Ute Housing

The Ute tribe, like every society, needed a form of housing to protect themselves from the elements, and they made it work with what they had available to them. With the materials around them, they built what are called “wickiups”, which is another for of a wigwam.

Wickiups were just meant to be places the people could take shelter in or to sleep in, everything else was done outside, such as cooking. They were built out of willow trees, specifically the saplings, and other sticks to build the almost dome-like shape of the wickiups. The neat thing about wickiups is they were in no way absolutely permanent and could be easily assembled or taken down depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, if the people were traveling for food or whatever the reason may be, they could build a wickiup if they needed one.

Even though wickiups used to be very common among the area that the Ute tribe used to inhabit, there aren’t many left standing, but this isn’t a bad thing. The sites where wickiups used to be built hold archaeological value to this day. Below is an example image of where a wickiup used to stand. While it isn’t a necessarily easy thing to see how it could have historical value, it helps to paint the picture of how the people lived their lives.

For a quick example of what a wickiup looked like, below is an image of a reconstruction of one. You can see how it was made out of the willow saplings and other various sticks to construct what almost looks like a tepee or a small dome. If built in a certain way, a fire could go in the center to help keep those inside warmer, but this was not an essential part of a wickiup.

---

Information sourced from:

https://quatr.us/nativeamerican/ute-houses-wickiups-native-americans.htm

http://www.dargnet.org/projects/cwp/index-cwp.html