The Jumano Indians of Texas have long been an enigma in Texas history and archeology. Many researchers from both disciplines have sought to connect the historic accounts with those of archeological assemblages, but have largely been unsuccessful. Part of the problem has been that the records tend to present problematic issues and very little information in the way of material culture. Another problem has been the tendency among archaeologists in the state to continue to lump site assemblages into larger analytical units, which in effect acts to homogenize any variability that would lend a better understanding of behavioral aspects. Recent efforts in the area of identity and social fields have opened new possibilities. Along these lines this report uses the ethnohistoric data on the Jumano to construct a frame of reference to define the Jumano identity and social field. Using the variability embedded in the Cielo Complex as a model, several sites within the Jumano range were identified for further investigation. / text

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

This project sets forth a Mexican American cultural studies treatment of a US Southwestern legend known as the Lady in Blue (La monja azul). The legend is derived from17th-century religious memoriales (accounts) that narrate the miraculous apparition of a living cloistered Spanish nun, Sor María de Agreda, to the Jumano tribe of western New Mexico between the years 1620-1630. However, the Lady in Blue's conversion of the Jumanos was only the first of many recurring appearances she would make in the Americas and Europe over the next three hundred and seventy years. In the American Southwest, northern Mexico and Spain, stories about the apparating nun resurface and are reshaped in response to the demands of their contexts. Her narrative is transatlantic both in terms of what it recounts, and in terms of where it is recounted. She is not only represented on both sides of the ocean, but her portrayal almost always has to do with her being on both side of the ocean. The Lady in Blue narrative brings together dialogues on conquest, both secular and religious, dialogues on the significance of the female body and the feminine written word, and dialogues on the negotiation of space, proximity and identity. Extant research on Lady in Blue focuses on the components of her story as discrete entities, inadvertently divorcing related histories and legends from one another. 20th-century historians have read the account as a medieval holdover in Franciscan mission writing; folklorists as isolated Indo-Hispano accounts; and literary critics as individual anecdotes in twentieth-century literature. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on is the continuity of the narrative-- the way a series of historical figures and documents capture the Lady in Blue as she moves from New Mexico, to Spain, and back to the Franciscan missions of the Southwest, where she is viewed as a proto- or co-missionary. From the missions, the traditions, legends, and folklore about her grew and were contended, resulting in the contemporary dramatic works, novels, short stories and poems about the Lady in Blue. / text