'We're still here': Heritage month events spotlight Native American culture, contributions

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

November is Native American Heritage Month, and events in Utah aim to highlight Native culture and contributions.
Chauma Kee-Jansen, of American Indian Services in Lehi, thinks Native American history should be more incorporated into mainstream U.S. education.
Proclamations and events this month, not all specifically tied to heritage month, aim to celebrate Utah's Native American communities.

LEHI — Chauma Kee-Jansen, who heads Lehi-based American Indian Services, thinks Native American culture and history merit more attention in U.S. history books and classes.

"Native American culture should be talked about all the time. It should be integrated into U.S. history, not just a special class that you can take in college that talks about specific Native American history," she said. "I think Native American history is U.S. history, and it should be integrated more within it."

Meantime, she says Native American Heritage Month, at least, helps spotlight the culture and its contributions to the broader community. "I think it's a time to celebrate that we are still here, and we're still contributing to society and our communities," said Kee-Jansen, who has Diné and Assiniboine Sioux blood.

Each November since 1994, the sitting U.S. president has declared November as Native American Heritage Month, or some similar variant, to recognize and honor the original inhabitants of what is now the United States. President Joe Biden issued the national proclamation for 2024 on Oct. 31, and Salt Lake County Councilwoman Dea Theodore sponsored a similar proclamation at the county level, approved by council members at an Oct. 29 ceremony.

"I think if we don't bring it forward, it starts to fade," said Theodore, a member of the Cherokee Nation, though she was adopted and didn't grow up immersed in the culture.

A personal factor motivates Theodore, a Republican. "We kind of lose our roots if we don't stay involved," she said. She aims to "bring it forward, bring my kids into it, serve, obviously, Native Americans as well."

Representatives from the University of Utah American Indian Resource Center, Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake and the Utah Division of Indian Affairs celebrate the beginning of Native American Heritage Month at the Salt Lake City-County Building on Nov. 1, 2022. (Photo: Laura Seitz, Deseret News)

But she also hopes to get the population at large to take note of the Native American population in Salt Lake County and beyond. The Salt Lake County Council proclamation says around 69,000 Native Americans are living in Utah from 50 tribal nations. The Goshute, Paiute, Ute, Navajo, and Shoshone tribes have been in Utah since the 1200s, it notes.

Salt Lake County "is home to talented Native American youth who will shape our future as they enter the education system, workforce and our Salt Lake County community to create a hopeful future for all," reads one of the proclamation's preambulatory clauses.

Wendell Myrick, a member of the Ute tribe and a resident of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Duchesne County, said he doesn't do much to mark Native American Heritage Month since he lives the culture on a day-to-day basis. But the month, he said, serves as a reminder to others of the first inhabitants of the North American continent.

"We're still here. We're still the first nation, the first people of the lands," he said.

Activities have already been held around Utah to mark the month. Utah State University in Blanding hosted a social powwow on Nov. 2 with drum groups and dancers. Restoring Ancestral Winds hosted a conference on Nov. 4 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City aimed at combating sexual assault and domestic violence in Native communities. Utah Valley University in Orem hosted a series of activities, including a powwow on Nov. 8 and 9.

More powwows and other events are also in the works going forward, though not all are specifically tied to Native American Heritage Month.

The Paiute tribe is hosting a Fall Gathering to honor the culture and language of the southern Paiute people on Friday at the Southern Utah University campus in Cedar City. The Ute tribe is hosting a Thanksgiving powwow from Nov. 28-30 at Ft. Duchesne, which will feature drummers, dancers and more.

Just as Thanksgiving is meant as a time to give thanks for those in the broader U.S. culture, so it is for Native Americans, said Myrick. It's also an occasion for the community to come together, he said, while Tahnee Pegaroose touted its importance in honoring generations of yesteryear.

The Ute tribe activities each November are about "remembering and honoring our elders and ancestors who have gone," said Pegaroose. She's also helping organize the Ute powwow.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.