Ute

The Ute, who call themselves Núuchi-u, "the people", have lived for many centuries on the Colorado Plateau and the eastern edge of the Great Basin, in a homeland that took in most of today's Utah, the western and central parts of Colorado and the San Juan basin of northern New Mexico. Today they form three federally recognised tribes: the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Colorado.

Ute is a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, closely related to Shoshone and Southern Paiute. Linguists think Numic speakers spread out from near today's Nevada–California border, with the southern branch, including the Ute, leaving first. Ancestral Utes were living as hunter-gatherers in south-western Colorado and south-eastern Utah by around 1300, and were established around the Four Corners by 1500. By the 1600s they occupied much of Colorado. Nobody knows where the word Ute comes from; Spanish records first write it as Yuta.

The Ute lived in nearly a dozen bands of extended families, typically 20 to 100 people, who moved between seasonal camps and gathered for trade and ceremonies. Men hunted bison, elk, deer and antelope; women gathered berries, roots, pine nuts and seeds and processed the meat. Western bands lived in domed willow houses, while eastern bands adopted tipis and many plains customs. Pikes Peak and the mineral springs at Manitou Springs were sacred places. The spring Bear Dance, one of the oldest Ute ceremonies, strengthened social ties and was a time for courtship; the midsummer Sun Dance remains an important event.

In 1637 Spanish forces fought the Utes and enslaved 80 captives. By about 1680 the Ute had many horses, which made them more mobile and turned them into skilled mounted warriors. They became the main trading partners of the Spanish settlers of New Mexico, a province of New Spain, famous for soft tanned deerskins, and traded at fairs at Taos and other pueblos. They also took part in the slave trade, selling captives from neighbouring peoples. Their allies included the Jicarilla Apache, while relations with the Comanche, once allies, turned hostile; the name Comanche comes from a Ute word meaning "enemy". The Spanish Domínguez–Escalante expedition crossed Ute country in 1776.

The United States gained Ute lands from Mexico in 1848. Mormon settlers arrived in Utah from 1847 and pushed Utes off their land, leading to the Walker War of 1853–1854 and the Black Hawk War of 1865–1872. Utah Utes were moved onto the Uintah reservation, a small fraction of their former land. In Colorado, gold strikes from 1858 brought prospectors; the Utes ceded the San Juan mining district in 1873, and after the violence of 1879 known as the "Meeker Massacre" they lost most of their remaining Colorado land, and in 1881 the Colorado Utes were forced onto reservations. Reservation policy imposed farming, allotment and boarding schools, and the population fell from about 8,000 in the early nineteenth century to about 1,800 by 1920.

The Ute have governed themselves under elected councils since 1934 and run their own police, courts and schools since 1975. The Uintah and Ouray Reservation is the second largest in the United States. The Southern Ute Tribe, enriched by natural-gas businesses, holds a triple-A credit rating, while the Ute Mountain Utes, whose land borders Mesa Verde and includes many Ancestral Puebloan ruins, run a tribal park. Ute tribes help co-manage the Bears Ears National Monument, created in 2016. Some 15,119 people identified as Ute in the 2020 census, and the language is still spoken on the reservations.

Our maps for 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Ute territory in the central Rockies and Colorado Plateau, labelled "Ute" or "Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute)". On the 1650 map it borders the Shoshone, the Arapaho, the Jicarilla Apache, the Southern Paiute and Spanish New Mexico.