Still Indigenous: Freddy Cabral, We are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory and the Persistence of the Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Still Indigenous: Freddy Cabral, We are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory and the Persistence of the Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation challenges the long-standing historical narrative that the Lipan Apache disappeared in the late nineteenth century. Instead, it argues that the non-reservation Lipan Apache survived through strategic adaptation, mobility, kinship networks, and cultural continuity across the United States-Mexico borderlands. By examining the Lipan experience under Spanish colonial rule, Mexican governance, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas, this study demonstrates that shifting political regimes consistently pursued Indigenous land, labor, and subordination through structures of settler colonialism and racial hierarchy. Using the frameworks of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide studies, oral history, and autoethnography, this dissertation shows how military campaigns, legal systems, racial classification, and archival erasure worked together to marginalize the Lipan Apache and to legitimize settler expansion. However, these systems failed to eliminate Lipan identity. Instead, many Lipan families responded by migrating to Mexico, intermarrying, adapting their language, participating in Catholicism, and concealing their identity within Mexican and Mexican American communities. What many historians interpreted as a disappearance was often a deliberate survival strategy. Methodologically, this dissertation combines archival sources with oral testimonies, family interviews, and community memory to reconstruct histories often absent from official records. These sources reveal that Lipan identity endured through storytelling, kinship, ceremonies, and intergenerational knowledge transmission into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately, this study contributes to Indigenous, borderlands, and Texas historiography by reframing Lipan history from extinction to endurance. It demonstrates that Indigenous survival does not depend on reservation boundaries or federal recognition but can persist through community, memory, and cultural practice. The continued presence of the Lipan Apache exposes the limits of settler colonialism and challenges narratives equating invisibility with absence.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed