Date: 01.10.2020 (Season 1, Episode 10, Part 1: 36:18 min.) To read the complete Utah Dept. of Culture & Community Engagement show notes for thisepisode (including topics in time, photos and recommended readings) click here. Interested in other episodes of Speak Your Piece? Click here for more episodes.
Podcast Content:
In this free ranging conversation Dr. Sondra Jones speaks about her book Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (University of Utah Press, 2019) which weaves centuries of history (oral traditions, ethnographic, geographic, military, cultural and more) of the Ute people, whose homelands encompass Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and beyond.
Jones’ book features Ute triumphs, losses, successful adaptive strategies and life-ways, intertribal connections, centuries of reciprocity and conflict with other Native Americans, Hispanics and white traders, travelers, and trappers, Mormon settlers, miners, ranchers and more. Jones brings to life tribal and band leaders, the constantly changing near-genocidal effect of US Indian policies, federal and church-based Indian schools, Ute trading and emerging economic practices. Jones then tells the present story of a thriving contemporary urban and reservation-based Ute society.
Jones has researched, studied, and written about the Ute people for almost fifty years. Jones describes herself and her ancestors as white and as “Mormon as they get.” However, Jones’ longtime husband–a Ute Sundance dancer who was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Is an urban Indian; school teacher to the Navajo; part Colorado Hispanic and part Tohono O’odham–along with their ten children, joined Sondra in a life that has included exchanges with thousands of Ute people and leaders, listened to hundreds of interviews, and years of research in federal, state, private and tribal collections from California to Washington D.C. This book represents a deeply immersive and emphatic study by Jones of a worldview and history of the Ute people.
What this interview and the reading of Jones’ book brought home to me (again), is that Western history, and especially Utah history, can no longer be presented, especially to school age children, without a requisite telling of the Native American story.
Guest Bio: Dr. Sondra G. Jones has a PhD in U.S. History from the University of Utah (2013) and has taught American and Utah history and Native American Studies at the University of Utah, Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University. Author of over a dozen articles on Native American history, Jones also published a work on Native American slavery in the 19th century entitled The trial of Don Pedro León Luján (University of Utah Press, 2000). She and her husband Robert Jones live in Utah County.
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