Welcome to Lippon to Lippon Apocalypse. Episode 1, The WorldWend. I'm Brandon Seal.

Down in the lower world, in the beginning,

there was no light, only darkness.

The people held a council down there.

They discussed whether there was another world.

They decided to send out wind to find out. Wind went up to the

surface. He was a whirlwind, and he cleared all before him, exposing the land. From the

Waterloope Mountains they emerged, we emerged, the Apaches, or Inde, as we call ourselves,

and we began walking to the four directions. To the north went the Apaches, or Inde, as we call ourselves, and we began walking to the four directions.

To the north went the Navajo, to the west the Chiracawa, to the south the Mescaleros,

and to the east, the last drop-off were the Lippanes. And the first of these Lippanes was

killer of enemies, a great one.

So goes in a paraphrased format the Lipan Apache origin story.

But note something interesting about it.

Most people's origin stories, at least the ones I'm thinking of,

imagine their ancestors as the first human beings.

But the Lipanes, and their own telling at least, appear as the last humans.

The last of the last humans, in fact, because in some tellings, the Apache exodus from the lower world

had also been preceded by the animal people, the bird people, the tree people, and then the spotted wood people,

a sort of not

quite fully formed human race that perhaps represented all non-Apatchie peoples.

And indeed, true to their legends, the Apache's ancestors, who called themselves collectively

...