(bright music) - [Female] Wickiups were a
shelter for the Ute people. They were trees that
were taken from the land that we could find. One wickiup will not
look like the next because there's different trees. - We've been recording
wickiups for many years. - We're down to the
last few hundred of them on the surface of the
western United States, and that's why we're in a
kind of a rush against time. - So we try very hard not
to leave anything behind which sometimes
provides a challenge for the archeological community
to record and find evidence. - The fact that they
weren't well recorded or understood made them
seem even more significant. - The Ute people virtually
lost all of Colorado. In our minds, our
old Ute territory, we still own that land. Beneath that is where our
ancestral people are buried, so that's why we want to
keep them and preserve them as much as possible. - [Announcer] This
program was made possible by the History Colorado
State Historical Fund. - [Announcer] Supporting
projects throughout the state to preserve, protect,
and interpret Colorado's architectural
and archeological treasures, History Colorado's
State Historical Fund:
create the future, honor the past. - [Announcer] With support
from the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, and the
Colorado Office of Film, Television, and Media. With additional support
from these organizations and viewers like you, thank you. (bright music) - A wickiup is an
anthropological or
archeological name that has been used for
Native American dwellings. - Our homes, we prefer
to call it Ute dwellings or Ute lodges, rather
than a wickiup. - Wickiups were a
shelter for the people and they were relatively
speaking not fresh
green cut trees but rather trees that were taken from the land that
we could find, and we were very, very
resourceful in finding what was offered to us,
not intentionally going and chopping new stuff. - It's a brush shelter. The shape and design
and size of which is at least partially
predicated by the environment, what the environment gives
you to build a shelter out of. Here in the pinyon-juniper
habitat of western Colorado, you break off dead
saplings or branches of primarily juniper trees. 97% of our wooden feature
poles for the platforms and the wickiups are juniper
as opposed to pinyon. - In the summertime,
they're up in the mountains. They're building lodges there. So when they make lodges that
are easier to put together, sometimes they're made
out of aspen poles, especially in the mountains
where there's aspens, a lot of aspen, so they're
making their dwelling out of aspen poles. - What mother earth provides
to us is ultimately seen. We don't go seek it, it's
usually there for us, and so it's through that
knowledge and the ability to structure something
in a unique form to provide that shelter. One wickiup will not
look like the next because there's different trees, different brush
that are out there. - They're so expedient,
some are bigger than others, some lean one direction
than the other, but they were put together
with the weather in mind more than anything else. We spend a whole lot
more time recording it than they did building it. A whole lot more
time, which is ironic. - The real reason I started for Dominquez Archeological
Research Group was because years of
being in the field and finding sites
being wiped out by vandals and animals and
developments of all sorts, and that's part of what the
wickiup project was all about. Those things are
in the environment, and wood deteriorates
and a lot of these were done probably
150 years ago, and ultimately they
go into the ground. We've been recording wickiups
for many years actually, from the 1980s when
we first started doing cultural resource
management work, but the Colorado Preservation
Organization listed this as one of the most endangered
structures in Colorado, and so we picked up on that
to push the wickiup project. - Back in 2003, DARG got a small
grant to do a wickiup study in a site in Garfield County,
which is one of the largest accumulations of
wickiup structures. It was kind of astounding
to learn how little we knew about Ute archeology even
though it's the most recent indigenous and aboriginal
archeology available to us. The fact that they weren't
well recorded or understood made them seem even
more significant. - We tread very lightly
and we're told you leave the campsite as though
you were never there. So we try very hard not
to leave anything behind, which sometimes
provides a challenge for the archeological community. They're looking for evidence,
we're told do not leave, basically, in english, do not
leave evidence you were there. Even though the youths were
gone, they had left these traces of their hunter
gatherer lifestyle here. How little we actually
knew and how hard they were to recognize out in the
field, which is also why they weren't studied well. It quickly became obvious
that we didn't know enough to actually interpret
the meaning of these or the significance of
them even without starting to talk to the Utes. - The knowledge that I
carry is basically very much in contrast to the
archeological community with our archeological
education, people go to school for
years, they learn processes to collect data, interpret
that and then try to tell a story according to
how the data tells the story per the collection of
evidence and science. But as indigenous
people, we actually have what's called
traditional knowledge. A lot of that knowledge
and the stories are handed down from
generation to generation, so it's a process of
reaccounting events, but they're all told by
someone who has a heartbeat, who has the ability
to draw error. So for us, those stories
are very much alive. We never question it. That's one of the
things as a young person when listening to elders
tell these stories, you never question out
of respect, you listen. - As archeologists, we're
always asked a couple questions, what did you find and
what did you find out, and so we try to answer
those basic questions of what did you find by
doing intensive recording, gathering data, putting it
into a sort of book of facts. We're tracking all of these
sites on the landscape, and they extend from these
