| OCR Text |
Show on the matter of ritual sites. There was no reason for the Utes to make the sites of their rituals known to agents. Had agents reported that the Utes continued to follow their indigenous religious observances instead of adopting Christianity, they would have been announcing the failure of United States " civilization" efforts. The absence of federal reports regarding the continuing ritual and sacred observances of the Uintah Utes is not evidence that such rituals did not exist, nor that specific sites on the Uintah Reservation were not important to religious observances. Several federal documents discussed below make brief mention of the continuing performance of the Sun Dance, Bear Dance, and other community rituals and customs, along with production nd wearing of traditional regalia and associated arts even throughout the 1940s. Traditional regalia associated with rituals appear in visual images collected in 1873, only one year after the Utes settled on the reservation. That year a Smithsonian expedition, headed by John Powell, photographed the Uintah Utes. The images are currently housed at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. The locations where the photos were taken is unknown; notes on the images simply read " Uintah Valley on the eastern slope of the Wasatch Mts., in Utah." 5 While the subjects are, to some extent, posed for the camera, the images still reflect the predominance of indigenous material culture, including symbols with potent meanings to the Utes. National Anthropological Archives ( NAA), Powell Expedition Photographs, Nos. 1527- 1548D. |
