The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation (, ) is located in northeastern

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

, United States. It is the homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe (

Ute dialect Ute ( )Givón, T. ''Ute Reference Grammar''. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011 is a dialect of the Colorado River Numic language, spoken by the Ute people. Speakers primarily live on three reservations: Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and ...

: Núuchi-u), and is the largest of three

Indian reservation An American Indian reservation is an area of land land tenure, held and governed by a List of federally recognized tribes in the contiguous United States#Description, U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose gov ...

s inhabited by members of the Ute Tribe of Native Americans.

Description

The reservation lies in parts of seven counties; in descending order of land area they are: Uintah, Duchesne, Wasatch, Grand,

Carbon Carbon () is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalence, tetravalent—meaning that its atoms are able to form up to four covalent bonds due to its valence shell exhibiting 4 ...

, and Emery counties. The total land area is with control of the lands split between Ute Indian Allottees, the Ute Indian Tribe, and the Ute Distribution Corporation. The tribe owns lands that total approximately of surface land and of mineral-owned land within the reservation area. Other parts of the reservation are owned by non-Ute, as the tribe lost control of much of the land during the allotment process. As of the 2000 census, a population of 19,182 persons was recorded as living on the reservation. This is the second-largest Indian reservation in land area in the United States, second to the

Navajo Nation The Navajo Nation (), also known as Navajoland, is an Indian reservation of Navajo people in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in ...

, but control of the land is split among multiple authorities. Tribal headquarters are in Fort Duchesne, located in

Uintah County, Utah Uintah County ( ) is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of Utah. As of the 2020 United States census the population was 35,620. Its county seat and largest city is Vernal, Utah, Vernal. The county was named for the portion of t ...

. The largest community within the reservation boundaries is the city of Roosevelt. Most residents within the reservation boundaries are not Native Americans.

Land ownership and the allotment process

The Uintah Valley Reservation was created on October 3, 1861 by an executive order of President

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War ...

. The Uncompahgre Reservation (commonly called the Ouray Reservation) was created on January 5, 1882 by an executive order of President Chester A. Arthur. The two reservations were maintained by separate agencies until 1886, when the

Bureau of Indian Affairs The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), also known as Indian Affairs (IA), is a United States List of United States federal agencies, federal agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, Department of the Interior. It is responsible for im ...

merged the administration into the Uintah and Ouray Agency at Fort Duchesne. Today, only about one-quarter of the in the reservation area is tribal land. Beginning in the 1890s (and continuing for more than a decade), the

U.S. Congress The United States Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. It is a bicameral legislature, including a lower body, the U.S. House of Representatives, and an upper body, the U.S. Senate. They both ...

passed laws requiring small parcels of land in the reservation be allotted to individual Natives and any surplus land be opened to the public domain. In August 1905, after allotments had been granted to the Native peoples, the unallotted land in the reservation was opened to homesteading and mineral claims. By means of presidential proclamation, town-sites were created (such as Myton and Roosevelt) and land was taken and absorbed into the Uinta National Forest. The United States Reclamation Service, through the use of eminent domain, acquired the Strawberry Valley for construction of the Strawberry Reservoir. Land within the reservation continued to be acquired by non-Natives until 1934, when the

Indian Reorganization Act The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of June 18, 1934, or the Wheeler–Howard Act, was U.S. federal legislation that dealt with the status of American Indians in the United States. It was the centerpiece of what has been often called the "Indian ...

ended the process, and in 1945 any unclaimed lands were restored to tribal jurisdiction. The allotment process has thus resulted in a reservation with not only tribal land, but land owned both privately by non-Natives and publicly by a variety of government entities. In March 1948, the area known as the Hill Creek Extension was added to the reservation.

