Executive Summary located in Towaoc, Colorado and White Mesa, Utah, is in an area known as the Four Corners Region where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah come together. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is a sovereign nation. T H E U T E M O U N TA I N U T E T R I B E
There is an old legend that a Ute Chief once stood in the San Juan Mountains and said, "From where I stand, all the land this water touches belongs to the Ute people.” Sadly, the U.S. government didn’t agree. Through various treaties with the Federal government in the late 19th century, the Ute Tribe yielded much of its ancestral Colorado homeland. Federal Indian policy at the time sought to assimilate Indian tribes into yeoman farmers by breaking their communal landholdings into individual assigned allotment tracts, typically consisting of 160-acre parcels.
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The Tribe initially rejected the allotment policy and the accompanying agricultural lifestyle. Instead, the Tribe opted to settle on arid communal lands in the far southwestern corner of Colorado, where water was scarce and the lands not as conducive to farming. The legacy of these historical injustices is still felt today. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is a small, but proud Tribe with approximately 2,100 members living on slightly less than 600,000 acres. The Tribal government center is located in Towaoc, Colorado, 25 miles west of Cortez, and over 300 miles to the nearest major city. This isolation is compounded by a lack of jobs, resources and amenities to provide for a healthy lifestyle. Nearly 70% of adults and over 50% of children are obese. Nearly 25% of Tribal members have Type II diabetes. This, along with many other public health crises, results in a life expectancy of 55 years - nearly 20 years fewer than the average American.
