Welcome to Season 7, the new history of Old Texas, Lepon Apocalypse.

I'm Brandon Seale.

On June 28, 2022, the Uvaldi Consolidated Independent School District voted to raise Rob Elementary

to the ground. Uvaldi's isn't the kind of school district that can afford to just go tearing

down perfectly good buildings, though,

and Rob Elementary held some historic significance as well for its role in desegregating Yuvaldi's school system a generation prior.

The month before the school board decision, however, Rob Elementary had been the site of one of the most horrific massacres in modern Texas history.

I refused to replay the details here. Most of us remember them all too clearly.

And for those of us who do, the decision to tear down the school makes perfect sense at some

deep, intuitive level, even as it's not rational in strictly economic terms.

For some reason, when I heard about the school board's decision, it reminded me of something

that I had read about the Lippon Apaches years ago.

According to some sources, Lippanes would raise their villages, uproot their communities,

and move to an entirely new location after particularly traumatic deaths.

It's obviously a highly inefficient practice, and sometimes it's offered as proof of Native American superstitiousness or of how indecifurable the Native American mind must have been.

And yet here we were, in 2022 2022 doing the exact same thing.

And I got it.

It made perfect sense.

I wonder, too, if I thought about this particular Lipan custom in the context of Yuvaldi,

because Yuvaldi was, according to episode five of season one of this podcast,

the location of the quote unquote final defeat the Lippon Apache Nation in January of 1790.

I've since come to appreciate that I was as wrong about that claim as the Spanish chroniclers on whom I was relying,

...