First Peoples



Native people used and culturally remade the Utah landscape as “home.” These peoples generally shared physical and cultural characteristics, though between native groups/communities we see some differences in political organization, technology, culture, and lifeways. These peoples and their worldview widely diverged from European explorers and settlers who they first encountered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unfortunately, none of the Indians in Utah had a written language. Historians must confront the differences between Native and western social scientific ways of understanding who the original inhabitants were, where they came from, how they lived and shaped the land, how they expressed their cultures, and what became of them. (David Rich Lewis)