All about the ancient tribes
Utes were known for their tanned elk and deer hides which they traded along with dried meat tools and weapons. Around 1637 Ute captives escaping from the Spanish in Santa Fe fled, taking with them Spanish horses, thus making the Utes one of the first Native American tribes to acquire the horse.
The word Ute means “land of the sun.” There are currently around 3,500 Ute Indians living on reservations in Utah, and they own 1,300,000 acres of land. Many of the Utes in Utah were originally from Colorado, when the Uintah-Ouray Reservation was created they were forced to relocate.
UTE INDIANS – NORTHERN. Ute Indians (who call themselves Nuciu, “The People”) are Southern Numic speakers of the Numic (Shoshonean) language family. At the time of Euro-American contact, twelve informally affiliated Ute bands inhabited most of Utah and western Colorado.
Ute Indians do not have formalized beliefs when it comes to religion but their beliefs are very important to them. They believe that the concept of power is obtained through dreams, visions, or from mythical beings. Religion is based on more of an individual level rather than as a group.
Ute people now primarily live in Utah and Colorado, within three Ute tribal reservations: Uintah-Ouray in northeastern Utah (3,500 members); Southern Ute in Colorado (1,500 members); and Ute Mountain which primarily lies in Colorado, but extends to Utah and New Mexico (2,000 members).
The home of the Ute Indian Tribe is the Uintah and Ouray (U & 0) Reservation, located within a three-county area in Northeastern Utah, known as the “Uinta Basin,” and covers a large portion of western Uintah and eastern Duchesne Counties.
Most Ute people speak English today. More than a thousand Utes, especially older people, also speak their native Ute language. If you’d like to know a few easy Ute words, maiku (pronounced similar to “my-kuh”) is a friendly greeting, and tog’oiak’ means “thank you.”
Utes, a mainstay of Aussie car culture since we invented the bloody things back in the 1930s, are set to disappear from local showrooms replaced instead, by those most American of things, the truck, or to give them their correct nomenclature, the ‘pick-up’ truck.
Anthropologists argue that the Utes began using the northern Colorado Plateau between one and two thousand years ago. Historically, the Ute people lived in several family groups, or bands, and inhabited 225,000 square miles covering most of Utah, western Colorado, southern Wyoming, and northern Arizona and New Mexico.
In the Ute language, Towaoc, pronounced TOW-ay-ock, translates into English as “ thank you.”
The Utes have inhabited this area of the country for at least 1,000 years. There were originally 12 “Nuche”, or “The People”, bands throughout Utah and Colorado. The Utes were among the first American Indians to acquire the horse as a means of transportation, and in rock writing the Utes are depicted as horses.
The Ute and Southern Paiute Indians are descended from the same group of Numic-speaking hunter-gatherers that began migrating east from southern California around A.D. 1000. Historically, the two groups shared similar, but not identical, hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
The Ute weren’t just all work and no play. They took a lot of time to play games. They played such games as dice, where if someone rolled certain symbols they would win. They also played games that were similar to baseball and kickball.
Native lands contain 10% of the known onshore supply of natural gas, but most of it is mined by non-Native entities that typically pay royalties of 12.5% of sales. Tribes ‘ royalties totaled $200 million last year. The Southern Utes, meanwhile, pulled in $100 million on profits from their gas-production company.
Beaded Crafts The use of beads is a mainstay of Ute crafts. Children’s jewelry is made from various bead designs, as are decorations for vests, flutes, children’s toys and many other types of crafts. Beading is traditionally the work of female Ute artisans, and can apply to a wide array of items.