PRESIDIO — Last Saturday morning, a crowd of around 75 people assembled for performances, speeches and prayers in honor of the official opening of el Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes, a Lipan Apache cemetery nestled in the heart of Presidio. Folks came from around the tri-county to celebrate, as well as representatives from the Lipan Apache tribe in McAllen and descendants from as far away as Oregon.
The cemetery dates back to the 18th century, when the Spanish struck a diplomatic deal with the Prairie Grass band of the Lipan Apache, or Lipanes, to settle down in what’s now Presidio. Three hundred years later, as the city began to sprawl, it gradually swallowed the cemetery, razing graves to build roads and water lines.
The project to protect and stabilize the cemetery has been three years in the making but was inspired by decades of family members protecting the cemetery on their own time. Descendant Christina Hernandez, who served as an official spokesperson for the interred families throughout the process, estimates that there are at least 500 Presidians who have a relative buried in the cemetery.
At Saturday’s ceremony, she emphasized how many groups of people from different walks of life came together to support the effort. “Our community is the gold standard for how Indigenous people and city officials, county officials can work together,” she said. “We should be proud in this community that we put our ancestors above politics.”
The process of putting family above politics was far from straightforward. In 2021, Hernandez and Shelley Bernstein, executive director of the Big Bend Conservation Alliance, approached the Presidio County Commissioners Court about transferring ownership of the land to streamline construction and ongoing stewardship. The lots underneath the cemetery had been owned by the city and county since the 1990s, but the burgeoning coalition believed they would be best managed by the descendants, via the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas.
Hernandez has been taking care of the cemetery since she was a toddler, working with family to clean up the burial mound and leave ceremonial offerings. But there was a limit to how much they could do to protect the land, which was being paved over by the city and gradually eroding without a fence. Neighbors had also started picking up sentinelas — or sentinel stones, which are traditionally arranged on top of individual graves — to use in landscaping projects. “We weren’t able to make improvements because the city and county-owned that land,” she explained.
In October of that year, the land was finally transferred to the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. Chairman Bernard Bercena and Vice Chairman Robert Soto traveled to Presidio with a number of other Lipanes based in South Texas to mark the occasion.
As part of that ceremony, descendants were invited to repatriate rocks that had been returned to the site from neighboring properties. The City of Presidio and Big Bend Conservation Alliance led the charge, leading a door-knocking campaign to educate homeowners and encourage them to return the rocks to the cemetery, no questions asked.
The construction project began soon after, prefaced by a long period of preparation to avoid damaging the sensitive site. The coalition wanted every step of the process to be Indigenous-led — and local, if possible.
Selina Martinez, a Pascua Yaqui architect from Arizona, kicked off the effort by conducting a ground-penetrating radar survey of the site. Her work confirmed what the descendants and their supporters already knew: that the mound had once been much larger and that more graves were located under the street and beneath neighboring structures.
After descendants gave feedback that they didn’t want to completely wall off the mound from the street, architect Joseph Kunkel of Indigenous-led firm MASS Design Group struck a compromise, building a walking path through the site hemmed by gabion walls — which are essentially baskets full of rocks, in a symbolic nod to the sentinela stones within the site.
The construction project was finally completed with the help of a $650,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, which reimbursed in-kind contributions from MASS Design Group, the Big Bend Conservation Alliance and other organizations that had donated to the effort. In the end, the project required nearly $1 million to complete — a far cry from the $40,000 to $60,000 price tag envisioned at the start of the project.
The coalition hopes that the funding will stretch beyond stabilizing the ceremony for future generations. The walking path includes interpretive materials that welcome visitors, inviting visitors to interact with the site in a respectful and thoughtful way. An innovative lighting design by artist Hisa Ota plays off of Presidio’s dramatic sunsets, creating a unique viewing experience for visitors from dusk till dawn.
The Mellon Foundation grant will also fund a study that will help local groups identify the needs of Indigenous groups across Far West Texas, hopefully inspiring other Native-led projects around the region.
Lucy Rede Franco Middle School students were the first to tour the site after a few weeks of programming across the district teaching students about Presidio’s Indigenous past. Sixth-grader Estela Merlin was moved by her visit, which included informational talks about the cemetery’s history. “The path to go see loved ones is very beautiful, and I really liked the caretakers that were telling the stories about the cemetery,” she said.
Saturday’s celebration of the monumental project began with a prayer walk led by Nakaya and Cristabell Flotte of People of La Junta for Preservation. A small group gathered in the Presidio Sandhills for the ceremony, followed by a “run/march” through the desert.
Anthropologist Nakaya Flotte has been working over the past few years to revitalize the Lipan Apache language, which was gradually whittled away by colonization and cultural assimilation. Using oral histories collected by anthropologists in the early 20th century, she has been able to piece together fragments of speech, ranging from everyday terms to ceremonial recitations. “I was the first to pray in the language in hundreds of years,” she explained to The Big Bend Sentinel. “We lost our language. But spirituality involves language –– you can’t learn about our spirituality without learning the language.”
The group then headed down to Market Street for the official ceremony, which included remarks, prayers and songs by descendants and representatives from the Lipan Apache tribal council. Many attendees wore ribbons distributed on invitations by Presidio ISD students — the red, yellow, white and blue design honors Indigenous prisoners of war who were held in Oklahoma during the 19th century. “The elders would look west and remember that their homeland was where the sun set,” the postcard explains.
Chairman Bernard Bercena remembered visiting the site around 2013 when it was threatened by a paving project. “In the condition that I saw this place, I could hear the ancestors weeping,” he said. “They were saying, ‘Do something.’”
A decade later, those in attendance agreed that the ancestors would be happy with all that has been done. Oscar Rodriguez, a historian and Big Bend Conservation Alliance board member, said that the repatriation and restoration of the cemetery were beyond his wildest expectations. “This is perhaps bigger than anything in my generation, the generation before us, maybe two or three generations back,” he said. “We’re very proud of this — it is a very significant milestone.”