The Ute: Grizzly Bear's People

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

            The following excerpt comes from my book, The People: Indians of the American Southwest.  My emphasis is contemporary; I do not include complete ethnographies of each tribe's pre-contact lifeways or extensive recounting of tribal myths.  As readers will discover in the text, I have talked with several hundred Indian people in the fifty reservation communities across the Southwest, as well as in the region's major cities.  I deeply appreciate the generosity extended to me when I showed up on doorsteps unannounced.  I apologize to all of the members of these tribes I did not seek out or missed.  I have tried to emphasize the positive statements made to me and avoid either romanticizing the People or ignoring the huge problems they face.  As Stan Steiner said of his 1968 classic, The New Indians: "What I have written is not a study, but a book of people full of the truths and lies people tell."  Those "truths and lies" are simply the stories every person tells in their own way.  Other members of their communities would tell different stories.  I try to provide a chorus of stories that, together, communicate the distinct personality of each people.

            I have tried to photograph with care, to refrain from taking advantage of people.  Except for public events, I have asked permission from my subjects.  During four days photographing at an Apache girl's puberty ceremony at Whiteriver, Arizona , I asked my companion, the late San Carlos Apache medicine man Philip Cassadore, whether it was really acceptable to publish my pictures.  With a wry spark in his eye, he reassured me: I had a wordless model release from the entire community: "You took the picture there at the ceremonial ground in front of two hundred Apaches, and no one stopped you.  If somebody is going to stop you, they'll stop you right there.  Nobody stopped you; that means okay."

            There will be Indian individuals and entire communities who will read this book and feel that I have divulged too much, that a white man should not be treading this territory; I regret offending them.  And there will be Indian people who resent other members of their communities speaking about their shared culture, though virtually every person I interviewed made clear that they spoke only for themselves.  In interviews, I did not pursue such sensitive subjects as ritual and ceremony.  If one of the People chose to share sacred aspects of culture, he or she did so, and I took notes.  Hopi and Zuni people talk openly about katsinas; Acoma, Santo Domingo, or San Felipe Pueblo people would never talk about such matters with anyone outside the Pueblo.  In my text, I have tried to strike a middle ground. I know I have taken some risks.  Everett Burch, language and education coordinator for the Southern Utes at the time I visited him, said to me: "We've given you a piece of our lives.  You then have the responsibility to give something in return." 

            This book is my gift. 

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T

his is our homeland.  This is our one last acreage; it sounds big, but it's small compared to what we once owned: the whole western slope of Colorado."  Ute Mountain Ute Arthur Cuthair sums up the history of his people with these words and a sweep of his arm up and around, through a blue sky stirring with thunderheads--taking in the green tableland of Mesa Verde, the stub of Chimney Rock, and the sleeping curves of Ute Mountain. 

            Once, his people lived unchallenged throughout western Colorado and eastern Utah, in the Rocky Mountains and the drier plateaus and valleys sloping southward to merge with the Southwest.  The Utes held this homeland in the face of all immigrant invasions, perhaps for as long as ten-thousand years--right up to a century ago.  And then they lost nearly all of it to the last invasion, to the Anglos who came to settle and mine and own land the Utes felt could not be owned.

            But they did not disappear.  Vivian Frost, a young Southern Ute woman, says: "In Colorado they think we don't exist, but we do."  The southern bands of Utes continue to exist today at two reservations in the southwest corner of the state.  All other Colorado Indian tribes were removed.  Northern Colorado and Utah Utes live at the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in northern Utah--beyond the Southwest.

            Norman Lopez, editor of the Ute Mountain tribal newspaper, the Echo, says: "We need to understand that there are Indians in Colorado.  These dances, the Sun Dance and the Bear Dance, still exist today."

            The Utes endure.

From the Wasatch Range overlooking the Salt Lake Valley, east to the Great Plains, and from the Uinta Mountains at the rim of the Wyoming Basin, south to the San Juan River and Santa Fe, eleven historic Ute bands divided this huge expanse of the West.  Several bands had access to abundant mountain game and garnered half of their food from hunting.  Others lived on lakeshores, and a third of their diet came from fish.  The driest territories dictated more plant gathering.

            At their frontiers, the Utes came in contact with a wide variety of other Indian cultures.  Western Utes, in modern Utah, were most like their Great Basin linguistic cousins, the Paiute and Shoshone.  Eastern Utes, in modern Colorado, adopted more Plains traits.  The southernmost eastern Utes had the closest contacts with Pueblo and Apachean peoples--trading at Taos and Pecos, allying with the Jicarilla, even a few bold Ute farmers planting cornfields long before Indian agents came along and insisted they do so.

