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Show A series of signed and broken treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century slowly forced Indian groups onto reservation lands in Utah. Resistance must have seemed futile to the Indian people. In 1865 Brigham Young summarized the situation for the Utes (Fig. 16): If you do not sell your land to the government they will take it, whether you are willing to sell it or not-and it won't make one particle of difference whether you say they may have the land or not, because we shall increase and we shall occupy this valley and the next and so on until we occupy the whole of them.14 The Ute people were finally segregated into two large groups designated as the Northern and Southern Utes. The Southern Utes are settled near the Colorado-Utah border and consist of the Capote and Mouache groups, who once lived in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. The Uintah and other scattered Utah bands moved to the bleak Uinta-Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah, where they were joined by the White River group, who had lived near the Yampa River in Utah and Colorado, and the Uncompahgres, the high-mountain people of Colorado.15 Some generalizations can be made about the Utes' material culture and that of other Indian peoples of Utah just before the reservation era. Like many generations of their ancestors, they tended to be conservative and traditional with little internal specialization. Knowledge was shared and activities were homogeneous. Innovation was probably somewhat proscribed and repetition rewarded. "Unique" or even highly individual objects, possessing a personally distinct assemblage of traits, were rarely produced. Survival needs and cultural norms dictated production. Indian people had a rich and eclectic material culture which was increasingly impacted by their changed and diminished lifeway. In the late nineteenth century most Ute and Paiute people still remembered how to construct basketry utensils, although they no longer played a significant role in Indian life and at that time had little commercial appeal to anyone else. One pitch-lined coiled water bottle, once a necessary tool for people who lived and traveled in an arid landscape, is an artifact demonstrative of the change that began to take place. The prehistoric form has acquired horsehair lugs and, in eloquent testimony to the new western symbolism, has a bottom patch made from the denim pocket of a pair of Levi Strauss trousers (Fig. 19). Although it is over seventy years old, it still fills the air with the sweet smell of sap when it is lifted. Water stored in such baskets must have had a pleasant, clean tang not found in metal canteens. On the reservation Ute women continued to bead native tanned products, al- 14 Fig. 16 Mormon missionary baptizing Shivwits Indians. St. George. C. R. Savage. Photograph. 1875. Collection of LDS Historical Department. |