On April 11, Roland McCook, an Uncompahgre band member from the Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, shared his knowledge and lived experience of Ute history in western Colorado. The free presentation was organized through the Glenwood Springs Historical Society’s speaker series and took place at the Glenwood Library. McCook currently runs an organization called Native American Cultural Programs, a nonprofit based out of Grand Junction.
“We had our own laws, most of which had to do with what’s right or wrong. We all have our conscience,” McCook said about the untrue notion that Native Americans were lawless.
McCook made sure everyone attending had a map of the original Ute lands in western Colorado up until 1860. He began by defining the names of tribes and noted that the Ute (Nuche in the Ute language) people did not consider themselves to be in tribes, but in families. Settlers used the descriptor “tribe” which has since carried over through colonialist recordings.
McCook started at the northwestern point of Colorado with the Yamprika family, the name meaning “root eater.” Just down from there was the Parianuche family, which means “elk people.” Taviwach, which translates to “sunny people,” was the original name for the Uncompahgre, or “red pond,” family in southwestern Colorado. Then, there were the southern Ute families: the Weeminuche, Moache and Kapota.
In 1861, the Uinta Valley Reservation was established in Utah and in 1868 the Treaty with the Ute (popularly known as the Kit Carson Treaty) sectioned off land spanning almost all of the Western Slope for the Ute people to live on. However, the settlers wanted the land for mining and farming. That treaty only lasted six years before the Brunot Agreement was made, which removed a chunk of Ute land, and so on and so forth until in 1880, when there was no western Colorado land for the Ute people to live on.
In response to the treaties encroaching on Ute land, Chief Ouray said, “You promised we’d have this original land.”
Eventually, there was a disagreement among some White River Reservation Ute members and a settler representative, Nathan Meeker, on farming expansion over sacred ground, which led to violence.
“Everything we do is labeled as a massacre,” McCook said regarding the Meeker Massacre of 1879, which was used as the reason for the forced removal of Ute people from western Colorado to Utah.
McCook said, “[The settlers’] lumped us all in one and moved us to Utah. [The Ute people] had been there over a thousand years and now they were herded like cattle, away from a way of life they knew.”
From the plants that they made medicine from, and knew the seasonal growth patterns of, to the hunting grounds and animals native to the areas, the Ute families were torn away from their Colorado home.
McCook explained that since the forced relocation of the Uncompahgre people, the Utes from Colorado have been living on the Uinta and Ouray Reservation in Utah and the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute reservations on the border of Colorado and New Mexico.
The presentation covered the Ute history from 1860 to present time and how Utah became the current home for many Utes despite the fact that they were originally from Colorado.
McCook also shared his personal story and experiences across multiple careers. The last two positions he held were serving his community as a tribal governor for nine years and then working at the Smithsonian as vice-chair and chair of the Native American Repatriation Review Committee. He retired and moved to Montrose to be closer to the mountains of his ancestors, and now offers lectures on the history of the Ute people.