Tindé

The Tindé, better known as the Jicarilla Apache, are one of the Eastern Apache bands and speak a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-dené family. Their Spanish name means little basket, after their sealed drinking baskets, while neighboring Apache called them Kinya-Inde, people of the fixed houses, because they lived more settled lives than most Apache.

Traditionally they ranged the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the plains of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, pushing out onto the Great Plains before 1525; from the Pueblo peoples they learned farming and pottery. Their year moved between river-bottom fields, hunting grounds and wild-plant gathering sites.

From the early eighteenth century they were squeezed between the expanding colony of New Spain and raiding Comanche, who drove many Apache bands southward and began a long period of displacement and warfare on the southern plains.