Mountain Spirits: Embodying the Sacred in Mescalero Apache Tradition

ISBN-10: 1475268955
ISBN-13: 9781475268959
Series: Mountain Spirits
Pages: 246
Language: English
Published: 2012-07-24
Author: Martin Ball

Description

This work explores the Mescalero Apache Mountain Spirit tradition of the people of the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico. In 1998 and 1999, graduate student, Martin W. Ball, lived at Mescalero and worked with a number of elder medicine people, ceremonial singers and dancers, and Mescalero tradition keepers to learn about this ceremonial and oral tradition of masked dancers. Using interdisciplinary methodology of oral tradition, ritual studies, enthnomusicology, dance, and myth, and symbol, the Mountain Spirits are described in careful detail from their origin stories to how they feature in contemporary Mescalero ceremonial practice and tradition.