Starting with the people
The repeated word in the title is a slip. This article uses it as a prompt to look at the people Juh led, the Nednhi Apache, one of the four bands usually listed for the Chiricahua Apache. The Chiricahua are one of several Apache peoples, and the Nednhi should not be confused with the Western Apache or the Mescalero. Juh himself is profiled separately.
The Nednhi are less well documented than the Chokonen, Chihenne and Bedonkohe, partly because they lived far from American posts. Their name appears with different spellings, and translations of it vary, so it is best not to rely on any single rendering.
A homeland in the mountains of Mexico
The Nednhi are generally associated with the Sierra Madre Occidental, the long mountain range running through the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Their range is often described as including river canyons and high country below the border, with seasonal movements that sometimes reached north into the borderlands of what is now Arizona and New Mexico. They hunted, gathered plants, and, at times, traded or raided. Specific places that mattered to the band are not well recorded in public sources, and some knowledge belongs to descendants.
Living in the Sierra Madre meant living under a different political regime from the Apache bands in the United States. Mexican officials, settlers and militia dealt with the Nednhi in ways that shifted between treaty-making, trade and campaigns. The wider pattern is part of Apache Mexico conflict, a history that began under Spanish rule and continued after Mexican independence.
Ties to the other bands
Marriage and kinship connected the Nednhi to the Chokonen, Chihenne and Bedonkohe, and these ties are how Juh came to be allied with leaders like Geronimo and Naiche. People moved between bands for marriage, safety or opportunity, so the boundaries were more fluid than a list of four names suggests.
Juh’s place among Chiricahua leaders is therefore best described as a regional leader of one band whose actions often intersected with others. He is not generally described as the leader of all the Chiricahua, no one held that role, and he should not be placed above the other leaders. The word “fierce” says more about how outsiders wrote than about his standing within his own community.
Pressure from several directions
By the late nineteenth century, the Nednhi were under pressure from the Mexican army and from state governments, and from American troops pursuing Chiricahua groups. Some Nednhi families came in to reservations in the United States, while others stayed in the mountains. After Juh’s death in the early 1880s, leadership of his group passed to others, and the band’s separate identity weakened.
After Geronimo’s group surrendered in 1886, people with Nednhi ties were among the Chiricahua sent east. Daklugie, Juh’s son, was among the children later sent to Carlisle. Their story overlaps with the history of the Chiricahua at Fort Sill and with the 1913 Chiricahua release, when families chose between Oklahoma and Mescalero.
Nednhi descendants today
There is no single “Nednhi community” in the way there are tribal governments, and families trace their histories in different ways. Some Nednhi descendants belong to the Fort Sill Apache Tribe in Oklahoma, and others to the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico.
Readers should be careful of sources that claim to know the band’s private beliefs or ceremonies. They are not public, and the nations’ own official sources are the best place for current information.