Apache Texts

I am putting online:

so that anyone interested can have access to them.

These works are now in the public domain because either they were published before 1923, or the author's death was over 70 years ago, or the author did not renew the copyright. Some of these works have been reprinted and republished — sometimes several times. A few of the republished versions contain newly copyrighted material written by an authority on the culture (for example, Goodwin's book was republished in 1994 reprint by the University of Arizona with a new forward and preface). Needless to say, the new material will not appear here.

What's new?

Development and further information:

I am going to concentrate most of my energies on Goddard's myths in English translation, and then on the other works with the transcriptions in the Apache languages being done last. I will probably have the shorter stories up before longer stories. (I also don't promise to adhere to this plan.)

Many of these are religious stories that may contain power. Goodwin writes that some may not be appropriate for women or children (see his preface for details).

The Jicarilla Apache texts (English translations) written down by Goddard are available at The Internet Sacred Text Archive (which was my inspiration to do this for these other texts). However, since that site does not provide the transcription of the stories in Jicarilla Apache, I will include both the Jicarilla Apache and the English translation.

Additionally, Harry Hoijer's (1938) Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache Texts are available online at the University of Virginia.

Although not strictly a text, I have a short quotation concerning Chiricahua Apache dwellings from Morris Opler's (1941) An Apache-Life Way. This describes what type of house the Chiricahua lived in.

Any comments and/or corrections are welcome.
email: ish_ishwar@yahoo.com.sg

Technical note on fonts:

These pages use Unicode technology to render the special characters used in the Western Apache language and the early Americanist phonetic transcription. You will need to have a font installed on your computer that has the glyphs in the Latin-1 Suppl., Latin-A, Latin-B, Greek, and Combining Diacritics ranges (these characters are also used in European languages like Polish, French, etc.). Many web browsers available for Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows should have no problems with this site. I refer you to Alan Wood's very informative pages for more information: Unicode and Multilingual Web Browsers.

If you have a problem, feel free to email me (I will write a page about this later).

• An Apache Life-Way: Description of Chiricahua dwelling.
• San Carlos Myths: Introduction, Creation Myth #1, Securing Fire #2, Winning of Daylight #1, Winning of Daylight #2, Deer Ceremony Songs, Sisters are Lured by a Flute #2, Coyote and Jack-Rabbit People, Coyote's Eyes, Sack and Pot, Bibliography.
• San Carlos Texts: Introduction, Coyote's Eyes.
• White Mountain Myths (Goddard): Introduction, Bibliography.
• White Mountain Myths (Goodwin): Preface, Earth Is Set Up, Variant: Earth Is Set Up, Variant: Vulva Woman.

This website is new (as of 14 November, 2004) and needs a lot of work. And I am going to do this in my spare time, so development will probably be slow. At any rate, please enjoy.

    – bright moments!

  this page last updated: 2006 Jul 23