Longtime Ute Mountain Tribal Park director Arthur Cuthair, whose shrewdness helped establish the profitable and controversial Soda Point tourist magnet near Mesa Verde, was 58 when he died May 5 of injuries sustained in the fire that destroyed his Towaoc home that day.
Dynamic and devoted to his Ute Mountain tribe, Cuthair became a tireless advocate for Ute Mountain Tribal Park, which embraces Mesa Verde National Park as part of the tribe’s reservation.
Before he championed it, few non-Utes realized that the 125,000-acre park contains even more of Anasazi cliff dwellings and other ruins that lure tourists to its famous neighbor.
“Art loved the fact that Ute Mountain Tribal Park has a much more remote feeling than Mesa Verde National Park,” said Stephen Trimble, who interviewed Cuthair for his 1993 book, “The People: Indians of the American Southwest.”
Cuthair loved the tribal park’s silent canyons and mesas. Unlike the National Park Service, he encouraged park visitors to climb up into ancient cliff dwellings.
Often, as tourists examined the pottery shards and wizened tiny corncobs still lying in the shady corners, Cuthair spoke feelingly about the Bear Dance and other tribal traditions. He told stories of Chief Jack House, the late Ute Mountain tribal leader who was instrumental in opening public access to the reservation’s archaeological ruins and other historical assets.
Because of his reverence for the tribal park’s spare beauty, Cuthair found it equally insulting and amusing when the National Park Service administrators complained about the plywood commercial district sprouting along the Chapin Mesa Road that wandered onto the Ute reservation.
When the Utes fortuitously discovered that Park Service surveyors twice miscalculated the park’s southern boundary, putting a stretch of Chapin Mesa Road – Mesa Verde’s busiest thoroughfare – on reservation land, they were as delighted as the park administrators were dismayed.
Tension between the U.S. government and the Ute Mountain tribe had worn as thin as the boundary between the immensely profitable national park and the perennially impoverished reservation.
The Utes lost no time in setting up tourist concessions selling pottery, T-shirts, fry bread, snow cones and other food, and guided four-wheel and helicopter tours of Ute Mountain Tribal Park.
“We’ve got to create jobs and bring in revenue,” Cuthair said in a 1987 New York Times article. “That’s why we like this thing.”
Cuthair, who formerly worked at Mesa Verde National Park and knew the extent of its profits, had no sympathy for Park Service administrators who saw the Chapin Mesa Road market as tawdry.
Cuthair, born Dec. 23, 1947, to Ira and Celia Coyote Cuthair in Ignacio, relished the reservation backcountry where he hunted, camped, fished, read, swam in the Hesperus River and fought wildfires, including the 2000 blaze that burned 23,000 acres within Mesa Verde National Park.
He dropped out of high school to serve two tours with the infantry during the Vietnam War, and then earned his general equivalency diploma upon returning to the reservation.
Cuthair served as a senior member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council, and represented the tribe at the National Congress of American Indians. He spoke fluent Ute, and took pride in securing insurance funding to pay for tribal members’ funerals. Cuthair was instrumental in the tribe’s successful lobbying for the Animas-La Plata water storage project.
He encouraged Ute youths to pursue college educations, including scholarship opportunities and the free tuition that Fort Lewis College offers to Native Americans.
“They should never forget that they have to compete in the outside world in order to survive,” Cuthair said in a 2002 interview with the Cortez Journal.
“Then, when they come back, they have the education and right attitude to lead, and people like me will step aside to let the new generation take over.”
The May 5 fire that cost his life also ruined his home, a financial loss that Ute Mountain Fire Chief John Trocheck estimated at $75,000.
Survivors include daughters Erica Cuthair of Towaoc, Yvette Cuthair of Las Vegas and Zelda Wilson of Fresno, Calif.; son Benito F. Cuthair of Towaoc; brothers Chester Cuthair, Wayner Cuthair and Kendall Cuthair, all of Towaoc; and sisters Mary Jane Cuthair Lonebear, Veronica Joyce Cuthair, Bernadette Cuthair and Beverly Cuthair Whiteskunk, all of Towaoc.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
