ROOSEVELT, Utah - Just try telling, even intimating, that Oranna Felter is not an Indian.
There's the living room of her home here in this northeastern Utah town that has been turned into a shrine to the Ute culture with a life-sized wooden carving of a chief. There's all the time she's spent in sweat lodges and participating in Ute ceremonies.
As Felter drives on the back roads on the nearby Fort Duchesne reservation, she points out all of her favorite hunting grounds and rapidly running creeks. At a fork in the road is a dilapidated structure, once owned by her parents, which was the first store of any note on the reservation.
But, according to the federal government, Felter and about 500 other mixed-blood Utes of the Uintah band are as white as the driven snow.
They were terminated as tribal members, stripped of their land and even their federally recognized Native status, nearly 50 years ago as part of the dubious Ute Partition Act, which American Indian attorney Dennis Chappabitty of Sacramento, Calif., calls "one of America's most glaring injustices."
The mixed-blood Utes filed a federal lawsuit a year ago in federal district court in Washington to try to win back their rights.
Felter, the lead plaintiff in the suit, noted that two other Ute bands scheduled for termination, the Uncompagre and Whiterivers, won back their rights through "deft political maneuvering," like many California tribes have done in recent years, and actually took over the ancestral homelands of the Uintahs.
The plaintiffs in the suit also claim that the partition act should be declared null and void because the act got rid of prior existing land and mineral rights of the disenfranchised Uintahs and parceled them out in the so-called Ute Distribution Corp. to corporations and many other non-Indians.
According to records of ownership in the multimillion dollar distribution corporation, nearly half of the about 5,000 shares in the corporation are owned by non-Indians, many of whom have connections to the powerful Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah.
At the time the mixed-blood Uintahs were removed from tribal rolls, each of them were given 10 shares of the stock in an attempt to help them adjust to the outside world, according to court records. Felter and other Uintahs said that they were given only five shares, per the agreement.
But many of those former tribal members didn't recognize the significance of the shares or understand legalities and cashed them in rapidly, leading to a life of poverty, Felter said.
Chappabitty, who is representing the mixed-blood Uintahs, wrote in response to a Department of Justice filing in October, which seeks to have the suit dismissed, that the partition act is a "proverbial small-pox infected blanket" which was disguised as a gesture of concern about the Uintas.
Mark Shaffer Updated:Sep 12, 2018 Original:Dec 23, 2003