In 1933, famed anthropologist Morris Opler met a Mescalero Apache he called Chris and worked with him to record the man's life story, from the bloody Apache Wars into the reservation years of the mid-twentieth century. Chris's vivid recollections are enriched at strategic moments with crucial background information on Apache history and culture, supplied by Opler.

Chris was born around 1880, the son of a Chiricahua man and a Mescalero woman. At the age of six, he and his family and other Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war and were relocated by the U.S. government to Florida and Alabama. Eventually settling on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Chris grew up expecting to become a shaman like his parents. Although Chris apprenticed as a shaman, his confidence in his healing ability waned after he was forced at the age of seventeen to attend federal government schools. Nonetheless, his interest in Mescalero religion, healing, and other traditional customs and beliefs remained, and that intimate knowledge of his people's world underscores and deepens the story of his own life.

This volume grew out of a symposium held at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 1969 at New Orleans, Louisiana. The "Apachean Symposium" was designed to provide an opportunity for scholars engaged in research on southern Athapaskan cultures to report upon their findings, and wherever possible, to link them to known fact and existing theory. The diverse work presented here will add significantly to the knowledge about Apachean cultures, and each of contributions also pertains directly to wider spheres of anthropological concern.