The Moache and Capote bands remained on the Southern Ute Reservation, and despite the further erosion to their homeland when European settlement was permitted on lands not allotted, they have used their sovereignty and western systems to become one of the most prosperous Tribes in America. We acknowledge that Mesa Verde National Park was excised from Ute Mountain Ute lands, stolen without consent or compensation by the federal government in 1906. When the Weenuche band refused allotment in 1895 (a tactic intended to assign individual parcels of land to individual people in an attempt to destroy the traditional collective ownership of lands), Chief Ignacio led the Weeminuche to the west, to what is now known as the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. Some Ute bands were forced to the Uintah Basin in what is now known as Utah, and the Moache, Capote, and Weeminuche bands were forcibly relocated to a strip of land 15 miles wide and 110 miles long south of Durango.
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A series of Treaties in the 1800s dispossessed Ute people of nearly the entire landmass of what is now known as Colorado. When elimination of the Ute people failed, a campaign of forced assimilation followed. The doctrine of manifest destiny, coupled with the Colorado gold rush of 1858, began a campaign of genocide and forced dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands and their cultures. Their history begins here, and it has been so since time immemorial.īy the time Spanish explorers arrived in the southwest in the late 16th century, there were a multiplicity of Tribes in the area including a host of Pueblos, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache, Shoshone, Comanche, Kiowa, and Diné (Navajo). Nuche (anglicized to “Yuta,” then “Ute”) peoples, particularly the Weeminuche Band (“the old ones”) have no migration story. The places they lived and the structures they built are not considered abandoned, and people continue to return to these places today, greeting their relatives who still inhabit this living cultural landscape.
These lands are the ancestral homelands of contemporary Hopi and Pueblo peoples, who lived, worked, and prospered here before moving forward in their long migration to their present-day homes in what is now known as New Mexico and Arizona. The national office of Great Old Broads for Wilderness in Durango, Colorado acknowledges that our sustenance and prosperity is derived from lands from which Native peoples, who have been caretakers of these lands for hundreds of generations, were forcibly removed.
We recognize further changes may be needed, and we welcome feedback. We see this land acknowledgement as a living document that will become more robust as we continue on our path of learning.
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