@article{MappingtheApachería:AmericanIndianSovereigntyandStatePowerintheU.S.-MexicoBorderlands:1338,
      recid = {1338},
      author = {Webb, Daniel},
      title = {Mapping the Apachería: American Indian Sovereignty and  State Power in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 18th-19th c.},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-06},
      pages = {378},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines one of the more sustained  interactions between Indian nations and European colonists  in North America. It traces the history of the diverse  populations of Athapaskan-speaking people constituting the  Apache and Navajo nations and their relations with the  governments of Spain, Mexico, and the United States in the  geographical expanse known as the Apachería—a vast region  stretching across the present-day states of Arizona, New  Mexico, and Texas in the American Southwest as well as  Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila in northern Mexico.

As  distant relatives of the people who migrated from western  Canada to the Colorado Plateau and the Central Plains in  the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the southern  Athapaskans were relative newcomers to the dominion claimed  by Spain in 1598 as the Kingdom of New Mexico. Known  initially as “Querechos” or “Teyas,” the dispersed tribal  units of bands and clans developed an extensive trading  network, connecting the hunters and gatherers of the Plains  with the primarily horticultural societies of the upper Rio  Grande valley. When Spanish efforts to colonize the Pueblo  Indians of New Mexico faltered in the seventeenth century,  the Apaches came to occupy an increasingly prominent  position on the periphery of colonial society, absorbing  apostate Indians into their structure of kinship relations  and themselves becoming integrated into the labor force as  prisoners of war, servants, and slaves.

While scholars of  Native American history have long recognized the central  importance of the Apache and Navajo nations in the “cycles  of conquest” led by Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers  in the region, less attention has been paid to their own  territorial ambitions. Historians’ emphasis on military  engagements have tended to obscure the broad range of  cultural, economic, and diplomatic interactions that shaped  the Apache and Navajo nations’ relations with surrounding  Indian and settler societies. Based on extensive research  of Spanish colonial records, cartographic materials, and  diplomatic correspondence, this dissertation shows how  their continuing migration and territorial expansion in the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries redefined the  boundaries between Indians and colonists in New Spain’s  northern frontier and exposed the limits of political power  in the periphery of both Mexico and the United States.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1338},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1338},
}