Decade after decade, federal Indian agents tried to change nearly everything about members of the Ute tribe: how they lived, their language, their faith traditions, what they wore, what they ate — and the family bonds that would ensure their culture endured.
Many parents refused to have their children exposed to one of the key assimilation strategies: federal boarding schools, either those built in other states or the two that opened on the reservation. Some children who were sent — or were collected by officials — ran away. Many refused to stop speaking their own language, although it was forbidden at school. Families reconnected on breaks and during the summers and at Bear Dances.
In 1896, a superintendent complained that Ute mothers saw the boarding schools as a plot — which, arguably, they were, against Ute culture and lifeways. After summer break, "we found much of our work had been unraveled by the camp mothers, who cling so tenaciously to the traditions and customs of their tribe,” Charles A. Walker wrote, “and regard the education so lavishly extended by the Government as merely a plot of the white man against their liberties and possessions."
What Indian agents framed — often in racist terms — as disobedience and disinterest was resistance.
The reports also show Ute students staying connected to their families — refusing to stop speaking Ute, taking yeast home to make bread at their family’s tepee, bringing fabric from home to sew clothing at school for a favorite brother or sister.
What federal Indian agents reported 1874 to 1906
In oral history interviews, former boarding school students and others describe resistance to assimilation — from running away from the schools, to continuing to speak Ute despite decades of efforts by federal officials to stamp it out, to later efforts to include their culture in public schools. Margaret Eberly, a non-Native who worked in education, said Ute students were still speaking Ute to each other in class in the 1960s — despite still being punished for it there, too.
Read about artist Keith Secola Jr. and how he fuses imagery from the past and present to recreate narratives and question Native American representation in history.
Read about the return of the Bear Dance to Whiterocks, once the home of Utah’s earliest and longest running federal boarding school.
The Ute Bear Dance hasn’t been held for 20 years in this Utah town — until now
Studies dating back a century show that Native students learn best and succeed when their language and culture are present in their education. Uintah River High serves as an example of what could happen if the Uinta Basin’s public school districts followed those recommendations.
This spreadsheet includes links to more than 150 photographs of members of the Ute Indian Tribe, from the early 1900s at the reservation boarding schools in Whiterocks and Randlett to Bear Dances through the decades to students today.
