On May 10, 2025, I spoke to the community of Quemado—Tse Yizhdááhí, "The Place Where the Rocks Were Burned." There, we discussed the historic 1909 renaming of the community of Mangas in honor of the Apache leader Mangas Coloradas. The conversation shifted to which Apache local group once inhabited the region stretching from Reserve northward into the Gallo and Tularosa Mountains. Audience members and I talked about the Tse Go T'éél Ndee—the People of the Flat Rock Mesa. Among those present was elder Placida "Placy" Castillo Padilla, born in 1933 and raised in Mangas. With deep ties to the area and ancestry, she recalled the Gallo Mountains as a shared memory between Apache and Mexican families.

She recounted the story of "El Indio," a man of mixed Apache and Mexican heritage, rejected by both. Based on historic memory, his Mexican relatives viewed his Apache roots with suspicion. At the same time, his Apache kin feared being accused of harboring a settler child to be traded or sold. Both sides saw danger; neither offered refuge. Though born of the land, he was unwelcome in every camp—forever on the outside, watching fires he could not join. To Padilla, this was not merely a tale of one man's misfortune but a real-life story, reflecting the reality of Gila Apache survivor families.

These survivors—like "El Indio"—lived unacknowledged lives between two worlds. Their presence remained, but their identity was denied. They were not deported, but they were erased. To speak their names now is to restore a portion of what was lost. Their endurance, outside reservation rolls yet rooted in sacred ground, demands recognition. Honoring them is not just about remembering; it requires interpretation: carrying the burden of witness, relation, and historian. The land remembers, but those without connection cannot hear it. That responsibility is ours because we deeply listen.

Stories of survival transcend geography. Fort Sill historian Gillette Griswold documents Apache Frank (Leyva), my great-grandfather, who lived on several reservations, albeit not permanently, visiting his mother, Ishnoh'n, at Fort Sill and taking her to see her younger son, Chiricahua Jim. Identified as an Apache Scout, Jim Miller requested Mescalero as his home before being released from service. According to Griswold, Ishnoh'n reached Jim before she passed away in 1909 and before the prisoners of war were freed.
In 1913, when the Chiricahua were freed, 183 made the Mescalero Apache Reservation their permanent home in New Mexico, while the other 78 stayed and chose Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as their home community. Evelyn Martine Gaines, the great-granddaughter of Mangas Coloradas and Victorio, recalled 'Wild Apaches' from Mexico visiting her father, who chose to live at Mescalero. These movements reflect ties between different political leadership of exiled groups and homeland families. These were not broken communities, but braided ones.

Massai, believed to be a member of the Chihene Nde (Chih Ndee - Red Paint Apache People), became a symbol of resistance. After escaping from a train en route to Florida, he returned to the mountains. One story recounts an Anglo rider encountering Massai on foot on the Plains of San Agustín, running alongside the horse, speaking without breath. His pace evoked more than physical stamina; it echoed the sacred motion of the gołbééhí ndee: 'prayer runners.' This phrase embodies a lifestyle: motion + purpose + place.

Massai and his family were living in the San Mateo Mountains when a confrontation with nearby settlers changed everything. After Massai took a horse, likely out of necessity, from a settler determined to reclaim it with the help of armed neighbors, he knew his time in the area was limited. Gunshots followed. When Massai was killed, his wife, Zanagoliche, fled with their children, navigating danger on her own. With the assistance of a Spanish-speaking family in San Marcial, she reached safety and eventually reunited with relatives at the Mescalero Reservation. Her return reflects the enduring ties between reservation communities and homeland Apaches—bonds that never fully dissolved. Gila Apache families remained unseen, uncaptured, and quietly rooted in their ancestral land. Still, the Apaches on all the reservations knew of their existence, as did informed ethnologists like Grenville Goodwin, who went looking for them in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

As documented by Grenville Goodwin and his son Neil, small bands led by Apache Juan, composed primarily of women and children, survived targeted extermination campaigns in the Sierra Madre well into the 1930s. Although settler accounts claimed these Apaches were wiped out in a massacre that included Apache Juan in 1931, my cousin, raised in the Sierra Madre, stands as living testimony to their survival. However, not all were as fortunate. The Goodwin oral histories, including those preserved at the University of Arizona, affirm what we as descendants continue to carry in body, in story, and in memory.

In the fall of 2025, the Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces will host an exhibit that compares the histories of the region's Indigenous Peoples. Among the featured groups are the Chihene Nde Nation, the Gila Apache based in New Mexico, and the Mescalero-Lipan-Chiricahua blended Apache community of the Mescalero Apache Reservation. This exhibition provides a long-overdue platform highlighting the shared struggle and unique survival rooted in ceremony, kinship, and place. It is not a story of erasure but of endurance.

To remember the prayer runner is to honor this legacy of spirit and survivance. Just as the runner does not hesitate before the climb, the Tseyi' Ndee did not abandon their land-based identity to history. They ran with intention. This running was a prayer for survival. These prayers were believed to etch trails into the land and to wear away canyons, creating living spaces for families.

Each syllable of Tseyi' Ndee carries what bureaucratic files cannot: the prayers of our ancestors, like Geronimo, who said in his autobiography, "...I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each."