Spoiler alert: the title of Brandon Seale’s new podcast series, Lipan Apocalypse, is not about the demise of the Lipan Apaches.
Rather, Seale uses the root meaning of the term “apocalypse” — an unveiling — to reveal that the story of these native Apache peoples that once populated expansive regions of Texas, New Mexico and what is now the Mexican state of Coahuila, is instead a story of success and continuance.
“We are accustomed to thinking of the story of Native Americans, especially in Texas, as an ending, or a demise,” Seale said. “But actually, what we’re doing here is we’re unveiling the presence of Lipan Apaches and the larger Native American presence in Texas in the present day.”
The 15-episode series will drop Jan. 1, all at once, a break from Seale’s previous week-to-week issues of his A New History of Old Texas podcast.
Throughout the series, Seale explores the deep history of what is termed the Lipanes Apachería, the area that constituted the entire range of the tribe including its diaspora from Northern Mexico to Western Louisiana.
Facing sometimes violent competition from Comanche, Wichita and Caddo tribes, then Spanish colonization and the onset of pandemic diseases, part of the Lipan survival strategy was to disperse, even sometimes joining other tribes on their lands and reservations, Seale said.
This blending-in strategy in part accounts for the relative disappearance of Lipan Apaches in the commonly told histories of Texas, Seale said, which focus mostly on the powerful Comanche resistance to settler occupation or the removal of other tribes to reservations.
“They’re carrying a new pan-Indian identity out into native North America, but doing it without their own distinct and consolidated identity,” Seale said.
Lipanes never surrendered to or had a treaty with the U.S. government, so were never granted a reservation or received official federal recognition as a tribe or nation.
Seale said one result is that “all of these people who have verifiable Lipan family stories and roots and presence within our geography today can’t prove, even if they wanted to, that they were Lipanes.”
But not only did Lipan clans essentially help establish what became the Texas-Mexico border along the Rio Grande — by keeping Anglos from moving further south and the Spanish from moving further north — their descendants were and remain common throughout their ancestral lands, including in San Antonio, Seale said. “In some ways, it’s an Apache town,” he said.
Remaining remnants include the Alazán-Apache Courts, built on the site of an old settlement between the Alazán and Apache creeks. A Lipan Apache town existed within San Antonio until 1937, Seale said, when it was torn down and replaced with the city’s oldest public housing project. “Just another example of continuing into living memory,” he said.
And some common surnames associated with Lipan heritage will be familiar to San Antonians: Castro, de Leon, Flores, Solis, Gonzales, Villarreal, Hernandez, Garcia, Leal and Romero, among others.
With Lipan Apocalypse, Seale hopes to change the narrative of tragic demise by filling gaps in their history, some of which exist because of a scarcity of English-language records and others because the very dispersal that ensured their survival as a people also dispersed their culture and traditions.
“Almost all the histories we have of them are told by their opponents,” and are thus skewed and incomplete, Seale said. He admits that in his podcast he gave himself the freedom to imagine why Lipan Apaches made their choices. But “I don’t change any of the facts,” he said. “It’s a bit of an interpretive history in the sense of trying to understand what their motivations were, by imagining that they are rational geopolitical actors like anyone else.”
Lipan Apocalypse is the seventh season of Seale’s A New History of Old Texas podcast, available through popular podcast platforms including Apple and Google, and through Seale’s website.