sites that we've been recording extend from the Uncompahgre
clear up through the Piceance Basin. In fact, the Piceance Basin
has some of the best preserved wickiup villages and
just single wickiups that we've recorded. (solemn music) Security was a major
issue for site location. Most often, sites are
located on hilltops, high points along ridges. (solemn music) They wanted water and food
resources to be fairly close. - So that's where you would
always find the people having their encampments
near a water source. When you speak to an
indigenous person, and you say natural resources,
we're always gonna say water, land, plants, animals,
things that are more natural in the state of where we've
always conducted life. - It's pretty clear that
these people traveled in extended family groups, and
a lot of the wickiup villages were arranged by family groups. - You might just
have three families. So there may be only
evidence of a smaller group of wickiups or lodges
where they may have lived. It just depended
on what activity they may have been
engaged in per the season. And then we, at different
points, would congregate back together and we would share whatever the
harvest we may have. Maybe one group of people
collected a lot of berries. Maybe one people were able
to harvest a lot of hunt, the hunting the game and
bringing the meat in. - They always had a
landmark or they had a place that women knew
this is my campsite, so they would look
for that rock. That rock when you turn
it over is a metate. So they used metates. It's a grinding stone, and
when they turned it over, that was their metate, so they
said this is where I camped last year or year
before or two years ago. - We're being led to these sites where there are extent
wooden features, these expedient little
wooden features like wickiups that the Ute people made,
and since they don't last too long, we're
being led to sites that are no more than two,
three, 400 years old at most, and as a result, over half of
our sites have trade goods, metal and glass
artifacts as a result of the Spanish in the area. They had this bounty of
goods and trade items, but it was ephemeral, short
lived, it came with a price, the price of freedom. It's easy when you're
out there in the field doing your fieldwork to get
engrossed in the minutia, the details of mapping
the artifacts in place, measuring the wickiup
poles, getting all this data because these things are
going away so rapidly, but then every once in a while,
there's some little thing that brings us back to the
fact that we're out there, what this is really
about is the people, the people who lived there. I know on this one site, the
Ute hunters camp we called it 'cause they were one
of the main activities on the site was making lead
bullets, smelting the lead over the campfire. We carefully mapped where all
these little bullet primers were that they popped out
of the bullet casings, and you could see where
the individual knocking these primers out
had been kneeling. The bullets were
arranged in two arcs where his knees had been. We've gotten to the point
now where we can walk onto one of these wickiup sites
and start finding seed beads. We can tell from the
size of these beads, this is pre-1860s,
this is 1850s, or this is post-1880s, 1890s, so they were demanding
and requesting smaller and smaller and smaller beads
'cause they can make more and more intricate
embroidery with these beads. And these beads were made in
primarily in Venice, Italy and in Bohemia or in Europe,
and shipped over the ocean by the hundreds of
pounds, billions, literally billions of these
little beads were shipped over to the east coast, brought out
west on some trader's mule, and traded to the
Indians by the billions where they were sewn
onto their clothing, their moccasins, their
gun scabbards, blankets, et cetera, and when
a thread breaks, dozens of these little things
will fall out onto the ground and many and many of
them were left behind, but it brings it back to the
fact there were people here, not just artifacts. That's where they're
there, there's 13. - I really, really believe that
the archeological community needs to come down to
the level of they are not the almighty authority. The people who've lived
the life should be revered as the almighty authority. - During the early period,
we were required to collect artifacts and the Utes were
kind of against that idea. - The invasive archeological
digs was one of the things that we felt was invading
the resting places of those who have passed on. - Science is all about
the collection of data, not actually the
collection of artifacts. However, the past
has been very good. That record, that collected
record from thousands of sites, literally thousands
of sites have been recorded in western Colorado,
tens of thousands. The record is being
preserved one way or another, but hopefully it's gonna be
preserved more through data collection in the future. - There's so many different
innovations out there that will take a
lot of the processes and allow them to
not be so invasive. - As early as the early
17th century, 1600, 1610, Santa Fe and Taos, when
then Spaniards arrived, the native peoples,
including the Utes, were gaining access
to these trade goods, metal knives, metal axes. Once you had a metal ax,
tree trunks and tree limbs became a source for
your feature elements. They could go through
a juniper or a pinyon, sapling or a branch
in a matter of seconds which they could not do
prior to having metal axes. Once they were taking at least
some of their wickiup poles or platform beams with metal
axes, we're able to date that structure using
dendrochronology or
tree ring dating. The prehistoric weather
patterns are reflected in a cross section or a
core from one of these trees and dendrochronologists
who do tree ring dating have establishes sequences of
it, vary from area to area. They establish these sequences
of thick and thin rings and they begin to
recognize those and if you've got the
outer ring or the bark, they can tell you
not only the year that that tree was cut down, but sometimes the
season of the year. We had one site, the Pisgah
site up in Eagle County. We took 20 some
