A varied and personal history
When people ask how Christianity affected Apache culture, the honest answer is that it depends on the nation, the period and the person. Some Apache people declined missionary teaching for generations, some adopted Christianity fully, some practice both Christian and traditional religion, and many have taken part in churches that Apache people themselves lead. This article describes the broad patterns. Matters of belief are personal and are not a measure of how Apache someone is.
Spanish and Mexican periods
Spanish colonial authorities in the Southwest and Texas saw missions as a tool for both religion and control. Franciscans and other clergy worked with the Pueblo peoples and others, and attempted at times to settle groups of Apache at or near missions and presidios. These attempts are well documented for some Apache groups, including Lipan and Jicarilla communities, but they were generally short-lived or only partly successful, and many Apache groups stayed outside the mission system. Records of the period often show Apache peoples using the arrangements for their own purposes, such as trade or temporary safety, and leaving when conditions changed.
Because the surviving documents are largely Spanish, they reflect colonial viewpoints. Tracing the effects on Apache religion therefore means reading carefully and acknowledging how little is known of Apache views at the time. Under Mexican rule after 1821, the mission system declined, and Apache contact with Catholic institutions continued mainly through settlements and families in northern Mexico, where many people had both Apache and Mexican relatives.
Settlement and pressure under the United States
As American settlers, miners and soldiers arrived in the nineteenth century, pressure on Apache land and livelihoods grew. Settlement did not only bring a new religion; it brought disease, new laws and loss of land that undermined the setting in which many religious practices were carried out. Many ceremonies depend on particular places and seasons, on the availability of certain plants, and on gathering relatives. When families were confined to reservations, these conditions changed, and so did the opportunities to practice.
Apache religion, like other forms of religion, was never simply frozen. Some historians have noted that the movement around a Western Apache prophet at Cibecue in 1881, which ended in the Cibecue Creek incident, drew on a mixture of Apache and Christian ideas. Scholars differ about how to interpret it, and it is better read as one example of people responding to rapid change in religious terms than as a model of what Apache religion was like.
Missions on the reservations
On reservations, the federal government assigned or allowed various churches to operate among Native communities. Over the following decades, Catholic, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed and other Protestant churches established missions on Apache reservations, running churches, schools and sometimes clinics. Many Apache families sent children to these institutions for schooling, partly by choice and partly under compulsion. Christian missions among Apache peoples were often tied to the federal assimilation policy, and missionaries on Apache reservations commonly discouraged traditional ceremonies and the use of Apache languages.
The effects were mixed. Some families experienced missions as places of education, food and practical help. Others remember them as sources of harm, especially where schools separated children from their families. Both memories are real, and they can sit side by side within a single community.
How people responded
Apache responses fell along a range:
- Declining conversion and continuing traditional practices, sometimes in private.
- Adopting Christianity as a primary faith, and joining or founding congregations.
- Combining church life with traditional ceremonies, treating them as different and compatible parts of life.
- Joining other religions, such as the Native American Church, which some Apache communities took up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
None of these choices is more authentic than another. People made them for personal, family and political reasons, and they sometimes changed over a lifetime.
Apache churches today
Today, many Apache communities have congregations of various denominations, and many of them are led by Apache pastors, deacons and lay leaders. Church services may include hymns or readings in an Apache language, and church events such as revivals, funerals and holiday gatherings are important occasions for families. Church members are also often active in language and community programs. Accounts of Apache religion today need to include these congregations alongside traditional ceremonial life, since both are part of the present.
Relations between churches and traditional practitioners vary. In some places they cooperate, in others there has been disagreement, and in many families both are part of the household. These are internal matters for the communities, and an outside writer should not summarize them too neatly.
Limits of this account
This article does not describe any ceremonial content, and it does not claim that any denomination or practice is representative. For accurate statements about religious life in a particular nation, readers should consult that nation’s own sources or its churches directly.