The specific mountains and springs and canyons that appear in Apache oral tradition and ceremony are real places that the tradition continues to reference even after the people who remembered them from daily life have been gone for generations.

Visiting these mountains — which is possible for anyone who makes the journey to this corner of the American Southwest — is a way of understanding something about what the resistance was defending.

The terrain is stunning: the volcanic rock formations of the Chiricahuas, the pine forests of the high country, the desert basins visible from the ridge tops, the springs that appear unexpectedly in apparently waterless country.

It is not difficult to understand why people would fight for this, why losing it would be a catastrophe, why carrying its memory for generations would be an act of resistance in itself.