Today, more Texans identify as Native than ever before. īack in 1950, the U.S. Census figures show a robust Native population emerging from concealment. She said her project comes at a time of reawakening for Native American identity and communities nationwide. “This is the first time in hundreds of years that Lipan Apaches and Southern Plains bison have been right here, on this land,” she said, pointing to the tall grasses beneath her high leather boots. A life in agriculture is a dream come true. Contreras is enrolled as a member of the Band. Ĭontreras, a college graduate, has never been wealthy: She has long been a single mother who worked in elementary school computer labs and later on a college campus. ĭuring a 2021 interview, Contreras smiled warmly as she walked the fenceline of her ranch on the prairie, 80 miles east of San Antonio. Two other smaller groups call themselves the Lipan Apache Nation of Texas and the Apache Council of Texas. Today, two major Lipan Apache groups have thousands of members: the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, based in tiny Brackettville, 30 miles outside Del Rio, and the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, based in McAllen. Lucille Contreras during Fort Clark Days, when several members of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas gathered for a weekend reunion. All are dedicated to rediscovering and reclaiming their pre-colonial roots. Thirty years ago, there were no openly Lipan groups here, but several robust communities have since been formed by a generation of people who organized around common oral stories of South Texas Apache ancestry. Her project is only the latest example of the steady re-emergence of the long-hidden Lipan Apache culture in Texas. She acquired 77 acres near the tiny town of Waelder, gathered a small herd of bison, and started the nonprofit Texas Tribal Buffalo Project in March 2021, using a mixture of $580,000 in loans, grants, donations, and support from her Native American activist community. Since her people didn’t have a reservation to use as a cultural center, Contreras decided to buy land. “And we as Indigenous people, especially Texas Indigenous, we also survived.” “There’s one thing for sure: The buffalo survived,” Contreras said. That means thousands of people with Lipan heritage, like Contreras, live scattered across a state that has historically labeled Native Americans as Mexican immigrants and taught school children that Texas’ tribal people were long gone. Ĭontreras wanted to show that those myths were false, and that South Texas cultural staples, like the roasted cow heads consumed in barbacoa tamales, the heirloom metate her grandma used to grind corn for tortillas, and the colorful parties thrown for young women coming of age didn’t originate in Spain, but trace back to a time when buffalo roamed all across Texas by the millions. They have no reservation and no unified representation. The Lipan Apache, historically based around Central Texas, are recognized by the state-but not by the federal government. She believed her own people, the Lipan Apaches, needed buffalo too. The career computer information tech worker from San Antonio would return to Texas and start to ranch buffalo, just as she’d learned in six years living with the Lakota.

Department of Agriculture loan application papers that had lingered on her desk for years. The COVID-19 pandemic had her locked down and looking every day at the heaping stack of U.S. For the first time, this mother of three didn’t have to consider what anyone else wanted. Lucille Contreras’ youngest son was on his own, ranching buffalo on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota where both lived. The moment seemed to call for drastic action.

We. the revolution stuck on day 19