Ute Tribe Quotes

Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000.

bear Indian names such as Yukon, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in the north, and Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona in the south. Often these names reflect the tribal names of the people who lived in an area. Such names might be a tribe’s own name for itself, or it might be the name given them by a neighboring group. We have states named for the Dakota, the Kansa, the Massachuset, the Illini, and the Utes. Some are names that describe the land or the water. Iowa is a Siouan word for “beautiful land,” Wyoming derives from the Algonquian for a large prairie, Michigan is Ojibwa for “great water,” and Minnesota is Siouan for “waters that reflect the sky.” The original meanings are often rather straightforward, but translators and local boosters have usually worked to derive the most poetic name possible. Nebraska means “flat” or “broad river” in the Omaha language; this makes it similar in meaning but not pronunciation to the Algonquian term for “long river” that eventually became Connecticut. Ohio means “good river” in Iroquoian languages, and Oregon means “beautiful water” in Algonquian. Kentucky has one of the more mysterious meanings: “dark and bloody ground.

My school’s textbooks mention nothing, not that this is Ute land, or that our tribes lived just north of here before a bunch of crinkly government paper pushed them elsewhere.

The tribe was promised that the reservation lands would belong to the Utes for all time. But within a few years, white settlers began to covet those lands for their own economic pursuits, so the boundaries of the Ute territory were slowly and inexorably carved into ever-smaller pieces.

An honest Indian agent named T. M. Byrnes temporarily forced the brazen miners to shut down. The mining companies petitioned Congress to declare that more than seven thousand acres of gilsonite-rich Indian land should be reclassified as “public domain.” Since the property rights of Indian tribes weren’t a high priority, Congress approved the bill. The Utes were to be compensated with payments of twenty dollars per acre. Those tribe members who didn’t want to sell were plied with whiskey or otherwise tricked, and by 1888 the mining interests obtained control of all of the land they originally sought.

The Utes who live in Fort Duchesne today are very familiar with the stories about the Buffalo Soldiers and their interest in Freemasonry. A patch of ground that once was designated as the graveyard for the Buffalo Soldiers has since been covered over with houses built for Ute tribe members. And that’s where things begin connecting to our story.