A Beginning
At Lake Timpanogos' Edge
This piece is the second in my series about Timpanogos history. To read the previous installment, an overview, please click this link.
Among native peoples there are many beginnings. If you were to travel between tribes, be welcomed among them, and ask after their genesis, each might offer you a different creation story. These distinctive myths wouldn’t negate each other. Rather, each would exist in conversation with the others.
Standardization had no utility among native peoples before the settlers arrived. Instead of one truth there were many, all contributing to the fabric of the broader community’s understanding of life. As one Agai Dikka (Lemhi Shoshone) activist has written, indigenous people think, and speak, in timelines.1
As for the Timpanogos peoples—I can’t tell you their creation myth because I haven’t heard it. Had I heard it, without being granted permission, I would not be in a position to tell you that story. I can, however, tell you about a beginning of the Timpanogos tribe. One such beginning most certainly happened at water’s edge.
The water might be a Timpanogotszi place of origin, but we shouldn’t think about it as the first point on a line that terminates at another point further down the line. For many traditional peoples time wasn’t conceived of as linear, so much as cyclical. A place of beginning is also a place of ending, and then again, a place of new beginning.
As we’re calling forward a beginning, we must consider the pa (water), and the sogope (land). Long ago, no arbitrary human-drawn lines divided state from state, or country from country. There were regions where tribes made their homes. These were often marked by natural divisions—where canyon edge meets sky, where forest line disrupts meadow, where river cuts through earth.
The Timpanogos, like all native peoples, could migrate at will. They could trade freely with many other tribes. The salt they harvested at Ti’tsa pa (the Great Salt Lake) traveled as far north as the region we now call Idaho, and as far south as the region we now call New Mexico. Spring and summer were the seasons for gathering, travel, and trade. Fall was the season to hunt and prepare for snow and ice. Winter was the season for rest.
The Timpanogos laid claim on what we now call Utah Lake. They had a sizeable village built on its shores, where members of their community lived year-round. In the winter time, small extended family-based bands would break off from the main village, and take shelter deeper into the mountain canyons, so as not to put too much strain on any one ecosystem during times when resources were limited.
When summer rolled around again the satellite bands of the Timpanogos would rejoin the main body at the village on the shores of Utah Lake, where they celebrated annually with a fish festival. This was a time of celebration. Many friends and relatives from other tribes, including the Numu (Paiutes) and the Gutsipiuti (Goshutes), would join the Timpanogos for the annual festivals.
On the shores of Lake Timpanogos every summer, the newe (people) would play games, worship, fish, and establish new marriages between their tribes and families. They would receive support from each other, from Dam Appet (Creator), from the pa (water), and the sogope (earth). Lake Timpanogos was the center of life for these people for hundreds of years. It was the heart of their culture, their community, and their way of life. What better beginning than that?
Questions for Reflection:
1. We often use the word indigenous in the United States to refer to First Nations people, but the word doesn’t inherently refer to the tribes who lived here prior to European colonization. Indigenous means “sprung from the land.” All of us, at some point or other, had ancestors who were native to a specific region of the world and whose culture sprang up out of the land they lived on. What do you know about your indigenous ancestors? How do you think connecting with their traditional ways of being would show up here, in your ongoing learning about the Timpanogos peoples?
2. Maxims like “time heals all wounds,” or “we can’t judge what people did back then, it was a different time,” often get circulated by people who are living in autopilot. What they once heard drops out of their mouths before they’ve given much thought to its implications, or how it might impact the listener. We call this phenomenon formatory thinking—group think. When faced with uncomfortable history like the history of the colonization of Utah, how can we find our own voices and perspectives, even when we may be surrounded by people who are still mired in formatory thinking?
3. One shared feature of almost all of Earth’s varied indigenous cultures is that death is included in a given culture’s understanding of life. Death isn’t viewed as something to fear, eradicate, triumph over, or erase. It’s a part of life—half of life, even. Indigenous peoples found sustainable ways to live; they moved in harmony with the Earth and her cycles, including death. For many of us from the dominant culture, death seems to be at odds with life. How do you think an indigenous understanding of death enhanced the Timpanogos peoples’ ability to receive support from nature? What is your personal relationship with death like? In what ways could it be renovated?
Over the course of the next 12 months I will be writing about the Timpanogos nation in more depth. If you’d like to learn more about their history, and investigate with me why it has been underground for so long, please subscribe!
You can also learn more at the tribe’s official website, where you can donate to their cause. If you are interested in getting involved with long term reparations work, please visit acknowledgetimpanogos.com.
Abrahamson, Willow. Buha Wiyipa on Instagram, Post from 24 May 2022.