dendrochronology samples again and again and again and again. It was the fall
and winter of 1853. We know exactly when those
people were living there, which is pretty unusual
for archeologists to be able to pin
it down that close. This is the earliest
tree ring date we've ever gotten on a wickiup. Our earliest good solid
date from tree ring dating is out here on the
Uncompahgre Plateau in 1795. We got a standing wickiup, and record one of
the ax cut poles, and the outer ring was 1795. People have been building
these brush shelters for 12 thousand years. In a shelter, in an overhang
or a cave of some kind, they might be a
thousand years old. Out in the open, I doubt
any of 'em much prior to 1750 are out there,
but we're just guessin'. - As our grandparents have said,
the great mystery sometimes is there for a reason. It's not for you to figure out, just know that it does exist. - The Ute people virtually
lost all of Colorado, what had been one time
their land because of greed, because of manipulation of
peoples, of what they wanted, wealth and all that. So by
1868, they had established what they called the Ute
Reservation in 1/3 of Colorado. They established that
for all the Utes. It would be their land forever
as long as the grass grows and the water flows, and that's
one of the famous statements that the government has
made with most treaties, but immigrants comin'
into those areas, findin' it rich in
resources, rich in minerals, invaded into the
Ute Reservation. It was greed. In our minds, this places
of our old Ute territory, we still own that land. White man only
owns a foot of it. Beneath that is where our
ancestral people are buried. You walk upon our
ancestral bones. - We were all taught in school Ute archeology in
Colorado ends in 1881. The gold and silver
seekers were here. The Front Range was
getting populated, agricultural lands were being
discovered in western Colorado and the call of the
Utes must go rang out. Over half of our
sites in northwest and west central
Colorado are after 1882. There were still plenty
of Utes in Colorado living on the landscape much as they
had for thousands of years. We've got a wickiup
site that dates to 1914, we got one in 1916. There were undoubtedly Utes
living on the landscape under the radar in western
Colorado into the 1920s. You don't see that
in the history books. After 1881 in Colorado,
they were basically saying you're red, you're dead. So they were moving, instead
of being at the springs and along the rivers
and water courses and along the trails
and corridors, they were going under the radar. Their settlement patterns
changed, they were living in less attractive places
to live to avoid contact with the white settlers
and miners and cavalry. It's funny as an archeologist,
as an archeologist we spend our careers looking for the
earliest example of something, the oldest that we get
excited the most recent find we can find, 1916,
how great is that? - They came back, hunted
in the old hunting areas, stayed in the old places
that their families used and people used to stay
at, they made that. It may have become
government land, it may have become private
land and things like that but they moved back
into this area. - [Female] The creation
story I grew up with was we were made
in the mountains and that's where the
creator had left us. - [Male] We don't have
no migration story. I've asked a lot of the
elders where did we come from? They had no answer, they
said we always been here. - [Female] We were there
to partake of the land and for the trees, the
animals, the birds, they were going to be the ones who would teach us how to
live this life out here. - [Male] They made temporary
shelters so you'd find some of this temporary shelters along where they're either hunting or if they were visiting
other Ute bands. When that season starts to
change, then they're starting to move back down
into warmer areas, but those lodges
are still there. The following year,
they're moving back up to the same area so
those lodges are there. And a lot of the hunting
lodges that they made are still there also because
they're gonna eventually come back and they're
gonna use that. - With the wickiup project,
most of the understanding comes through material
culture because that's sort of the hallmark of our
technological society, our property based rather
than place based society. Places are seen as
property which is a thing but for aboriginal cultures,
generally and certainly for the Utes as I've
come to understand them, place is a living thing,
and it's a way of life, not something that's owned. - That was once somebody's home. Would I ever walk into George
Washington's former home and just start ramrodding it? No I don't think so. Well that's the same
thing as if you were going into a wickiup, that
was somebody's home. That was where somebody
conducted life or
duty in that time. Our grandparents would say
be careful what you touch and what you do because even
if that person does not exist in this life anymore, that
doesn't mean they may not want what you took that
doesn't belong to you. - It's a physical world
that we're looking at but they may have been looking
and probably were looking at more of a spiritual
world as well. - Wickiups to us is
used by our ancestors that lived in that area. Maybe they had a
certain spirituality. That's where we call
it significant to us. May not be significant
to anybody else, but to us it is significant, that's why we want
archeologists to preserve it. - We feel like the wickiup
project has been a big success at least from our point of
view, and I think the Utes respect and value what
we've done to some degree. We've always felt that
what we were doing was for the benefit of the
tribes as well as our own scientific interests as
archeologists, not just science, it's cultural
preservation, heritage. - It gives us a
sense of groundness because it's still there, that
we know that our ancestors lived in that area, so
that gives us evidence that we can say yes
my people lived here because of the structures. To us that is significant
because it gives us a sense that our
people were there and there isn't anybody
that can dispute that. (solemn music) (bright music)
