Welcome to Leapon Apocalypse. Episode, Changing Woman. I'm Brandon Seal.

There's something that bothers me about Killer of Enemies, that legendary first Apache.

Think for a second about what we've learned about these Plains Apaches. They're alliance makers, not warmakers, at least not as a first option.

They seem to live by and respect the cycles of life, meaning both the ups and downs of human relationships,

but also even the literal cyclical migrations they would make each year through their enormous domain,

from Kansas to Coahuila, from the Rockies to the Rio Grande.

They're absorbers of people, not annihilators of them.

In short, they aren't just killers of enemies.

There's another very different mythical figure in Apache stories that appears much more rarely,

and yet seems to have been a sort

of counterpoint to killer of enemies.

Appropriately for a figure referred to as changing woman, she appears in multiple forms, much

like the moon with which she was associated. Most often, however, she is either Killer of Enemy's

companion, or, more often still, his mother.

And when you think about it, doesn't alliance-making, a reverence for the cycles of life,

and a preference for cultural absorption over annihilation, sound much more appropriate to a changing

woman rather than a killer of enemies? So what if changing

woman is perhaps the real avatar of the Plains Apaches, not killer of enemies? There's other

reasons to suspect a more prominent role for changing woman in the prehistoric period.

The Plains Apaches and particularly the later Lipan Apaches were matrilineal and matrilocal societies,

meaning not only that they defined their families by their mothers, matrilineal,

but new Lipan husbands would leave their families and move in with the families of their wives, matrilocal.

...