H. Henrietta Stockel - Böcker

This book is the unforgettable story of a Comanche woman who has become one of the most influential, inspired, and determined Native Americans in politics. LaDonna Harris was born on a Comanche allotment in southern Oklahoma in the 1930s. From her earliest years, she was immersed in a world of resistance, reform, and political action. As the wife of Senator Fred R. Harris, LaDonna was actively involved in political advising, campaigning, and networking. Not content to remain in the background, LaDonna became a well-known political figure in her own right, serving on the National Indian Opportunities Council as President Lyndon B. Johnson's appointee and working beside such notable political figures as Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver. In 1980 she became the vice-presidential nominee for the environmentalist Citizen's Party. Her story provides a witty and valuable American Indian insider's view of modern national political scenes.

The stories of ten women healers form the core of this provocative journey into cultural healing methods utilized by women. In a truly grass-roots project, the authors take the reader along to listen to the voices of Native American medicine women, Southwest Hispanic curanderas, and women physicians as they describe their healing paths.This book will fascinate anyone interested in the relationship between illness and healing-medical practitioners and historians, patients, anthropologists, feminists, psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, sociologists, folklorists, and others who seek understanding about our relationship to the forces of both illness and healing.

In her latest work, H. Henrietta Stockel examines the collision of the ethnocentric Spanish missionaries and the Chiricahua Apaches, including the resulting identity theft through Christian baptism, and the even more destructive creation of a local slave trade. The new information provided in this study offers a sample of the total unknown number of baptized Chiricahua men, women, and children who were sold into slavery by Jesuits and Franciscans. Stockel provides the identity of the priests as well as the names of the purchasers, often identified as "Godfather." Stockel also explores Jesuit and Franciscan attempts to maintain their missions on New Spain's northern frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She focuses on how international political and economic forces shaped the determination of the priests to mold the Apaches into Christians and tax-paying citizens of the Empire. Diseases, warfare, interpersonal relations, and an overwhelming number of surrendered Chiricahuas at the missions, along with reduced supplies from Mexico City, forced the missionaries to use every means to continue their efforts at conversion, including deporting the Apaches to Cuba and selling others to Christian families on the colonial frontier.

Stockel sheds light on some of the mysteries surrounding traditional and contemporary Chiricahua Apache culture. Each of the women interviewed emphasizes the importance of storytelling and ritual in preserving Apache heritage. Many ceremonies are still practiced today. In this book, the voices of the Chiricahua women are heard, individually and collectively, describing their history, its effects on them today, and their lives and their hopes for the future.