Ute Museum

Today, I went with members of my archeology group to the Ute Museum on the Indian Reservation in Ignacio. In a word, it was awesome! We had a big group . . . maybe twenty-four people, so they split us into two smaller groups. My group went to the permanent museum first.

The Ute woman who gave the tour was excellent. In the museum, first we watched a short video that was interesting. Then, we started on the official tour. The museum is divided into different sections, and we'd stop at most of the sections and she would talk about it. It has been too long now for me to remember the sections, but they had a broken promises section, a section on herbal plants, food, weapons, horses, mandatory schools, and they even had a small house of the type that they forced the natives to live in on the reservations.

It showed some info on the Ute language, and I saw that horse was kava. I asked them how to pronounce it, because kava kava is an herb. It's pronounced ka-va with the accent on the second syllable. They talked about the mandatory schools where they ripped all children from their parents, forced them to go to school in faraway places (so it would be too far for them to run away and go home), and how they cut their hair, and wouldn't let them speak their native language. The houses that they forced them to live in were one room simple affairs, with a wood stove, a chair, and a table. Not much else.

After that incredibly interesting presentation, we went into another room to watch a short presentation on the "buffalo box." The buffalo box is a box made of rawhide from a buffalo. Inside the box are different parts of the buffalo and she explained what each one was for. One of the most interesting were these little things on the forelegs of the buffalo . . . and horses have them, too. Jennifer had told me once that they were remnants of a previous toe. Anyway, they are this hard, pointed "thing" coming from the back of about where the ankle would be. The Utes used to use them for . . . well, she described it like this . . . they'd hang them over the door, and if a teen-ager tried to sneak out at night . . . they would make a sound! I thought that was kind of cool. The whole table was filled with many different things all made from the buffalo.

After that, both groups met up again and had lunch at the casino. This woman from the casino/museum, who had apparently arranged the whole thing for us, came as we all sat down. She started to announce that whoever came up with the first ute word . . . I immediately shouted out "ka-va!" and I won a free lunch! How cool is that!? All in all, it was a really fun day!