Local opinion: Apaches should be foremost in Chiricahua National Park discussion

Recently, congressional efforts to upgrade the status of Chiricahua National Monument to a national park have been gaining momentum. With the support of Senators Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, The Chiricahua National Park Act passed the Senate in 2022. While a similar bill has not yet passed the House, Representative Juan Ciscomani has said he supports the initiative, and all three delegates have pledged to push for Chiricahua to become a national park again this legislative session.

While much of the debate around Chiricahua’s status has revolved around the social, economic, and environmental impacts of it becoming a park, the opinions of its previous Apache inhabitants have been largely absent from the conversation. But because of historical injustices they have suffered, they should be given special consideration in deciding whether Chiricahua should become a national park.

In the late 1800s, after hundreds of years of defending against first Spanish and then Mexican incursions into their homeland, the Chiricahua Apache were fighting a last-ditch effort against an increasing wave of American settlers. In 1872, tired of fighting and trying to salvage what he could for his people, Chief Cochise met with U.S. Army General Otis Howard to negotiate an end to the hostilities. Cochise agreed to end attacks on Americans in return for the Chiricahua Apache receiving their own reservation free of settlers.

President Grant’s 1872 Executive Order establishing the Chiricahua Indian Reservation stipulated that it encompassed most of the Chiricahua Mountains, including the land on which the monument is currently located, as well as a wide swath of today’s Cochise County. Although the U.S. government failed to deliver the rations it had agreed to provide as part of the agreement, Cochise kept his word and Apache attacks on Americans decreased to almost nothing. The reservation had served its purpose.

Despite the cessation of hostilities, in 1876, President Grant abolished the reservation. The ostensible reason was collective punishment for the killing by two Apaches of of two White alcohol vendors who were illegally on the reservation. However, historians generally agree that the real reason for ending the reservation was the pressure on Grant by mining interests who wanted access to Southeast Arizona because they thought it was ripe for exploitation. The discovery of silver and the founding of Tombstone in 1877, as well as later mineral discoveries in Bisbee and elsewhere, proved their hunch correct.

Unfortunately, the prosperity of the mining industry came at the expense of the lives and culture of the Chiricahua Apaches. When their reservation was eliminated, they were forcibly relocated to the San Carlos Reservation in central Arizona. This was a devastating blow because they were now living in the hot desert hundreds of miles from their mountain home, on land rife with malaria, and were forced to live with culturally and linguistically distinct Western Apache bands, some of whom had been their historical enemies. Their subsequent forced removal to forts and reservations in the East compounded the sense of loss that still affects Chiricahua Apache descendants today.

The effort to make Chiricahua a national park gives us the opportunity to provide some redress for this historical injustice. Chiricahua Apaches should work with Arizona’s congressional delegation to implement measures to address their concerns about it becoming a park.

Any number of measures could be considered, such as unfettered access to the park for cultural and religious purposes, federal recognition of their people as a tribe, increasing the number of tribal members hired by the park to tell their stories, or restoring some portion of their former reservation to them. Including these or other provisions in legislation to make Chiricahua a national park could partially rectify the historical injustice committed 150 years ago, when the U.S. government abolished the Chiricahua Apache Reservation and forcibly removed its people to make way for miners and settlers.