Plains Apache Tipis: Residential and Ceremonial Lodges

For many Americans, tipis symbolize the nomadic Native American culture and lifestyle. This understanding has been so extensively advanced by paintings, advertising, films, and television that tipis have come to be associated with Native American groups in almost all geographical regions. Tipis were, however, an integral part of residential and ceremonial life in the Great Plains where both construction and use were closely tied to indigenous social organization, politics, war, and spirituality. Among the Kiowa and Plains Apache, residents of the Southern Plains, some tipi covers were painted to reflect war deeds or spiritual blessings. This paper examines the construction, decoration, ownership, and destruction of historic Plains Apache tipis, as well as modern uses of the iconic structures.

Jicarilla Apache

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.