We Shall Remain Geronimo

We Shall Remain: Geronimo
1
The murder of Geronimo’s mother, young wife and three children turned him into a fighter: he hated the Mexicans after this attack and would attack any group of Mexicans that he encountered thereafter. He demonstrated great bravery. Following the murder of his family, he was part of the band of Apache sent to take revenge for the slaughter. The Mexican soldiers were firing at the attacking Apache, but Geronimo did not even flinch—it was as though he were possessed with an internal fury. As he assaulted them one by one with his knife, legend has it that the soldiers would call out to St. Jerome to come to them for help: “Jeronimo!” and this shout of the Mexicans for aid was then the name that the Apache applied to Geronimo. In Geronimo’s own words, he felt he had been given “power” by the attack.
2
The people who descended on Arizona in the quest for gold were “mostly a lawless bunch of people” (“We Shall Remain: Geronimo”). These prospectors were mainly young men without any sort of social boundaries who had a great deal of racism and who were “disastrous” for the Native Americans. Some of the miners were murderous and would poison the food of the Apaches using strychnine and even attacking pregnant women and cutting the babies from their wombs, according to the documentary. Some of them would even abduct Apache children and girls and sell them into slavery. They were full of animosity towards the Native Americans and did everything they could to drive them away or to undermine their existence with cruelty and disregard for their human rights.
3
Life for Geronimo during the four years he spent at the San Carlos reservation was miserable. It was a “struggle” for him in the words of the documentary (“We Shall Remain: Geronimo”). The reservation was full of mosquitoes and was very restrictive. There was nothing to farm—even though the Apache were led to believe that they would be farmers. It was not a place that he or anyone else really wanted to be. That is why Geronimo decided to break out—and, of course, his misgivings about the place were why he had tried to get away from having to go there in the first place. Once caught, he had to be taken there in chains.
4
The Apache children were sent to boarding schools far away in order to indoctrinate them with Western American-European values and to basically get them to stop thinking of themselves as Native Americans. Some of them died of disease on the journey, which served as good a purpose.
5
Geronimo’s regret on his deathbed, which he made to his nephew, was that he regretted surrendering. He had basically been a prisoner of war for the last years of his life and though he enjoyed marginal freedom and been able to come and go, he did not retain full freedom in the sense of being able to return to his native land. He was still a prisoner of the state, a resident of the plantation. For that reason, he regretted giving up his rights to be free in exchange for an end to the fighting. He wanted to die in his own land—not in the land he was forced to live on under the orders of the U.S. federal government.

Works Cited

“We Shall Remain: Geronimo.” YouTube, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q79NaHAscIA