[Aztlan] Geronimo Skull

[Margarita B. Marin-Dale]

Thank you for the clarification, Bunny.  In one of the articles that Susan submitted, I read that Geronimo's great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, is an artist, a medicine man, and a member of the Mescalero Apache Tribal Council.  Apparently he was also the driving force in creating a bronze statue and a memorial in honor of his grandfather in the Gila Wildnerness of New Mexico, where Geronimo was born.  The article stated that he has recently been focusing his efforts on repatriating Geronimo's remains from Fort Sill, so that they may be transferred to the memorial site.  
   
  For those listeros who are well versed in the NAGPR, I have two questions:
   
  1.  What are the chances that a linear descendant, such as Harlyn Geronimo, will successfully recover the remains of his great-grandfather from Fort Sill?  (Irrespective of what occurs in any future case involving Harlyn Geronimo and the Skull and Bones society at Yale.); and
   
  2. Will the remains at Fort Sill be grandfathered (exempt) under the Act, because they were seized and under government control before the passage of the Act in 1990?
   
   
  Saludos,
  Margarita
   
  

Bunny <bunny5 at mindspring.com> wrote:
  While somewhat off topic, perhaps, it should be noted that one reason any 
request by Arizona's Western Apaches to possess Geronimo's remains has been 
rejected is because Geronimo was not a Western Apache, but a Chiricahua 
Apache whose aboriginal range included a large area in the adjoining states 
of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua. Chiricahua and Western 
Apaches are not only separate ethnic entities, but historically there was 
considerable enmity between them. Descendants of Chiricahuas have never 
fogotten that Western Apaches served as scouts for generals Crook and Miles 
and were larely responsible for the U.S. Army's success in campaigns that 
led utlimately to Geronimo's surrender to Miles' forces in 1886.
I was in Bowie, Arizona in 1986 at the observance of the centennial of 
Geronimo's final surrender (he'd surrendered three time previously). The 
contingent of Western Apaches who had come down from Arizona's Ft. Apache 
Reservation was given a very cold shoulder by Chiricahua descendants from 
Ft. Sill and from the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico, as well as by 
Mescalero Apaches from New Mexico.
Geronimo's bones, wherever they maybe, do not belong in Arizona or to 
Western Apaches.
Bunny Fontana


		
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