|
|
 |
 In Court, No One Can Hear You Scream "Geronimo!" By Gregory McNamee (Random House). Cloth, $25. IN THE NINETEENTH century, the United States government tested the Chiricahua Apache people in battle. It won; after Geronimo's uprising, the Chiricahuas were removed from their homeland in southeastern Arizona, sent off to Florida, then Alabama, and then Oklahoma. Every Chiricahua man, woman and child was treated as a prisoner of war, write Washington-based attorney Michael Lieder and New Mexico novelist Jake Page, "whether or not they had participated in warfare against the United States or were then capable of doing so."
Not until the late 1970s did it allow that the Chiricahuas were indeed the rightful owners of that rich parcel of real estate. The government then awarded the Chiricahuas $22 million, the seventh-largest compensation issued by the commission in an aboriginal land claim--but a far smaller settlement, the authors argue, than they deserved for having been uprooted from their homes in the first place.
This all makes for meatier, and in the end far more moving, courtroom
drama than any John Grisham potboiler, although the Chiricahuas'
story is unlikely to make the bestseller list. Lieder and Page
relate the tangled story of the Chiricahuas' legal odyssey in
great detail, and very well--even if they downplay the internal
divisions within the band that eased the federal government's
victory in the first place, divisions that came into play again
a century later when some Apache leaders attempted to lease a
portion of the Mescalero Reservation to the federal government
as a nuclear-waste dump.
|
 |
Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives
|
 |
© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
|
The Chiricahuas were finally merged with the Mescalero Apache
band on a reservation in southern New Mexico. They were then forgotten,
edged to bureaucratic extinction until 1946, when President Truman
ordered the creation of the Indian Claims Commission to consider
tribal rights over conquered territory. The commission took its
time in deciding whether the Chiricahuas had established what
it called "use and occupancy" in the lands that had
been taken from them, and in evaluating the value of those lands,
including the region of Bisbee, the site of billions of dollars
worth of gold, silver and copper.
