Nuuchi

The Nuuchi are the Ute people of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. Their self-designation Núuchi-u means “the people”, and their speech is a Colorado River Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, closely related to Shoshone and Southern Paiute.

Numic-speaking hunter-gatherers had spread through the Great Basin by about 1000, and ancestral Ute bands were living in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah by 1300, settling the Four Corners region by 1500. Their nomadic bands gathered for trade, intermarriage and ceremonies such as the spring Bear Dance, and traded hides and meat with the Pueblo towns to the south.

By the late 1600s they had acquired horses through neighbouring tribes, and in the 1700s their first limited contacts with Spaniards drew them into wider regional trade.