01/05/2026
“Reclaiming their Texas Native heritage has taken decades of effort and a revolution in identity for leaders in the Lipan communities of Texas. Leaders of the generation who organized today’s Lipan groups grew up at a time when Indigenous ancestry was often kept secret.
“We grew up thinking we were Hispanics because that’s what we were always being told,” said David Garza, 55, as he flipped chunks of cabrito on a wide charcoal grill outside an old family home in Brackettville, around 20 miles north of the Rio Grande, in February 2022. “It wasn’t until my adulthood I realized why [my parents] kept it from us. They were afraid of getting killed.”
He was grilling on this Sunday morning for a monthly Lipan family reunion. He roasted two cow heads overnight in an underground pit to make barbacoa tacos like his dad used to do. About 45 people turned out, with families drove in from Houston, San Antonio, and Del Rio to this same wooden house where they’ve gathered for more than 50 years.
Garza’s long curly hair spills out of his felt hat, stuck with a feather. A knife hangs in a decorated leather sheath from his belt. He grew up in this town of fewer than 2,000. His parents were sheep shearers. Four generations of his family are buried in a cemetery only a short walk away. Still, as a child, he wondered where he belonged. The Anglos made fun of his English and the Mexicans made fun of his Spanish.
When Garza was a teenager, an uncle used to sometimes visit from Dallas, and he would say Garza’s grandparents described their family as Apaches. But Garza’s father always denied that.
Garza knew only what rural Texas public schools taught him: The Apaches were long gone. It wasn’t until the investigative efforts of other leaders of his generation that he learned the history of Brackettville and of the nearby Indian War fort around which it was built.
When he was a kid, there was no Apache culture evident at family gatherings. But at their gathering today, women wear Apache dresses and the boys beat homemade drums, tanned hides stretched over kitchen pots. A White Mountain Apache man named Shawn from an Arizona reservation had married into the family. Each month for a year now, he has built a sweat lodge and led prayers in his Apache language. Fifteen boys and men aged 12 to 65 sing Apache songs they’ve practiced for these gatherings. Later, they break for tacos as a remix of Selena’s Tejana cumbia plays over a loudspeaker.
Garza said he is most grateful that his two daughters now know they are Apache, and that they feel an older cultural tie to their homeland they can tap into for both wisdom and peace.
“Our family is still alive. They didn’t slaughter everyone,” Garza said. “We are slowly starting to come back.”
Lipan Apaches across Texas are challenging the myth that their tribe was wiped out.
