(Jeremy Wade Shockley, The Southern Ute Drum)Ĭasinos, hotels and restaurants remain shuttered.

Boxer and his fellow singers use bone and iron to sound wooden instruments leaned against the growler box, performing songs passed down from one generation to the next, from one season to another, during the Southern Ute Bear Dance. Southern Ute elder and Air Force Veteran, Austin Box (far right) never misses a chance to Bear Dance in Ignacio, alongside family and friends. Bear Dance singers are also performing Bear Dance songs in otherwise empty arenas so tribal members can drive by and hear the traditional chants.įor now, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes in southwest Colorado are continuing to keep their reservations under tight coronavirus lockdowns.

In their place, the Utes are using social media to display videos and photos of past Bear Dances. The dances and the attendant gambling and feasting festivities have been canceled. The Ute reservations have opted to remain even more buttoned up than the rest of Colorado. In a rite of spring for Ute Indians since at least the 1500s, hundreds of tribal members would gather for days of celebrations around the dances.īut, like so many other public gatherings, the dances won’t happen this spring. Groups of dancers would sway back and forth, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the lines of men and women closely facing each other before they split off into pairs.

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Ute tribes reimagine Bear Dances, a key ceremony of renewal, as coronavirus locks down Colorado reservations - The Colorado Sun Close

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