Lipan Apache Homes

Apache, Lipan (Native Americans of the Southwest)

Lipan may mean "warriors of the mountains." Apache comes from the Zuni word Apachu, meaning "enemy." The Apache call themselves Ndee, or Dine’e , "the People."

Location The Apache arrived in the Southwest from present-day Canada around 1400. By about 1700, the Lipan were living on the south-central Texas plains, as far south as Texas’s Colorado River. Today they live on the Mescalero Reservation, in southeast New Mexico.

Population Approximately 100 Lipan Apache lived in their region around 1900, although possibly up to ten times as many lived there prior to contact with non-natives. Of roughly 25,000 Apaches nationwide in 1990, 3,500, including Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache, lived on the Mescalero Reservation; several hundred lived off-reservation.

Language The people spoke a dialect of Southern Athapaskan, or Apachean.

History Ancestors of today’s Apache Indians began the trek from Asia to North America in roughly 1000 B.C.E. Most of this group, which included the Athapaskans, was known as the Nadene. By 1300, the group that was to become the Southern Athapaskans (Apaches and Navajos) broke away from other Athapaskan tribes and began migrating southward, reaching the American Southwest around 1400 and crystallizing into separate cultural groups.

Before contact with the Spanish, the Apaches were relatively peaceful and may have engaged in some agricultural activities. By about 1700 the Lipan had become separated from the Jicarilla and had migrated into the central and south Texas plains. They had also acquired horses and had become expert buffalo hunters and raiders of the western plains from Kansas to Mexico. Caddoan villages felt the wrath of Lipan raiders and slavers until they acquired guns from French traders and were able to drive the Lipan back into Texas.

A Lipan request for Spanish protection against the Comanche, who were pressing them from the north and east, resulted in the establishment of a mission in 1757, which the Comanche promptly destroyed the following year. By the late eighteenth century, the Comanche had forced most Lipans from Texas into New Mexico to join other Apache bands there.

By the early nineteenth century , the remaining Lipans had established good terms with the Texans, serving as their scouts, guides, and trading partners. Following the war between Mexico and the United States (1848), the Apaches, who did their part to bring misery to Mexico, assumed that the Americans would continue as allies. Instead, the Texans adopted an extermination policy, and those Lipans who escaped went to live in Mexico. In the late 1870s, some Lipans fought with the Chiricahua leader Victorio in his last stand against the United States and captivity. He and they were killed in Mexico.

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