Apache Community Shares Stories
Comanche Nation Historic Preservation held a community meeting in Apache on Thursday, September 7, at the Comanche Community Building.
Comanche Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Martina Minthorn said they’re visiting communities about the history of the towns, events and people.
“We had invited a moderator from the community to be able to invite select elders that might have interest in sharing their stories with the community,” she said. “So, the moderator knows the community so that she can call upon or he could call upon different members to share their stories that might have importance to the town.
Minthorn said the purpose is to gain information to protect burial or sacred sites.
“So that as far as historic preservation that we can protect those for generations to come,” she said.
The meetings are also a good time for the community to get together to share stories, according to Minthorn.
“It's just good to hear special times in history and just the people that were in their communities. And so, in places like Dolese, that was a rock crusher, but knowing it was a huge mountain before,” she said. “So, it's just pretty cool just to hear the elders talk about bringing their commodities on horse and buggies and just being able to hear about their times at boarding school. So, it's just going down their memory. So, it's just good to be together to ping off each other's memory and it's just a good time.”
Minthorn said it’s important to gather these stories.
“Our elders, we're fighting time right now and collecting what history that we do have. And so just getting people together and sharing these stories with our youth and our community members, our family members,” she said. “And so, these events have been telling us of teaching our kids as much about our cultures that we can, preserving as much as. It's just been a good time to awaken that, ‘Hey, we need to share these stories. We need to tell each other more about our experiences.’ A lot of people didn't know that others did such things in their community. So now, these are coming out through these community visits.”
Minthorn said people were also able to learn more information about themselves.
“A lot of people were, ‘I didn't know you were related to so and so.’ And so that's how people are coming to these meetings. And they did find out more information about their family trees,” she said. “And like I said, it was just good just to see about those significant people that others didn't know about and their contributions to the community. And so, it's just a good time, like I said, of sharing about those people and telling those stories. Because a lot of times we don't talk about people that pass on. And so, this is kind of an opportunity just to showcase to our youth and those people just to hold on to what we have left and share their stories.”
Minthorn said asking the elders questions about church, church groups, burial sites and culture is important.
“As far as right now, I think that we need to get our elders with our youth together to be able to share that knowledge and getting them to be able to ask the questions that need to be asked. And so just being able to share those and then anything that needs to be documented,” she said. “We want to do more interviews with elders. We want to be able to get them together to do group interviews just to talk about their experiences growing up. We did a lot of interviews about the boarding schools. And so that's just a hard topic to talk about with a lot of them, but it is a need. And so just being able to, like I said, preserve what knowledge is still here.And being on the reservation or coming to the reservation that helped the cultural genocide, unfortunately. And so now it's a task to be able to preserve language and culture and what we still have left.”
Community gatherings will take place every Tuesday and Thursday.
The next one will be at 6 p.m. on September 14 at the Dorothy Lorentino Education Center.
