Ute (Indian Tribe)

Ute

Chief Severo and family, ca. 1899
Total population
(4,800–10,000)
Regions with significant populations
United States (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah)
Languages
English, Ute
Religion
Native American Church, traditional tribal religion, and Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Chemehuevi and Southern Paiute people

Ute people /ˈjuːt/ are Native Americans of the Ute tribe and culture. They are now living primarily in Utah and Colorado. The Ute are in the Great Basin classification of Indigenous People.

They have three Ute tribal reservations: Uintah-Ouray in northeastern Utah (3,500 members); Southern Ute in Colorado (1,500 members); and Ute Mountain which primarily lies in Colorado, but extends to Utah and New Mexico (2,000 members). The majority of Ute are believed to live on one of these reservations. The State of Utah is named after these people.

The primary language of the Ute people is English. However, some of the people still speak their ancestral Ute language. It is related to the Southern Paiute language and belongs to the Southern subdivision of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

A dictionary and grammar have been written for the language, and the Bible has been translated into Ute. Several orthographies exist, but the language is written in the Latin script. Different ideas about the phonetic spelling of many names and some words has caused confusion about the spelling, so many names are often spelled in several different ways. An example is Timpanogos, which has also been spelled as Toompahnahwach, Tumpanuwac, Tumpanawach, Timpanog, Tumpipanogo or Timanogos, among other spellings. (Some of these spellings are transliterations by other language speakers to represent how Ute words sounded in their languages.)

The original homeland of the Uto-Aztecan languages is generally considered to have existed several thousand years ago along the border between the United States and Mexico, perhaps in the area of Arizona and New Mexico, as well as part of the Northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. From this area, speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages gradually diffused northward and southward. Tribes that speak Uto-Aztecan languages include the Aztec in Central/South Mexico; Hopi and Pima in Arizona and New Mexico; and tribes such as the Ute, Paiute, Bannock, Shoshone, and Comanche on the north and east.