Along the Way

The Name's the Thing, So Say the Apaches

The first non-Indians to step foot in Arizona some 400 years ago were courageous and adventurous. Many of them probably didn't consider that they also were ignorant and presumptuous.

As a result, the Spaniards who arrived in the 1500s, and the various settlers who followed them, set about naming mountains and rivers and creeks as though these features had not previously been labeled by the native inhabitants.

Apaches didn't have maps, but it is clear that they had names for places on what is now the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. The words Fort Apache are a good example. Old Indians knew it as Tx'óghagai, a word that is unpronounceable in English but which is clearly descriptive in the Apache language.

The word, said Edgar Perry, a member of the White Mountains Apache tribe and a linguistic specialist of the White Mountain Apache Culture Center, refers to a place "where the white reeds or grasses grow like arrows," an accurate description of the rolling valley east of Salt River Canyon where Fort Apache is nestled.

On most parts of the reservation today, only the elderly members of the tribe are likely to know a place's Apache name, and therein lies a sensitive issue for Indians involved in a project of restoring Apache names to places now identified by English words.

"All of the mountains around here have Apache names, but they're not on the map because nobody knows how to read and write Apache," said Perry. Although a written form of Apache was introduced several years ago by a Christian organization, most of the 10,000 members of the White Mountains Apache Indian Tribe have never learned it, Perry said. Speakers of the Apache language, he observed, see images rather than words.

"If you say 'cow' to Apaches, they just see the animal, not a word spelled out," he noted. "Nobody knows how to write down the names of things and places." Some tribal members, in fact, cannot even speak Apache "and don't care about the language," he lamented.

However, Keith Basso, an anthropologist who learned the Apache language, has spent seven years gathering Apache place-names and re-creating a map of a 35-square-mile portion of the reservation around Cibecue, a community northwest of Fort Apache. Basso had been spending summers on the reservation since 1958, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard University, learning Apache history and customs.

"I began to see how superimposing an Anglo language on an Apache landscape was a subtle form of political oppression and domination," he said. "Naming places" he declared, "is a way of taking legal and political control of an area. Surely one way of appropriating territory is naming it.

"When you ask Apache people about how places got their names, they tell you the ancestors made these names, and they made them well. The names are a mnemonic peg on which to hang a social history, and I wanted to help bring them back."

With support from Tribal Chairman Ronnie Lupe, Basso obtained grants from two private organizations and the National Science Foundation. While a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and later as a professor at Yale University, he spent summers collecting placenames and stories from people in the Cibecue District.

Lupe said, "Hopefully, as time flies, we will do the whole reservation. Teaching our kids the Apache placenames is one way to connect them to their culture."

Most places on the reservation, like most of Arizona, were named by Spanish explorers, missionaries, and Anglo settlers or soldiers who didn't know the Apache names or couldn't pronounce and spell them, though the words described the places accurately in Apache.

For example, elderly Apaches know the town of Whiteriver, where the tribal headquarters is located, as Ch'ilwosh, meaning a "valley or natural grade for the river to flow."

White Springs, near Cibecue, is known as Tu'hagai, meaning "water whiteness up and out."

Lupe indicated the non-Indian names were offensive because they contribute to the eradication of the Apaches' link to their culture.

Pointing to a dip in the ridgeline of mountains east of Whiteriver, he said, "There's a trail that goes through there. We Apaches never gave it a name, but it was the main commerce and trade route between our communities before the days of roads and cars.

"Apaches always just refer to it in our language as 'trail over that mountain,' and people know what you mean, but if you look on topographical maps, you see it's called U.S. Military Trail. Our people used it long before the military was here.' Not all Apaches agree with the attempt to replace English placenames with Apache names.

Bonnie Danford, an Apache who speaks, reads, and writes Apache, said her children cannot speak Apache, "and I don't know if younger kids would get used to using Apache names. My son knows one word in Apache. It's tsígist'íí, which means 'tortilla.' "He learned it because he thinks it's English."