http://www.maninthemaze.com/thesantafeseries/apacheland.html

Religious Views from (outside) perspective:

This central aim is looking at the Mescalero Apache from an outside view and hopes in seeking to elucidate Mescalero theories of ritual, power, sacred space, metaphysics, and theology.

The Mescalero people are members of one of the largest cultural and linquistic groups of Native Americans in North America, The Athabascans. This large family of cultures had included many Native peoples of Alaska and Canada such as the Koyokun, Tlingit, and Dene. Athabascans are generally distiguinished as Navajo or Apache. They both migrated from the north into the Southwest at a minimum of five hundred years ago.

Masked males dancers are ceremonially transformed into living embodiments of the power of the creator as it manifests through the four directions and various sacred powers.

• Ball, M.W. Mountain Spirits: Embodying the sacred in Mescalero Apache Tradition.