PBS Home Video: Geronimo and the Apache Resistance

" 'The Apaches traveled light and left little behind them. But like a great wind, they left a powerful memory of their passing...' Geronimo and the Apache Resistance brings that memory to life again. For years, Apache tribes had resisted the advance of the pioneers and their threat to the traditional ways of life. But Geronimo fought the longest, becoming one of the famous, feared and misunderstood Indian warriors in our history. Now at last, descendants of those Apaches who fought so long ago tell their story as it has never been told. They explain the mysteries of Apache power that made them so terrifying in battle, so skillful in escaping disaster. We learn there was no single Apache Nation, but several nomadic tribes, spread out across the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. We learn that Geronimo was not a chief, but a revered medicine man whose knowledge of ceremony and mysticism made him a leader of his people. Geronimo's personal story is also the story of his people- From the murder of his family by Mexican soldiers in 1851, to his many battles and the broken promises that provoked them. When he made his last, desperate escape from the reservation in 1886, 5000 U.S. soldiers searched in Mexico for six months, without finding his band. The Apaches finally surrendered and were exiled to military prisons in Florida, Alabama and finally Oklahoma, where Geronimo died in exile in 1910- A prisoner of war. Yet through all of this, the Apache spirit remained unbroken- as unbroken as their mystical bond with the ancestral homelands. "