OCR Text |
Show Fig. 15 Face painting. Southern Paiute. Early 1900s. Adapted from Isabel T. Kelly, Southern Paiute Ethnography, University of Utah Anthropological Papers, no. 69 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1964), Fig. 7. Painting by Jay Nielson. 1978. Collection of Utah Museum of Natural History. benevolent products of an industrialized society: spark-makers, warm woolen blankets, metal tinklers, and rainbows of colored, faceted, iridescent seed beads. The Ute people quickly learned beadwork techniques. An unusual and whimsical pair of dyed gauntlet gloves, made during the early reservation period, illustrate the sophisticated artistry which Ute women once achieved with beads and deerskin (Fig. 14). In addition to their material culture, the Utes were a people possessed of a lively oral tradition. We are lucky to know something about their engaging coyote tales, music, and ceremonial and social dances. One very old Ute springtime dance, originally probably both a social and a religious event, is the Bear Dance. The Ute people explain that they originally learned the dance from the brown and grizzly bears which lived in great numbers on their lands. John Duncan described the coming of the Bear Dance to his people: Long ago a man dreamed he saw a bear way back in the mountains, dancing in front of his horse. He danced to a pole and back again and kept repeating this, as the people dance forward and backward now. The man then set out to seek the bear. After traveling in the mountains he found him dancing in this manner. The bear taught the dance to the man, who returned home and introduced it to his people.u Dancers arranged in two long lines were accompanied by musicians playing moraches (rasps) placed in resonators. A rare and energetic Ute painting illustrates the Bear Dance and the Sun Dance, a ceremony which the Utes acquired from the Plains people (Fig. 17). The people who gathered at Bear Dances in the mid-nineteenth century, dressed in brilliantly beaded clothing and perhaps gambling away some of the profits of another year's successful trade with the white man, did not know that such good times were almost at an end. Many Paiute groups realized early that the arrival of the new strangers was not a fortunate turn of events. White trappers, failing to understand the ingenious and precisely adjusted material culture of the "Archaic" Paiute people they encountered in the Great Basin, contemptuously dismissed them as "diggers." As late as 1874, John W. Powell's expedition photographed the Kaibab Paiutes in deeply fringed Plains buckskin costumes instead of their own clothing.13 Many white men accepted the vivid, "barbaric" material culture of the Plains Indians as a romantic symbol of the wild, new western land they intended to conquer; but they found the hunting and gathering lifeway of some Great Basin peoples to be primitive and incomprehensible. Unfortunately the Ute people, too, would ultimately suffer from the often disastrous cultural collision which marked the white settlement of this country. 13 |