Utes

The Ute historical creation myth is that Father Sky created the Earth, moon, sun, and stars. A mythical Creator placed on the Earth everything that people would need in order to survive in terms of food and shelter, and then placed several sticks into a sack. The Creator's intention was that the people would all be equal and hold equal amounts of territory. Coyote came along and opened the sack prematurely, however, allowing chaos and mass dispersal. The Utes, one of the groups of people, were able to conquer and retain a much larger portion of the land than other groups of people. According to scholars, this creation story shares much with the actual historical migration record.

The Utes once enjoyed a vast territory. Like most Native American territories, it consisted of two parts: the domain, meaning the principle land of residence, and the hunting grounds. The original Ute domain included almost all of Utah and Colorado. The outlying hunting grounds, which stretched beyond the domain, included small portions of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

For several thousand years hunter and gatherer peoples are believed to have occupied this region. By around 500 CE, two distinct groups of people are believed to have resided in the Four Corners region: the Moquis, also known as the Fremont People, and the Anasazi. The Moquis combined hunting with sedentary agriculture. The Anasazi were an agricultural people and were in existence until about the mid-14th century. The factors that caused their removal and extinction remain a mystery. There is little or no evidence to suggest violence and many believe the reason to be climatic changes.

Utes, like other tribes of the Southwest, have Aztec roots. Southwestern Indian tribes are believed to have migrated from Mexico possibly as early as 2000 BCE. This movement included what would by and large become the tribes of the American Southwest, including the better known tribes such as Utes, Paiutes, Shoshones, Chemehuevis, Hopis, and Apaches. These were all believed to have been one great mass of relatively indistinguishable Native Americans centered roughly around the Great Basin region by about 1000 CE.

According to the Southern Paiute creation myth, Coyote brought a bag of sticks from the south to the Great Basin region east of Death Valley, where the sticks escaped. This myth, which is similar to other western Indian origin myths, suggests that the tribes of the Southwest share roughly a similar origin and began to spread from one another, becoming or solidifying distinct characteristic tribal identities at a similar time. Scholars believe this mass migration and cultural distinction took place between 1000 and 1400 CE. While scholars do believe that after the first wave of migration from Mexico there was indeed a dispersal of peoples beginning in about 1000 CE they place the origin of this second movement not in the Great Basin, as the Southern Paiute creation myth suggests, but rather in Death Valley. From this location most agree that the Shoshones went to the north, the Utes went to the northeast, and the Paiutes remained. Evidence for this comes mostly from the study of these tribes' basket production, which indicates marked similarities. Utes settled in the Four Corners region by 1300 CE, and over the next 200 years also migrated into the Colorado Rocky Mountain region.

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