Nuche

At one time, the Ute people inhabited a vast territory covering most of what is now Utah and Colorado. In the mid-nineteenth century, settlement in Ute territory by non-Indians caused several deadly conflicts in Utah. In western Colorado, influential mining and other economic interests were the leading factors displacing the Ute by way of government treaties and agreements. Less than 40 years after the arrival of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Ute bands from the Great Basin and western Colorado were relocated from their mountain homelands to a desolate and unfamiliar reservation in the Uinta Basin.

“Once we were the children of God, but now we are the children of the government.”   

In the early 1900s, U.S. government policy sought to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American culture with the hope that tribes would disintegrate and would no longer need reservations (and funding for those reservations). Some of the ways the government hoped to accomplish this was through increased pressure to farm and ranch, social integration, and boarding schools. For the Ute people, these efforts resulted in a slow adaptation to a new way of life.