"Being & Becoming Ute": A Conversation with Ethnohistorian Sondra G. Jones (Season 1, Ep. 10 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Hi, this is Brad Westwood. You're listening to Speak Your Piece. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, and contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed, this is the place.
I want to thank Dr. Sondra G. Jones again for joining me today. Hello, Sondra.

**Sondra G. Jones** (0:30)
How are you?

**Brad Westwood** (0:30)
I'm so good. It's so good to have you in our first half of Speak Your Piece. I have a few questions that I want to ask you and they're not in chronological order, but I think the first question is so essential. I want to make sure you have an opportunity to share your thoughts and ideas about it.
The 20th century story of the Utes is so vibrant. The contemporary story is such a big deal and so often neglected, if not included in the writings of our Native Americans in Utah. Tell me about the contemporary life.

**Sondra G. Jones** (1:09)
Right.
What little bit there has been written. There's been one book about the 20th century for just the Southern Utes, and others that get to the 20th century and they just simply gloss over in five or six pages. By the way, this happened. But it's an absolutely fascinating story and every bit as interesting as the buckskins and horseback riding of the 19th and 18th century.
Among the things that will happen is a look at how the leaders do not give up control just because they're on reservations. They were suing the government in the 1890s and winning. Now, their money disappeared into individual Indian accounts, but they actually won a million or two dollars from the government back in 1890 for land that was taken. So they were already lobbying, the Southern Utes especially, they were already lobbying. And they will actually form a consortium of the three tribes, the three main tribes, in order to hire Ernest Wilkinson, who will later become president at BYU, but he was an attorney of Native American law.
And he and Cohen will work together, and he will represent that tribe for years and years, over decades, in order to get reparations for the land that was taken and not paid for. You know, so these lawsuits, and they've, they learned how to fight in the courts, where it's important to fight the white man, not on the battlefield anymore, because the market's going to lose there, but they learned how to work in the courts. And Wilkinson and his firm literally worked to change the law so that you could sue. And Native American tribes all over the country began to have lawsuits for the land that the government had taken from them and never paid for.
So this is, you know, they're working in the courts, now they learn how. And so they're sending their people to school today to become lawyers, to have business management degrees. That's what they want to learn because over the 20th century, well, first they begin with reorganization in the 1930s during the Great Depression. One of the things they did was reorganize the tribes and create tribal governments. Now, they were puppeteered by the agents while they're learning how to navigate this new kind of political system. But they learn. The big key was when World War I, a few Utes will go and participate. But World War II, you have a number of Utes who participate in the war. They go off the reservation. They see the world. But not only that, they've got women and other men who leave the reservation to work in the war industries in California, Colorado, get degrees in nursing. They're in back east on the East Coast. They come back to the reservation and they've seen the world. They're the newly educated group. It'll be some of these people who will write the new constitutions. And when they get that Indian land claims, but the Utes are the first to get Indian land claims through the courts, they blaze the way. And they had the largest settlement, over $30 million to be divided between the three tribes.
Keeping in mind that Wilkinson was working on, not on retainer during the whole time that he's doing this work, all they did was kind of pay his expenses and that was it. He does get a cut.

**Brad Westwood** (4:58)
It doesn't negotiate for a, I mean, don't they eventually have to settle with them?

**Sondra G. Jones** (5:03)
They settle, but it's a relatively small amount compared to what they get.
But World War II was so dramatically a change. And it's at this point that at the turn of the century, you had parents who didn't want their kids going to boarding school, they would hide them, they would be taken at gun point, but they would get sick and die when they went to these boarding schools. So they didn't want them to go. Now they want them educated. Now they want them to have schools. Now they start lobbying for schools.