Dilapidated hotel rooms and empty campgrounds are all that remain of a failed 1970s-era attempt by the Northern Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Ute Reservation to bring tourism to their barren basin in the northeastern corner of Utah.
But armed with a fresh college diploma in resort management, the great-great-great-grandson of the legendary Ute Chief Ouray and his wife, Chipeta, hopes to turn that around.
Farrell McCook is the first Northern Ute to graduate from a Colorado Mountain College associate-degree program that offers tuition breaks to Utes who traditionally lived where the college’s campuses are now spread across the Western Slope.
McCook, who paid in-district tuition rather than the much more costly out-of-state assessment under the program, now has returned to the reservation land to which his tribe was banished in the 1880s to use his newfound business expertise to promote tourism enterprises.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what resort management meant before,” said McCook, 40. “Now, I have all these ideas.”
The idea for the 3-year-old tuition-break program for Utes was conceived in the early 1990s when some professors at the college found that many people around the Yampah and Roaring Fork valleys knew little about the local history of the Utes.
The college responded by scheduling speakers, workshops, dances and other cultural events to bring Utes and the valleys’ residents together.
“We wanted to bring them (the Utes) back. We felt it was important there be a reconnection to place,” said Pam Burwell, a history and philosophy professor at the college.
Those efforts evolved into the tuition agreement, which is unusual because it is subsidized by the college and not an outside entity, Burwell said.
McCook will put his college knowledge to work in a job with his tribe’s Fish and Wildlife Division. He said he has already developed a PowerPoint presentation for the Northern Ute Tribal Council showing his plan to revive the RV campground at Bottle Hollow Reservoir along U.S. 40 on the reservation.
“I think it will work this time, with the talent of our younger generation,” he said.
He said he also wants to create camps for hunters who come to the reservation for guided hunts and to more aggressively market the tribe’s White Rocks brand of bottled water to other reservations for sale at casinos.
He and his father, Roland McCook Sr., a former tribal chairman, also have dreams of developing a Ute museum on a 3,200-member reservation that currently boasts a bowling alley, a feedlot and gas stations, but little else in the way of economic development.
Roland McCook helped create the tuition program. Last month he received a standing ovation when he gave the commencement address at the college’s Alpine Campus in Steamboat Springs, where his son received his diploma. Four other tribal members are currently enrolled in classes there.
“I told them to grab opportunity and go through open windows. Otherwise, they will end up washing those windows.”
Farrell McCook said book learning will not make any of the changes easy. He said there are traditionalists on the reservation who are in favor of the status quo.
“Some members want everything to stay the way it is,” he said. “But we need to bring pride back into the tribe.”
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
