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

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Piece. This podcast is about Utah's history. My name is Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian at the Utah Dept. of Heritage and Arts. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us. It speaks to both our shared and to our separate identities. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, archaeologists, curators, all who contribute to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries.
If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, this is the place.
Today's guest is Ethnohistorian, Sondra G. Jones, who holds a PhD in History from the University of Utah, where she also taught. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of History at BYU. She's also taught at Utah Valley University. Sondra is an American, a Western, and as I mentioned before, an Ethnohistorian.
Although her interests and what we'll be speaking about today, we'll deal with Utah history. She is a Utah historian with a rich understanding of the Native American experience.
Sondra in 2019 published from the University of Utah Press, Being and Becoming Ute, A Story of an American Indian People. I want to thank the University of Utah Press as they have been leaders in bringing to the public vital and important history about Utah. Hello, Sondra. Thank you for being here. Glad to be here. In her book, our guest weaves together a history of all the Ute groups in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. The narrative describes their traditional culture, including all the facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones emphasizes how the Utes adapted over four centuries and detailed events, conflicts, trades, social interactions with non-Utes and non-Indians. Being and becoming Ute examines the effect of the broader issues associated with our culture, including public school education, colonial wars and commerce with Hispanic and American settlers, modern world wars, and other international conflicts, battles over federal instigation of termination, tribal identity, and membership in the development of the economic enterprises and the political power that they currently hold and have for quite some time.
This is a wonderful, readable, multi-generational history, which in my mind offers to anyone who loves Utah's history, a means of framing up properly to really understand the major portions of Utah's Native American story. So much of what we hear and read about, typically about Utah's history, does not include the Native American experience, and it is my effort and Speak Your Piece to have as much Native American history as possible as appropriate to the fore. Sondra, tell us first your personal story on the subject. Tell us about your multi-decade research and writing in order to accomplish this book.

**Sondra G. Jones** (3:23)
Well, let me step back just a moment and explain who I am, and why I got interested in this topic. I am a descendant of pioneers, 1847 Advanced Company. So I am pioneer to the bone. However, my husband is Native American, as well as reaching into the Spanish background of New Mexico, the Upper Rio Grande region of early Spanish migration. We have his family traced all the way back to 1754, and some of the original land grants in New Mexico, as well as another side of his family to Southern Arizona. I have 10 children who are very proud of their Native American heritage.
We lived on the Navajo Reservation for about eight years. I did before I went back to school.
During that time, got acquainted with a number of Native Americans. I come to this topic from a unique perspective of both a Native American and a Latter-day Saint pioneer heritage, daughter of the Utah pioneers. It's been interesting to balance the two and to try to look at it from both perspectives. In fact, sometimes I've been criticized for being too much on the Native American perspective rather had to work on balancing it out again, because I have a tendency to sympathize with what happened to the Native Americans, because contrary to popular belief, we've got Native Americans here in Utah. This was their homeland. The Shoshonean-speaking people, whether we're talking about the Shoshone, whether we're talking about the Ute or the Paiute or the Goshoot, this was their homeland and was their homeland for five or 600 years, and moved into it about a thousand years ago.

**Brad Westwood** (5:29)
I appreciate your acknowledgment. That is something we need to make clear here in the beginning of this, is that we're basically and completely across the entire state of Utah, in the once sovereign lands and the ancestral lands of a number of tribes, including the Utes.

**Sondra G. Jones** (5:48)
Absolutely. They're all related. They're what has been called Numic-speaking or Utah Aztec-speaking people and they've been traced linguistically how they spread into this region.