Tava Kaa-vi: The Ute and Their Sun Mountain

Before it was Pikes Peak, before any name on any English-language map, this mountain was Tava Kaa-vi. In the language of the Ute people, that means Sun Mountain, and to all bands of the Ute nation, and to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa who also came here, this summit carried a weight that no European surveyor's name could replace. The Tabeguache Ute, whose territory wrapped around the mountain, held ceremonies on these slopes.

The Sundance is a solemn ceremony of renewal, not theater or spectacle, and Ute people still hold it today, a thread of continuity across centuries of displacement. The Ute also carved message trees into the ponderosa pines on these slopes, blazing the bark in patterns that marked trails, burial sites, prayer, and medicine. The Garden of the Gods, a few miles to the north, has been a place of human presence for thousands of years, and the Ute trace their creation story to those red rocks.

The mineral springs at Manitou, bubbling cold and carbonated from limestone aquifers, were sacred neutral ground. The Ute wintered along these banks. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other plains tribes came seasonally.

They believed the bubbles rising from the water were the breath of the Great Spirit Manitou, and they left offerings of beads and fetishes in the pools. The word Manitou itself, from Algonquian tradition, became the name of the town built over the springs in eighteen seventy-two. In an eighteen sixty-eight treaty, the Tabeguache Ute were removed from this country to a reservation on Colorado's western slope.

Thousands of people left behind the peak they had danced on and prayed to for centuries, traded away by a government that did not ask and would not wait.