            Reservations isolated these three southernmost Ute bands from northern bands, and today there are Southern Utes and Northern Utes.  The Mouache and Capote bands merged to become the Southern Ute Tribe.  The Weeminuche band became today's Ute Mountain Ute.  All other Utes came to be called Northern Utes.

            The Mouache lived along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Santa Fe, westward to the San Luis Valley.  Capote Utes spanned the Colorado-New Mexico border south of the summits of the San Juan Mountains and west from the San Luis Valley as far as Durango.  Still further westward, the Weeminuche held the San Juan River drainage, from the snowy San Juan and Abajo mountains to the arid mesas and plateaus surrounding the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers in Glen Canyon--where they overlapped the San Juan band of Southern Paiute.

            These Utes were the northernmost of Southwestern Indians.  Beyond them to the north, beyond the spine of the San Juans and the high desert of the San Luis Valley, land, plants and animals, and culture changed.  The Southwest ended.

After making the world and all the animals, the He-She--Sinawaf, the One-Above, the Creator--realized that they would always be quarreling, particularly with Coyote around to cause trouble.  So Sinawaf made the Grizzly Bear to rule over the other animals with wisdom and strength.  Coyote still makes mischief.  But Bear is there for the Utes to learn from.

            Eddie Box, the Southern Ute Sun Dance chief, told writer Nancy Wood some of what the Utes have learned.  "The bear...was able to bring people together, to teach them to live in harmony all year long, not just at Bear Dance time.  The Creator used the bear to teach the Ute strength and wisdom and survival."

            The Bear Dance is the oldest of Ute ceremonies--still performed today at both Southern Ute and Ute Mountain.  By dancing, the Utes awaken Bear from winter sleep.  In turn, Bear leads the People to roots, berries, and nuts through the summer. Women choose their partners (who should not be relatives), and the courting that follows has always led to many marriages.  On the sidelines, feasting, horse-racing, gambling, and stick-and-hand games make these four days the most important coming together of the Ute year.

            The Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes both hold sacred the Bear Dance and Sun Dance.  Southern Ute educator Everett Burch says, "There's one big church--there's no getting away from it.  The whole universe is one big tipi." 

            Youngsters also join powwow dance groups, learning what David Box learned: "The older people say a powwow is to establish yourself among other people in good spirits--teach your children what it means to be an Indian."  Linda Baker Rohde remembers: "In Durango, the school never understood how important it was to get away for powwows.  If they want to keep what's left of the real Native American, they will have to learn how to work with them."

            The most powerful part of "what's left" of the Ute spirit comes out each year in the Sun Dance.  And to talk about the Southern Ute Sun Dance means talking about Eddie Box.

            Consistently described as "the self-proclaimed spiritual leader of the Southern Utes," Eddie Box is a controversial character.  In When Buffalo Free the Mountains, Nancy Wood tells the story of Box's return to the reservation in 1954 after some years away, of his restoring the Sun Dance that had disappeared with the death in 1941 of the last Sun Dance chief (the grandfather of Eddie Box's wife).  She tells of the risks he has taken--and the criticism these actions have brought.

            Eddie Box stepped in to fill a vacuum.  The grumblings from the rest of the community about his conspicuousness and his celebrity seem to come not so much from people who wish to displace him, but from the jealousy extended toward anyone who has the confidence to stand alone.

            I spoke with Eddie Box in his living room, under the gaze of a great shaggy mounted buffalo head, with bold paintings by his son on the walls facing a reproduction of a classic Remington-esque cavalry-and-Indian skirmish.  On the mantel were black-and-white photos: a mysterious vision of Jesus appearing in the Canadian clouds taken by a Cree friend of Box and a portrait of the Comanche leader, Quanah Parker--a Box ancestor.  Eddie says that he has a little Cheyenne and white in him also, from his grandmother, daughter of trader George Bent and his Cheyenne wife.  Many Box family members, including Eddie, have Bent as a middle name.

            Box served sixteen years on the tribal council; retired now, he makes Ute "love flutes," signing them with the name he prefers, Red Ute.  He says, "Back in the fifties, they call me agitator, they call me activist.  They call me many names.  All I was telling the people was `wake up--we cannot let somebody else think for us all the time.'"

            He speaks most passionately about ceremony: "When I talk about these things, it kind of sends chills down my back.  We've got so much power within ourselves to help ourselves, but we don't use it.  That's what the Indian ceremonies are all about.  The Sun is an energy, it is created by the Creator.  Accept it, it fills you up, then you let it flow out."

