Garrett Briggs

Garret Briggs, NAGPRA Coordinator, Southern Ute Cultural Department, with Cassandra Atencio, NAGPRA Coordinator, Southern Ute Cultural Department

Photo of author Garrett Briggs, a younger man standing in a green field with trees in the background. He has collar length black hair which is parted in the middle of his head and frames his face. He is relaxed, with his fingertips tucked into the front pockets of his khaki pants, and his light colored dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He has a faint black mustache and goatee, and is smiling.
Garrett Briggs

Written by Garrett Briggs

  • Pikes Peak

    Tava-Kaavi / Sun Mountain

    The Nuuchiu (pronounced New-chew, meaning “the People”), or the Utes, are the longest continuous Indigenous inhabitants of what is now Colorado. According to Nuuchiu oral history, we have no migration story and our people have been here since time immemorial—when they were placed within their homelands, on different mountain peaks, to remain close to their Creator. Nuuchiu Ancestors, in order to maintain transmission of cultural knowledge, taught generations through oral history about the narratives and the names ascribed to geophysical places and geological formations within their aboriginal and ancestral territory.