Naadahendé

The Naadahendé are the Mescalero Apache, Naa'dahéńdé in their own Southern Athabaskan tongue, meaning people of the mescal, the agave whose roasted heart was their staple emergency food; they also call themselves Shis-Inday, people of the mountain forests. Spanish colonists, who knew them from about 1550, translated the agave name into Mescalero.

Primarily nomadic mountain people, they ranged from the Rio Grande and the Sierra Blanca east to the Llano Estacado and the Texas Panhandle, men leading buffalo hunts onto the plains while families gathered mescal and other wild plants in the southern deserts.

Descent was matrilineal and newlyweds settled near the bride's family, living in tipis and wickiups. Closely related to the Chiricahua in language, the Mescalero were part of the long Apache struggle against the Spanish frontier through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.