AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | OCTOBER 2010

We Shall Remain a five-part PBS series, explores how Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture.

Geronimo, episode 4, tells the story of the indomitable Chiricahua Apache whose insistent pursuit of military resistance in the face of overwhelming odds confounded not only his Mexican and American enemies, but many of his fellow Apaches as well.

Born around 1820, Geronimo grew into a leading warrior and healer. But after his tribe was relocated to an Arizona reservation in 1872, he became a focus of the fury of terrified white settlers, and of the growing tensions that divided Apaches struggling to survive under excruciating pressures. To angry colonizers, Geronimo became the archfiend, perpetrator of unspeakable savage cruelties. To his supporters, he remained the embodiment of proud resistance, the upholder of the old Chiricahua ways. To other Apaches, especially those who had come to see the white man’s reservations as the only viable road, Geronimo was a stubborn troublemaker, unbalanced by his unquenchable thirst for vengeance, whose actions needlessly brought the enemy’s wrath down on his own people. At a time when surrender to the reservation and acceptance of the white man’s civilization seemed to be the Indians’ only option, Geronimo and his tiny band of Chiricahuas fought on. The final holdouts, they became the last Native American fighting force to capitulate formally to the government of the United States.

Geronimo is directed and produced by Dustinn Craig and Sarah Colt. Watch Geronimo now on the We Shall Remain website.