For nearly 200 years the Jicarilla band of the Apache people thrived at the intersection of Pueblo Indian and Spanish colonial settlements in northern New Mexico. Part of the much larger nomadic Athabasca people, the Apaches and Navajos arrived in the Southwest around A.D. 1500, about the same time as the Spanish. They were then pushed from the Plains by other tribes and pulled into the Rio Grande Valley by contact with the Pueblo people and Spanish settlers. They thrived as traders among all these groups—Plains, Pueblos, Spanish, and mixed blood people of northern New Mexico.
Archaeologist Sunday Eiselt of Southern Methodist University begins this comprehensive study in prehistoric times and ends with the Jicarilla being forced onto a reservation in the 1880s, one of the last tribes in the United States to avoid the reservation system. She uses ample archaeological and ethnohistorical data to trace the modern development of the tribe and the evolution of institutions that ensured its survival despite dramatic changes in lifestyle and homeland.
