In this essay, I will examine the American laws concerning women in regards to marriage, divorce, and property, and how Ute women responded to these laws. Before being confined to the reservations, the Ute men and women freely adhered to their own marriage customs, which gave women freedom to marry whom they chose and gave each partner relatively easy divorce proceedings. In Ute societal customs, women were valued and powerful members of the tribal community "by virtue of their labor and their ability to bear children" (Shoemaker 159).

After being forced onto reservations and the enactment of the Dawes Act, married Ute women were left with no legal standing as wives to their husbands in the allotment of land, unless the couple underwent a Christian marriage ceremony. In the event of a divorce, according to Ute custom, the ex-wife was unable to share in the couple's assets (in this case, land).

Osburn mentions that in the years from 1905 to 1917, there were ten divorce cases "among the original allottees at Southern Ute" reservation (Shoemaker 162). Of these ten, records exist concerning eight of them, who appealed to the Indian agent for help in gaining a portion of the land thereby resisting "their newly assigned position of economic subservience" (Shoemaker 162). Four of the women received land from their ex-husbands, whether from the husbands' kindness or pressure from the Indian agent is unknown. The other four women never received any land from their ex-husbands, even though they persisted in their claims based on the fact that they had fulfilled their traditional Ute role by bearing children.

Bibliography

Shoemaker, Nancy. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Taylor & Francis, Inc., 1994.