Translation – Magazine Interview of Oranna Felter (September 4, 2009)
Uintah, the Denied Indians
By Emanuele Bompan, from Salt Lake City
Photos by Giada Connestari
Oranna Felter lives in a classic American dream house, with two old GM trucks parked in the yard. Behind her stretches the rich basin of the Uintah Mountains in northern Utah, a lush area for hunting and fishing, the reservation of the Ute tribe, numbering 10,000 members divided into three distinct groups: Uintah, White River, and Uncompahgre.
Oranna’s lifestyle is certainly not what a Westerner would expect from the last leader of the mixed-blood Uintah Indians, accustomed as they are to an iconography of hides, feathers, wild horses, and tipis. Yet the warrior spirit of her ancestors remains in the shrewd eyes of the woman, though it coexists with the sadness of no longer being recognized as a “daughter of the Great Spirit,” but instead as a “white” American citizen.
Indeed, Oranna, along with 490 other Native Americans, under U.S. administrative law, was deprived of her title as a Native—even though she carries, in part, the blood of her prairie ancestors. All descendants of Native American tribes hold a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, a document issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that certifies, after genealogical study, the possession of Native blood, whether wholly or in part. For some tribes, at least one-quarter of a person’s blood must be connected to the tribe; in others, even 1/16 is enough. Anyone who meets this requirement may thus obtain the status of “Native American” and enjoy the related benefits guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Indian Affairs—such as free medical care, usufruct of the tribe’s reservation resources, special hunting and fishing permits, and more.
But Oranna, like the other surviving Uintah of her group, is a mixed-blood, and the rest of the Ute have repudiated them. In 1954, her people made the mistake of ratifying—according to historians, under pressure or coercion—a pact that separated the Uintah mixed-bloods from the rest of the full-bloods. This was known as the Ute Partition Act (UPA), approved by the U.S. Congress on August 27, 1954.
The UPA was the result of a racist policy promoted by conservative members of Congress between 1953 and 1966, known as “Terminating federal supervision over selected Indian tribes.” This policy aimed to exclude Native Americans from ownership of important lands and reduce government spending on their assistance by revoking their Native status.
The controversy over the vote by which the mixed-blood Uintah authorized their representatives to ratify what is legally called termination has never ceased. Tribal interviewees speak of corruption, coercion, ignorance of the terms, political pressure, and the exclusion of a large portion of young people from the vote. Many similar cases occurred across America.
However, during the 1970s—thanks in part to the rise of the Native American protest movement—termination policies applied to various tribes were suspended, following the recommendations contained in President Richard Nixon’s 1970 special message to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Yet none of the full-blood members of the Ute tribe has ever thought to this day of requesting the exemption of the 490 Uintah members from termination, as happened elsewhere.
Since the ratification of 1954, for Oranna, her family, and her people, an exile began within their own land and from their own identity. For many, termination had terrible, sometimes fatal, consequences.
“My sister was only a few years old then,” recalls Oranna. “She soon became ill. At that time, we were excluded from any medical care and had no money to admit her to the hospital. She died of an acute kidney condition without even the medicine to ease her pain.”
Other members of the mixed-blood group today live in shacks or on the streets, but many are afraid to tell their story for fear of reprisals.
Behind the refusal to reintegrate the mixed-bloods, however, do not lie tribal or racial reasons. When the Uintah mixed-bloods were stripped of their Native status, each of them—regardless of age—was granted 10 shares of reservation land capital, in effect their property.
But soon, the difficult social and economic situation that followed termination pushed many mixed-bloods to sell their shares—for a few dollars or trivial objects—to other Ute tribal members.
“We sold my sister’s share to cover some of her medical expenses,” Oranna explains. “Other people gave theirs up for food, medicine, a bit of cash.”
It quickly became clear that the full-blood Ute were trying to acquire as many shares as possible, to secure a larger “stock package” over the reservation and profit from it.
It did not take long before private companies in Utah—many run by Mormons—began actively seeking to get hold of those valuable documents. Everyone wanted to exploit the resources of that land, under an immense sky, inhabited by wolves, eagles, and even strange shape-shifting monsters (or so local folklore claims).
What really changed was the value of the land—especially after oil and natural gas began to be extracted. The value of the stock dividends skyrocketed.
“Then we began to understand, but it was too late. There were greater interests than we could have imagined. Termination had created the perfect situation to seize a small treasure.”
Today, Native Americans still hold about 1,000 shares—less than 25 percent of the original mixed-blood package. A similar portion is managed by the Ute Tribal Trust, which also oversees their original fund.
However, leafing through the list of shareholders, one finds non-existent companies, small cover names, and other “normal” financial tricks to funnel shares anonymously into the hands of the Ute tribe—but also banks and private entities determined not to give up their stake.
More than half the shares at the time were assigned to minors (2,900 out of a total of 4,900). Their guardians, despite a prohibition on sales—especially outside the tribe—when pressured by growing poverty, sold them anyway. And so, many lost a fortune.
For Oranna, however, it is not only a matter of money. Being recognized as a member of the Uintah branch of the Ute tribe is a matter of identity and moral restitution. For years, she has pursued a legal battle between Utah and Washington.
At her side is the well-known Native American affairs lawyer Dennis Chappabitty, who in 2005 took up the case again, building a complex, well-documented investigation. According to Chappabitty, “We have finally gathered evidence of an agreement orchestrated among multiple parties by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Moreover, there is no evidence that the Uintah freely and knowingly approved the vote for the UPA.”
For now, the administrative proceeding is stalled. “There is no media attention on our story; no one seems to care, and those with vested interests do everything to silence us.”
But Oranna does not give up, and the battle of a lifetime continues:
“It doesn’t matter how long I must keep fighting—I want to die buried as I was born: a Native of this land.”