The evening of March 3, the Carbondale Historical Society hosted the third installment of its 2024 Winter Speaker Series, “Tales of the Ute People in the Roaring Fork Valley,” in partnership with the Aspen Historical Society. Nina Gabianelli and Skyler Lomahaftewa were the keynote speakers. The two have collaborated since 2012 to bring the culture, language and stories of the Ute people to public schools and other educational programs.
Gabianelli served as vice president for the Aspen Historical Society and worked in programming and education there since 2008.
She discussed history specific to the Uncompahgre Ute, who have ancestral ties to the land and of which tribe Lomahaftewa is a member. She covered a wide spectrum, beginning with the Ute story for creation and delving into drafted U.S. treaties that were subsequently broken, the Meeker massacre of 1879 and the forcing of the Ute people onto reservations.
“Most of the information I’ve gathered comes from oral histories as well as reading different books and authors who write about the Native peoples — some [by] white men and some [by] Native people. So there are a lot of different variations,” Gabianelli said during her opening statement.
She explained that some Ute elders track their history back hundreds of years, while others say it expands thousands; some say they were always here, and some say there were others before them.
“We know there’s hard evidence of human life in this Valley that dates back over 8,000 years,” Gabianelli asserted. She pointed out the mid-’90s discovery of bones, found in a cave near Glenwood Springs, known as the Timberline Man. Those bones proved to be over 8,000 years old.
Lomahaftewa shared his lived experience as an Indigenous person.
Lomahaftewa grew up on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah and came to the Valley many years ago to pursue positive change in his life and a love for snowboarding. He also has Hopi and Choctaw heritage on his father’s side.
“My mother is Ute and in most Native tribes and cultures you go with your mother’s side. So my mother being Northern Ute, I more or less identify with and gravitate toward the Ute side, even though my last name is a Hopi name,” Lomahaftewa explained.
He made it clear in his opening that he does not speak for all Ute or Indigenous people, but from his own perspective and experience.
“Everything often gets explained from the perspective of Western society. I come in and speak to a Native interpretation of things — our perspective of our history, our culture and everything else,” said Lomahaftewa. “I want everyone to get the idea that Native peoples and cultures are still living, versus being something in a textbook that you’re reading in history.”
Though not an elder, he is a caretaker of one of the dance ceremonies on his reservation: The Bear Dance. The tradition is performed each spring to mark the end of winter. Lomahaftewa’s great-grandfather once held the same responsibility for their tribe — demonstrating his earlier point that Native cultures persist.
After the presentation, the duo answered questions from the audience. One observer inquired how Lomahaftewa feels when he studies his people’s history.
“When I was a teenager, I was much more angry when learning my history. My reaction was natural … I thought about many things at once. Today, I think about how to fix that. How can we heal from that?” he rhetorically questioned in conclusion.
Visit carbondalehistory.org to find a recording of the presentation in the coming days.