Indigenous Lives- final project: The Utes

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THE UTES

Who are the Utes? What have they come to?

How has history of the Utes carved the story of the soil we stand on?

nov 15
Leo Kunkel Chief Buckskin Charley

Think we are on their land!

We have taken over their land and killed them. We have horrible stereotypes for the Native Americans like redskins and savages The belief is that the indigenous people were savages because of their lack of clothing and primitive tools. In the dictionary, savage is defined as fierce, violent, and uncontrolled. However, the colonists were closer to savages than the indigenous people. When the colonists came in they brought slaves, disease, and other harmful things. The main thing that we brought was the gruesome effect that we had on the land. We tried to kill the natives, took the land the animals, and took control, saying my way or the highway. In the end, the colonists took over and have a hypocritical view of their history. For example, we have a holiday in the USA called Columbus Day when in reality, he didn’t set foot in the U.S. so how are they savage?

what is it that you will do to help?

Unlike other tribes,the Ute do not have a strong belief that God is great. They believe that he existed but was not meant to be cherished.

Men’s Prairie Chicken

Dance

TAccording to tribal history handed down over many generations, the Utes were originally a tribe that lived throughout Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, some areas of Arizona, and New Mexico. They lived in the mountains and plains of these states. Now they are confined to a much smaller area in southern Colorado, a slice of Northern New Mexico, and Utah. And they are divided into separate tribes, each with their own tribal government.

Sequiah Tallbird performs the fancy shawl dance during the Ute Indian Powwow dance performance and presentation in the auditorium at the Steamboat Springs High School in 2019.

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On Christmas Day 1854, about 100 Ute and a few Jicarilla descended on El Pueblo in Colorado. They killed 15 men, captured two women, and ran off all the stock. Then, they crossed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and attacked a settlement recently founded in the San Luis Valley near where Alamosa, Colorado now stands. In Retaliation to the attack, on March 19th, troops skirmished with a a war party near Poncha Pass. They killed eight warriors and captured the party’s entire pony herd after a four-day chase. Colonel Philip St. George Cooke led the retaliation. The retaliation did not kill off the Ute but cut their numbers down sufficiently.

the history of the Utes

forever remembered

cultural appropriation

From some people’s point of view, They once had the word Ute in the dictionary which was defined as an Informal. a noun when referring to “a utility vehicle” and the slang for use in the U.K. is a person that is younger.

appropriation

The Utes are also now a sports team. However, the Utah Utes could be defined as appropriating the Ute culture using their nation as a mascot. The only Ute war was in Colorado.

AD 1000s to 2022

This is a current Ute house and it is pretty typical for their hoouses to look like this.

To understand where the Utes are today now as a nation and in their current location, we have to look at their past. The pre-European Ute tribe BC 1000–1200 was a thriving tribe whose territory was in the Four Corners area. By 1300 BCE, when the Europeans came to what is now California, they pushed them out of their territory. The Utes mostly retreated to the Rocky Mountains where they knew they would have the advantage of mountainous terrain. They had reason to stay with their ancestral land because their ancestors said that they are a part of the land and the land is a part of them. The Ute Nation is currently comprised of 2,970 members and the majority of the tribe is on their reservation in Colorado.

As it. learned tools sists vided and operate ing tribal al life

As times changed, the Utes had to change with it. They adapted to the roles of the colonists, learned Christianity, and how to use modern-day tools such as guns. Today, the Ute reservation consists of 1.3 million acres of trust land. It is divided between Lake City, Utah near US Highway 40 and in Colorado south of Pagosa Springs. The Utes operate several businesses on their land including a supermarket, gas stations, a bowling alley, a tribal feedlot, Uinta River Technologies, Ute TribEnterprises, LLC and water systems. The average life expectancy on the reservation is 55 years old and the average annual income is $24,510.

who approved

approved this

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Culture helps identify who you are. In 1901, the U.S government put together a boarding school called Ignacio Colorado on the Ute reservation. It was a boarding school which served Ute, Apache, and Navajo children. The school consists of three buildings, a girls’ dormitory, the main school/gym and a lunch hall which the Utes called tekahan which means place to eat. The boarding school’s purpose was to take the “savage” out of the child and make them a “normal person.” The school would not allow the students to leave with the intent to remove them from their people and culture their so-called savage ways. Anything that they could do to strip them of their dignity and beliefs was done. Their hair was cut, they were put in uniforms and were forbidden to speak their native language. The natives call it a cultural ethnocide. But since the natives were raised one way for thousands of years, it was very hard to break. in fact, it was close to impossible. I n the 40s the school softened up a little bit and let the students speak their native language.

the last of us

when the colonialist came over with the thought that for them to become a free nation they needed to Slaughter the people that were free(the indigeindige nous) they killed 100s of thousands. if it was brutal or inhuman it was done. even with their attempts to take out the natives the natives learned how to survive and adapt. we killed over 56 million indigenous over 100 years. there are still natives but a fraction of that great number.

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