Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian

Born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, Charles E. Apekaum, grandson of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, served as the principal interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935. Educated, bilingual, and world traveled, Apekaum’s services as a translator were sought by anyone who dealt with the Kiowa Indian Agency personnel, politicians, and scholars.

The following year, Apekaum traveled throughout Oklahoma with anthropologist Weston La Barre and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, serving as their liaison as they documented the peyote religion. During off days, Apekaum narrated his life story to La Barre, recounting the final days of the reservation, allotment, the early days of Anadarko, Oklahoma, his seventeen years attending boarding schools, service in the navy during World War I and then as a state game warden, his work translating for politicians, and his involvement in the Native American Church. La Barre never published the manuscript, which contains rich details about intertribal variants of the sacred peyote rite as well as about Apekaum’s life experience.

In Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian Benjamin R. Kracht presents Apekaum’s autobiography for the first time. This eyewitness account is an important addition to Native American life narratives and the reconstruction of Kiowa cultural, social, and religious life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southern Great Plains.

Charles E. Apekaum (ca. 1890) was born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation. He served as interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935, among many other jobs as a translator. Weston La Barre was an anthropologist best known for his work on traditional uses of plants in Native American religions and use of psychoanalysis in ethnography. He is the author of The Peyote Cult, a landmark work in psychological anthropology. Benjamin R. Kracht is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He is the editor of Stories from Saddle Mountain: Autobiographies of a Kiowa Family by Henrietta Tongkeamha and Raymond Tongkeamha (Nebraska, 2021) and the author of Kiowa Belief and Ritual (Nebraska, 2017), among other books.