Apache Odyssey: A Journey Between Two Worlds (Revised) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803286160)

In 1933, famed anthropologist Morris Opler met a Mescalero Apache he called Chris and worked with him to record the man's life story, from the bloody Apache Wars into the reservation years of the mid-twentieth century. Chris's vivid recollections are enriched at strategic moments with crucial background information on Apache history and culture, supplied by Opler.

Chris was born around 1880, the son of a Chiricahua man and a Mescalero woman. At the age of six, he and his family and other Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war and were relocated by the U.S. government to Florida and Alabama. Eventually settling on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Chris grew up expecting to become a shaman like his parents. Although Chris apprenticed as a shaman, his confidence in his healing ability waned after he was forced at the age of seventeen to attend federal government schools. Nonetheless, his interest in Mescalero religion, healing, and other traditional customs and beliefs remained, and that intimate knowledge of his people's world underscores and deepens the story of his own life.

Author: Morris E. Opler
ISBN-10: 0803286163
ISBN-13: 9780803286160
Publisher: Bison Books
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2002
Pages: 302
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.03h x 6.04w x 0.70d