Southern Paiute: Dispossession Measured in Park Entrance Fees

The entrance station where you stop to pay your fee sits on land the Southern Paiute have occupied for centuries. The fee goes to the National Park Service. None of it goes to the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.

The Southern Paiute are not a single band but a confederacy of related peoples, including the Cedar, Indian Peaks, Kanosh, Koosharem, and Shivwits bands, organized today as the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. They are the primary indigenous stewards of the Zion and Bryce Canyon region. Their villages and seasonal camps followed the Virgin and Sevier River valleys through a landscape they managed through controlled burning, seed cultivation, and intimate knowledge of where water could be found in a desert that offered it sparingly.

Mormon settlers arrived in the eighteen fifties and systematically occupied Paiute water sources and agricultural lands. The colonization followed a pattern documented across the LDS settlement corridor: missionaries first, then farming families, then irrigation ditches redirecting water that had sustained Paiute communities for generations. Within a generation, Paiute bands that had lived on the land for centuries were displaced from their primary territories.

The federal government compounded this in nineteen fifty-four by terminating the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah's federal recognition, removing the tribe from the official roll of recognized nations. For twenty-six years, tribal members lost access to federal services, Indian Health Service care, and federal trust protections. Restoration came in nineteen eighty, but the land lost during the termination period was not restored with it.

The Paiute language is today critically endangered. Language revitalization programs are underway through the tribe's offices in Cedar City, and oral tradition continues to carry place names for this landscape that predate every park sign you will pass. The canyon the National Monument of nineteen oh nine called Mukuntuweap, using the Paiute name, was renamed Zion in nineteen nineteen. In Paiute records, it is still Mukuntuweap.