Ancestral and Present-Day Maps for the 8 Sovereign Nations Within Utah

Our land maps put the tribal nations within Utah on the map

Our team of instructional designers has designed maps showing the historical and modern geography of Native lands in our area to help teachers empathize with Native perspectives and understand Native American terminology and facts. 

The need for these maps arose after we listened to Native groups answer our query “What do you want the children of Utah to know about your tribe?” Native groups continued to repeat their desire that students and teachers understand that their tribes existed not only as indigenous people from the past, but that they live as indigenous people today. With the intention to amplify this message we designed these maps to support teachers’ understanding as they use our Native American-themed lesson plans and participate in our online course “Amplifying Native Voices in the Classroom.”

The maps help teachers and students understand what Native American ancestral lands looked like before colonization and how those lands have changed to reservations today. Participants in many of our presentations and workshops are asking for copies of these maps. We are excited to make them available to all.

Click here to access all the ancestral and modern-day land maps.

Designing maps to represent the historical and modern sovereign nations within Utah

The maps went through a rigorous design process to assure that they show not only the distinctiveness of the five tribal groups affiliated with the land organization of the past, but also the unique experiences of each of the eight federally recognized sovereign nations within the borders of Utah today.

From our instructional designer’s reflection: “Creating maps of Native American lands in Utah was more complicated than we originally anticipated…We struggled to decide whether we should emphasize a) the connection between modern Native American groups and their ancestral lands, which depicts them as five tribal groups or b) the distinctness of each federally recognized Native nation or tribe as they exist today.” 

Map of Ancestral Native Lands in Utah

Before colonizers arrived, six tribal groups called this area, the area surrounding what is now identified by the United States as the state of Utah, their home. The Native lands map shows the fluid ancestral boundaries of the following nations:

• The Ute (Noochee/Noochew/Nuchu)*
• The Navajo (Diné)
• The Shoshone Bannock (Newe) This should be changed to Eastern Shoshone.
• The Shoshone (Newe)
• The Goshute (Newe)
• The Southern Paiute (Nungwu/Nungwutsi)*

As you can see in this map, the historic boundaries of Native lands were very fluid. Even with this fluidity, indigenous groups were, and remain today, very connected to their homelands. We acknowledge that mapping ancestral lands in this static way is not an indigenous tradition, but one designed to support teachers who are accustomed to using modern maps. Indigenous traditions are oral traditions, not written. These maps could have been drawn, printed, or designed in a multitude of ways. This is one way to show ancestral lands. 

*A note on the different spellings for these ancestral groups: The Ute Mountain Ute use the spelling Nuchu, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation use the spelling Noochew and Noochee. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah uses the spelling Nungwu where the San Juan Southern Paiute use Nungwutsi. These names come from different Native dialects and from oral traditions, rather than a written language, so spelling is less important than the pronunciation of the names. 

The introduction from the book Why the Moon Paints Her Face Black helps explain the challenge of writing things from an oral tradition:

“In the course of this project, I have been struck time and time again how vastly different the oral tradition is from the written tradition. As Eleanor recounted the tale of Why the Moon Paints Her Face Black, each telling brought out different details, different emotions, different explanations.”

“I sat there with Eleanor, trying to pin down each element to the story, trying to write down the unwritten, but it was fluid and resisted penning. For once words get put down on a piece of paper, they become rigid and solid. All of a sudden, they become authoritative. This is the way the story goes; this is the way each word is pronounced. It does not, cannot be any other way.” “So here it is, a story of the stars and the sun and the moon. But this is not the only way it can be told.” - Chloe Valentine Brent

How to Credit These Maps for Educational Use

These maps are covered under Creative Commons copyright licenses and should be correctly attributed when shared. 

“The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional ‘all rights reserved’ setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.” (From https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.)

In all of our NACI resources, we have chosen to use the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 copyright to allow teachers flexibility with our resources while also protecting the communication of the Native knowledge that went into their creation. 

When sharing these images, provide attribution with this statement: “Image by BYU ARTS Partnership/NACI licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.” This statement should be listed closely to the image. For digital versions, please include the hyperlink to the Creative Commons 4.0 description (as done above).

Living maps, moving towards more accuracy and authenticity

These maps were created using information from a variety of sources. We consider them to be living documents that will change as we receive more input, especially from Native sources. We continue to update the maps as we receive feedback and we look forward to improving their accuracy and authenticity.