The moment seemed to call for drastic action. Lucille Contreras’ youngest son was on his own, ranching buffalo on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota where both lived. Her other kids were financially stable. For the first time, this mother of three didn’t have to consider what anyone else wanted.
The COVID-19 pandemic had her locked down and looking every day at the heaping stack of U.S. Department of Agriculture loan application papers that had lingered on her desk for years. Finally she decided. It was time.
The career computer information tech worker from San Antonio would return to Texas and start to ranch buffalo, just as she’d learned in six years living with the Lakota. She believed her own people, the Lipan Apaches, needed buffalo too.
The Lipan Apache, historically based around Central Texas, are recognized by the state—but not by the federal government. They have no reservation and no unified representation. That means thousands of people with Lipan heritage, like Contreras, live scattered across a state that has historically labeled Native Americans as Mexican immigrants and taught school children that Texas’ tribal people were long gone.
Contreras wanted to show that those myths were false, and that South Texas cultural staples, like the roasted cow heads consumed in barbacoa tamales, the heirloom metate her grandma used to grind corn for tortillas, and the colorful parties thrown for young women coming of age didn’t originate in Spain, but trace back to a time when buffalo roamed all across Texas by the millions. “There’s one thing for sure: The buffalo survived,” Contreras said. “And we as Indigenous people, especially Texas Indigenous, we also survived.”
Since her people didn’t have a reservation to use as a cultural center, Contreras decided to buy land. She acquired 77 acres near the tiny town of Waelder, gathered a small herd of bison, and started the nonprofit Texas Tribal Buffalo Project in March 2021, using a mixture of $580,000 in loans, grants, donations, and support from her Native American activist community.
Her project is only the latest example of the steady re-emergence of the long-hidden Lipan Apache culture in Texas. Thirty years ago, there were no openly Lipan groups here, but several robust communities have since been formed by a generation of people who organized around common oral stories of South Texas Apache ancestry. All are dedicated to rediscovering and reclaiming their precolonial roots.
Today, two major Lipan Apache groups have thousands of members: the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, based in tiny Brackettville, 30 miles outside Del Rio, and the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, based
