From Gunpowder and Disease to Bureaucratic Negligence and a Mythologized Past: How Nineteenth-Century Hardships are Invoked in Contemporary Western Apache Land Defense.
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2025-06-15
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en
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This thesis examines how present-day Western Apache activists invoke nineteenth-century struggles over land to defend sacred sites, particularly Oak Flat (Chi'chil Bildagoteel). Drawing on testimonies, oral traditions, ceremonies, and legal statements, it explores how cultural memory and ancestral knowledge are mobilized in contemporary land defense. Oak Flat, under threat from copper mining, symbolizes more than a local dispute, as it embodies the historical continuity of dispossession and the ongoing fight for sovereignty and cultural survival. By tracing the evolution of Apache historiography and heritage studies, this research highlights how cultural practices and activism connect the past to present resistance. Central to this activism is the belief that land and identity are inseparable, and that memory is a strategic and dynamic force, rather than a passive one. This study contributes to broader understandings of Indigenous heritage as lived, political, and forward-facing, where protecting sacred landscapes becomes both an act of remembrance and a means of asserting presence and survivance.
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