            Eddie Box says: "I didn't become the Sun Dance chief overnight."  Like any Sun Dance chief, he received a vision directing him to sponsor the dance.  He speaks thoughtfully, sincerely, and movingly; he seems the real thing.  Who are we--Ute or non-Ute--to question the validity of personal visions?

            The Sun Dance came to the Ute from the Shoshone, who learned it from the Comanche, who learned it from the Kiowa.  Ute Mountain performed their first Sun Dance in 1900, their shaman Tonapach learning the ritual from the Northern Utes; he, in turn taught the ceremony to Southern Ute shaman Edwin Cloud in 1904. 

            In his fine book on the Sun Dance religion, Joseph Jorgensen suggests that the Utes adopted the Sun Dance after the Ghost Dance failed to rid their world of whites, after the Utes had resigned themselves to reservation life.  The Sun Dance "promised only that men could cope with life as it was, promised only that it could make men well and make communities happy to the exclusion of whites, yet in a white-dominated world."  And it delivers on these promises to its participants still.  As Eddie Box says: "Some of the things Indian people feel are not written in books, they are written in their hearts.  The teachings of the Sun Dance are about peace and harmony." 

            Sun Dancers pledge to dance in twelve dances.  In each, they dance for three days and three nights (at Southern Ute, four), seeking to acquire power, puwa.  They dance and sleep in a corral, the "thirst house," without drinking or eating, with the hope that power will come to them--for themselves, the community, relatives in mourning, or to make themselves shamans.  Singers and drummers accompany them, spectators watch and bring them armfuls of cattails, cottonwood branches, and other water-loving herbs to cover themselves with.  The women who sit by the singers brandish these same sprays of green plants, keeping time to the music with them.  The women sing for a line or two alone when the drum stops--a benediction.

            The dancers move back and forth toward a central cottonwood pole, in the crook of which rests a bison head.  They charge and retreat, blowing eagle-bone whistles, meditating, pondering their dreams, giving themselves to the power of this religious experience.  The symbolism of the corral and the dance is complex, mixing Ute ritual with Christianity: indeed, Utes told Jorgensen: "No one knows the complete meaning of the dance."

            I watch as Eddie Box directs the third day of a summer Sun Dance.  He announces that the afternoon is for blessing and healing anyone who wants to come into the lodge.  An old man is pushed beneath the center pole in a wheelchair; next come mothers with babies and little children--the kids solemn, uncrying. 

            Eddie Box wears a crown of greenery and uses a swatch of it as a wand, along with an eagle wing, working over the bodies of the patients.  The eagle wing makes a dry tapping sound, light, soft, with a vibration--of power.  Other dancers do some curing and "shamanizing" for their own patients.

            The Southern Ute Sun Dance lodge stands a couple of miles north of Ignacio.  Beyond its circle is a circle of brush shades and the tipis and pickups of spectators's camps.  Beyond camp is a circle of sheltering reddish hills; on ridgetops and along the base of the rise stand ranchhouses, the more affluent with satellite dishes.  The cattail sprays brought to the dancers come from the marshy edges of fields, some with cattle grazing, a few marked by the rhythmic clanking of oil-well pumpjacks.  Further still is the circle of mountains, big ones, including Hesperus Peak in the La Platas.  Los Pinos River flows by midst cottonwood trees, a little to the east.

            This truly is a dance to the Sun.  Sunlight blasts the spectators, too, but we have it easy, retiring to shade and food and cold drinks whenever we feel the need.  All that greenery warming in the sun makes the lodge smell sweet and moist--and I smell sage, too.

            The drum and the singing and the sharp thin chorus of eagle-bone whistles mesmerizes.  The drum goes on and on; it rests on the earth; its vibrations come through earth and air to each listener's breastbone.  Breastbone, eagle bone.

            The dancers hold eagle wings or a single wing feather, to amplify their prayers and to bless the pole, each other, themselves, and family members who approach.  Eddie Box says: "When you come out of the Sun Dance, you have to do it in steps, like a decompression chamber.  We hope they won't go down all the steps, back to where they started."

            A last dance, last song, and last blessing end the ritual.  Gift giving and a feast end the gathering.  The Southern Ute dance begins the annual cycle of Shoshone and Ute Sun Dances, and people from all the reservations attend and dance at others.

Linda Baker-Rohde said something to me that explains how the Utes have maintained their spirit in the face of change.  "You are everything that is in your family line.  No matter who you are, you are an old person with someone new inside of you.  You reflect who you once were, yet you have new experiences that your great-grandmother couldn't have."

            Eddie Box says, with hope: "One hundred years from now, our kids probably will be more understanding than us.  I understand my elders; these people in the future will understand me and my elders. 

            "One hundred years from now, Utes will still be Sun Dancing."