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In 1928 John P. Clum published the first half of a two-part article that signaled an important shift in Western Apache historiography.1 In the essay titled simply "Es-kin-in-zin," Clum fashioned a life history of the legendary Western Apache leader haské bahnzin (Anger Stands Beside Him).2 Clum's article was written with great empathy and a genuine desire to understand past events from the viewpoint of someone whose life was irreversibly altered by the incursion of Euroamericans into the Apache homelands. However, when Clum described one of the most pivotal episodes in haské bahnzin's life, the so-called"Camp Grant Massacre" of 1871, surprisingly, he turned to non-Apache sources rather than depicting it from the perspective of his subject. Lamentably, nearly every author who has written on this topic has followed in Clum's footsteps.3 Of the scores of articles, books, and Web pages that portray the Camp Grant Massacre, practically all of the texts recycle the incident from the recollections of the American participants.4 Curiously, even those expositions sensitive to the Apache experience have tended to rely on these partial and incomplete sources.5
The Camp Grant Massacre remains a salient moment for contemporary Western Apache peoples.6 Although a difficult part of their history, it continues to instruct Apaches and non-Apaches about the sacrifices of those who have gone before and the circumstances that have shaped our modern world (figure 1; figure 2). The story of the massacre was first preserved by personal histories and has since been maintained in part through Western Apache oral traditions.7 Apache narratives are vital for better understanding the massacre, not so much because they necessarily constitute a more factual version, but because they afford alternative, even complementary, accounts. Furthermore oral narratives reinvigorate the stories of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, shedding light on those lives that have long been excluded from this historical record.8 As many scholars have increasingly valued the historicity in oral traditions, another set of academics have concurrently critiqued Western-based textual histories for failing to render an unbiased gaze back through time.9 Given that written and verbal historical accounts are similarly the product of a complex process that entwines the past with the social and political present, theorists have progressively given consideration to how "the data of history and the data of...