Correcting the title
The title suggests a single “relocation program” run by the US military. No such program existed under that name. Two quite different things are covered by the word relocation in Apache history. The first was a series of forced removals carried out largely by the Army, often alongside civilian Indian agents, mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. The second was a civilian program of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, begun in the early 1950s, that encouraged Native people to move to cities. The Army had no role in the second. Both affected Apache people, in very different ways, and both are described here in general terms.
Army removals in the nineteenth century
After the United States took control of the Southwest in 1848, the Army became the main federal presence among Apache peoples. Reservation policy in the 1870s often aimed at concentrating different groups on a small number of reservations, with San Carlos in Arizona becoming the best-known. The result was that people from many local groups, with different leaders, homelands and sometimes languages, were pushed together on land that many of them did not know.
Several removals illustrate the pattern, though sources differ on details and numbers:
- In 1875 the Yavapai and Tonto Apache living around the Rio Verde reservation were removed to San Carlos on foot in cold weather, a journey of well over a hundred miles in which many suffered. The Rio Verde removal is described in its own article.
- The Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona was closed in the mid-1870s and its people were moved to San Carlos. Warm Springs people, also called the Chihenne, were moved from their New Mexico homeland to San Carlos a short time later. Several resisted or left, a decision that fed into the conflicts of the following years.
- In 1886, after the surrender of a Chiricahua group under Geronimo, the Army sent Chiricahua men, women and children, including people who had not taken part in the fighting and some who had served as Army scouts, as prisoners of war to Florida. This period is covered under Chiricahua prisoners of war and Fort Marion imprisonment. After years in Florida and Alabama, the group was moved to Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1894, and the prisoner of war status ended in 1913.
Earlier, in 1863 to 1868, the Army held many Mescalero Apache people, together with Navajo, at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, a site with poor water, crop failures and widespread illness; the Mescalero at Bosque Redondo left in the mid-1860s and later returned to their mountain homeland. Several of these events involved a mix of Army and civilian officials, which is one reason historians avoid describing them as a single program. What they share is the use of force or its threat, and a disregard for the places that mattered to the people moved.
The effects were wide. Families were separated, sometimes for years. People died during the moves or soon after of exposure, disease and hunger. Leaders lost authority when groups were combined. Sacred places, farming fields and hunting grounds were left behind. Many Apache communities still tell these removals as part of their own histories, and many place names reflect them. The broader consequences are discussed under forced relocation and the impact of colonization.
The BIA urban relocation program
The second chapter began in 1952, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs started a Voluntary Relocation Program. In 1956 it became the Employment Assistance Program. The program offered Native people travel costs, help finding jobs and housing, and short-term support if they moved to cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and others. It was part of the federal termination policy of that period, which aimed to reduce the federal government’s responsibilities to tribes. Officials presented the program as an opportunity, because reservations had few jobs.
Experiences were mixed. Some participants found steady work and stayed. Others struggled with high rents, discrimination, unfamiliar surroundings and the loss of their support networks, and many returned home. Over time, the program contributed to the growth of urban Native communities, and with them urban Indian centers and health programs. Apache individuals and families were among the many Native people who took part, though the scale and details differ from reservation to reservation and are best learned from local records and the nations themselves. Debates continue over whether the program was a genuine choice or one made under economic pressure.
Why the distinction matters
Treating the two as one story would blur important differences: one involved armed force and imprisonment, the other offered a voluntary, if constrained, choice. Both nonetheless left questions about connection to land and kin that Apache communities still address today, for instance in how nations maintain ties with members who live in cities. For current information about enrollment and programs for off-reservation members, consult each nation’s official website.