The Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum (SUCCM) is dedicated to ensuring the upmost care and cultural sensitivity when handling objects and artifacts, with a team comprised of mostly Southern Ute tribal members and other members of tribal nations handling cultural items with care is second nature. SUCCM celebrated the grand opening of the “Ute Cradleboards & Baskets: Carriers of Life” exhibit on Thursday, May 23 last year, and in February a team of four Ute and Diné women worked to carefully take down each cradleboard, a testament to the organizations focus on ensuring items are handled with certain Ute cultural practices in mind and sensitivity. The takedown team is exclusively an all-woman team, an impactful and poetic act as the cradleboards, baskets, and water jugs are almost exclusively created by women for the continuity of life, emphasizing femininity and the matrilineal kinship of the Ute people.
Announced during the exhibits grand opening, “For thousands of years the Núuchiu (Ute) women have used nature’s resources to create containers of functional works of art that have embraced and nurtured life throughout the Ute lifecycle. The ‘Ute Cradleboards & Baskets: Carriers of Life’ exhibit featured over 15 cradleboards, several medicine baskets, and water jugs – highlighting the beauty and complexity of these cultural items throughout history.” For almost one year the exhibit lived in the museum’s temporary exhibit, and now as the crew begins to curate a new exhibit, four women – Sheree Mann (Diné), Rhonda Price (Southern Ute), Alissa White (Southern Ute), Alexandria Roubideaux (Southern Ute) – have dedicated their time to creating special containers for each piece, skillfully cleaning and packaging each cradleboard to ensure its longevity within the archive.
Sheree Mann is the Collections Assistant for SUCCM, handling objects, managing pest control, cataloging etc. “I took it upon myself to make sure that all the cradleboards had a box to be housed in and that we had a plan for when [cradleboards] came out of the exhibit – right now we’re taking the cradleboards out, we’re cleaning them, and we have a plan to lay them down, basically little beds for each one, specific to each item because they are unique in size and design.”
“We make an ethafoam base that’s at least three to four inches, carving into it for the unique sizes, creating handles so we can pick up the cradleboards with ease in the future, we then make sure each cradleboard is covered with a scarf as tradition follows, then wrap that all in a soft tyvek material so there couldn’t be a possible scratch or damage within the item,” Mann said. “For me, it was serendipitous to have three Southern Ute women helping with the takedown of the exhibit, it was most important because we’re dealing with the cradleboards which are the carriers of life – so to have these Ute women helping with that process, it was really powerful – Rhonda, Alissa, and Alex are the ones who are cleaning the cradleboards and providing all the care for each one.”
Mann continues “What made this exhibit ever more special is that technically it is the largest cradleboard exhibit within the Southwest and possibly the nation– you must have the time to be able to give individual love to every single item, I am happy that I get to be here and to be trusted with that responsibility for the Tribe, I am Diné, and it is really important to me to be able to fully house these items with the level of care that they deserve.”
Southern Ute tribal member Alexandria Roubideaux is part of the team and shared her experience during the process of taking care of the items. “Initially it was very inspiring and important to have the entire exhibit dedicated to the women of our Tribe and our Ute ancestors, that’s especially important in the time where women in general are being challenged every day,” Roubideaux said. “Being able to work with Sheree and Tallias Cantsee and everyone here at SUCCM, they gave me the opportunity to have professional work and be able to work in collections, providing skills that will be extremely helpful in this field of work – having this opportunity is surreal, I feel like I have really meaningful things to do – it has taken me some time to figure out what was in the cards for me, so being here these last six months has really opened doors for me.”
The “Ute Cradleboards & Baskets: Carriers of Life” exhibit at the museum showcased the continuity of cradleboard design and construction throughout generations of Ute families, highlighting their cultural significance as teaching tools. The exhibit also included baskets and water jugs emphasizing the items’ importance in their role of caring for the community. The SUCCM’s commitment to cultural sensitivity is evident in their approach to handling and displaying these items, balancing professional museum standard practices with traditional protocols.
The exhibit highlighted cradleboards as the main attraction but later on, water pitchers or water jugs and medicine baskets joined the exhibit as well. Museum Director Trainee, Fabian Martinez shared insight to the process “These items are carrying life, and these are really sacred objects as well, so it was kind of a natural progression over time where we first wanted to start with the cradleboards and it continued to develop,” Martinez said. “[The exhibit] was designed to show you the continuance of traditions, from contemporary to the old style, then into the minis and toy cradleboards – a woman as a child, they would receive small cradleboards as a way of learning what the cradleboard represented, from there as those women got older and began having kids they would learn how to make and maintain cradleboards for their children.”
Tallias Cantsee is the Collections Manager for the museum, tasked with conservation, preservation, storage, exhibition, and access to the items housed in the SUCCM collections. “I think it’s truly special what’s going on now at the museum, we are almost a fully Tribal staff and that translates into the cultural care aspect of people handling these items, there’s not many institutions that are like this,” Cantsee said. “Those spirits within the items, they recognize who’s handling them, we are taught to talk to them and respect them so it’s important that we have tribal members interact with these items.”
“It’s important that we have females interacting with the cradleboards because traditionally they’re the ones who are responsible for making these items that and caring for that life, so it’s almost like we are coming full circle back to how it should be from our cultural understanding,” Cantsee said. “We try our best to emphasize our cultural protocol, down to males and females handling certain items, so it’s an honor and really beautiful when you look at it from that standpoint, this is how we’re operating with these collections in a tribal museum it’s a labor of love.”
The SUCCM team continues to work to carefully store each item that was on display of the “Ute Cradleboards & Baskets: Carriers of Life” and now begins the process again for a new exhibit.
“It’s almost like natural law that these cradleboards and other items are taking care of us, so we emphasize the importance of taking care of those items,” Cantsee said. “They’re not just inanimate objects, we all know they have a spirit, and we take care of them because of that.”