Doo Aniina' Agot'eehi Baa Nohwill Nagoshdi'/I'll Tell You About How It Was

FAIN: CZ-50033-04

Fort Apache Heritage Foundation, Inc. (Fort Apache, AZ 85926)
Karl Alfred Hoerig (Project Director: June 2003 to September 2007)

Endowment for oral history research, presentations by White Mountain Apache elders and cultural experts, and creation of exhibits relating to tribal and regional history.

This Challenge Grant will help to initiate funding for an endowment to support ongoing local history programming at Nohwike' Bagowa, the White Mountain Apache Cultural Center and Museum and the Fort Apache Historic Park, located on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in east-central Arizona. Fort Apache is an important site to the history of Euro-American settlement in Arizona, and its use first as a military post for the control of Native Peoples and later as a federal boarding school for the education of Native children increases its significance for the understanding of U.S./Native Nations relations from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is also unique as a site of U.S. domination that has been reclaimed by its formerly subjugated people for the interpretation of its history. The long-term programming supported by this endowment will provide unprecedented opportunities for the presentation and preservation of White Mountain Apache historic understanding. Because Apache relationships to and understanding of the past are inextricably linked to oral traditions, supported programming will emphasize the creation of opportunities for the oral transmission of cultural and historic knowledge from Tribal Elders to younger people, the video and audiotape preservation of those presentations for future generations, and the development and mounting of exhibits interpreting Apache historical perspectives for Tribal members and other participants in the supported programming.