The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe: Living Neighbors of an Ancient Landscape
Near Cortez, Colorado
The land around Cortez is home to a living Indigenous nation as well as the ruins of an ancient one, and the two are not the same people. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe are the descendants of the Weeminuche band of the Ute people, and their reservation wraps around the western and southern edges of Cortez, covering more than five hundred fifty thousand acres across Colorado, New Mexico, and a narrow strip of Utah. Their tribal headquarters is Towaoc, just a few miles from downtown Cortez.
The Ute are not the ancestors of the Ancestral Puebloans who built the cliff dwellings and great houses scattered across this landscape. The Ute arrived in the Four Corners region centuries after the Ancestral Puebloans had departed, occupying lands that had stood largely empty for generations. Their presence here is its own deep history.
In the eighteen hundreds, the Ute controlled an enormous territory stretching across most of Colorado and into neighboring states. That territory was stripped away through a series of treaties and agreements. The Brunot Agreement of eighteen seventy three forced the Ute to surrender the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains.
The catastrophic Meeker Massacre of eighteen seventy nine, in which a confrontation between the Ute and a hostile federal Indian agent escalated into violence that killed the agent and ten of his employees, gave politicians in Washington the pretext to push for the removal of all Colorado Ute. Most of the northern and western bands were forced to relocate to Utah by eighteen eighty one. The Weeminuche band, led by Chief Ignacio, insisted on remaining in southwestern Colorado and chose to move to the far western end of the Southern Ute Reservation rather than accept individual land allotments.
In nineteen forty they separated formally from the Southern Ute and became the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. The population of the Ute in Colorado had collapsed from approximately eight thousand people in eighteen fifty nine to fewer than two thousand by nineteen twenty, a consequence of disease, displacement, and the destruction of their hunting and gathering way of life. Today the tribe operates the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, a hundred and twenty five thousand acres along the Mancos River canyon, containing hundreds of cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, and archaeological sites accessible only through guided tours led by tribal members.
National Geographic Traveler has recognized the park as one of eighty world destinations worth seeking out. The tribe also operates the Ute Mountain Casino Hotel outside Towaoc. The Ute Mountain Ute are not a relic of a vanished past.
They are present-tense neighbors of Cortez, a sovereign nation governing its own lands a few miles from where you are standing.