Legal jurisdiction issues

Because of the allotment process, land in the reservation is owned by a variety of private, public, and tribal entities. Law enforcement efforts in the area are complicated by this checkerboard of ownership which results in a variety of different legal jurisdictions. The tribe has had longstanding issues with state and county authorities, who since the 1970s had prosecuted in state court Ute members from within the tribal lands at this reservation and its two other holdings. The tribe filed suit against the state in federal district court. In '' Ute Tribe v. Utah'' (10th Cir. 1985) (en banc), known as ''Ute III,'' the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, sitting ''

en banc In law, an ''en banc'' (; alternatively ''in banc'', ''in banco'' or ''in bank''; ) session is when all the judges of a court sit to hear a case, not just one judge or a smaller panel of judges. For courts like the United States Courts of Appeal ...

'', upheld the tribe's legal jurisdiction over its members within the reservations and affirmed its boundaries, rejecting the state and counties' claims that the area of jurisdiction had been reduced since the reservation was established in 1864. The

U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...

declined to hear the case. The state continued to prosecute Ute within the reservations in state court, in violation of the ruling in Ute III. The state Supreme Court ruled the reservation boundaries had been reduced, and the case was heard by the US Supreme Court, '' Hagen v. Utah,'' 510 U.S. 399, 421-22 (1994). It upheld the Utah Supreme Court in affirming that some congressional actions had diminished the boundaries of the Uintah Reservation, but that the two other reservations were not affected. In an effort to reconcile the cases in light of the Supreme Court's ruling, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed ''Ute Tribe v. Utah'' in 1997.

So in a decision the parties call Ute V, this court elected to recall and modify Ute III's mandate. See ''Ute Indian Tribe v. Utah,'' 114 F.3d 1513, 1527-28 (10th Cir. 1997). Because ''Hagen'' addressed the Uintah Valley Reservation, Ute V deemed that particular portion of Ute tribal lands diminished — and diminished according to the terms ''Hagen'' dictated. So much relief was warranted, this court found, to "reconcile two inconsistent boundary determinations and to provide a uniform allocation of jurisdiction among separate sovereigns. Id. at 1523.

The state and counties continued to prosecute Ute from within the reservation for offenses in state courts. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals called the plaintiffs and defendants together again in 2015. The court rejected the counties' claim to be acting as an arm of the state and entitled to the same immunity. It strongly advised the state and counties to observe the settled nature of this case and to refrain from their tactics to challenge the boundaries of the reservation and jurisdiction of the tribe over its people in "Indian country."

Communities

* Altamont * Altonah * Arcadia *

Avalon Avalon () is an island featured in the Arthurian legend. It first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 1136 ''Historia Regum Britanniae'' as a place of magic where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was made and later where Arthur was taken to recove ...

* Ballard * Bennett * Bluebell *

Bonanza ''Bonanza'' is an American Western television series that ran on NBC from September 12, 1959, to January 16, 1973. Lasting 14 seasons and 431 episodes, ''Bonanza'' is NBC's longest-running Western, the second-longest-running Western series on ...

* Boneta * Bridgeland * Cedarview *

Crescent A crescent shape (, ) is a symbol or emblem used to represent the lunar phase (as it appears in the northern hemisphere) in the first quarter (the "sickle moon"), or by extension a symbol representing the Moon itself. In Hindu iconography, Hind ...

* Duchesne * Fort Duchesne (tribal headquarters) * Fruitland * Gusher * Hanna * Hayden * Ioka * Lapoint * Leeton * Leota *

Monarch A monarch () is a head of stateWebster's II New College Dictionary. "Monarch". Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 2001. p. 707. Life tenure, for life or until abdication, and therefore the head of state of a monarchy. A monarch may exercise the highest ...

* Mountain Home * Mount Emmons * Myton * Neola * Ouray * Randlett * Roosevelt * Soldier Creek Estates * Stockmore *

Strawberry The garden strawberry (or simply strawberry; ''Fragaria × ananassa'') is a widely grown Hybrid (biology), hybrid plant cultivated worldwide for its fruit. The genus ''Fragaria'', the strawberries, is in the rose family, Rosaceae. The fruit ...

* Tabiona * Talmage * Tridell * Upalco * Utahn * Whiterocks

References

Uintah and Ouray Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, Utah
United States Census Bureau

External links