Turning 50 and still growing, Salt Lake's Urban Indian Center honors tradition, memory and vision. 

• Wes Long

BALLPARK—The Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake probably doesn't attract as much public attention as some of its neighbors. However, the warm, brown brick building located at 120 W. 1300 South in Salt Lake City—facing Smith's Ballpark to one side and the Lucky 13 Bar & Grill to the other—has as many stories to tell (if not more) than any of them.

Just ask the guests who filled the center's main hall on Feb. 29, in celebration of the 50 years that have passed since the Urban Indian Center (or alternatively, the Indian Walk-In Center) first opened.

"We had powwows down here every month, if not every weekend it seemed," former director Dena Ned, Chickasaw/Choctaw, told those assembled. "I remember learning from the most amazing women how to actually make fry bread down in that little kitchen. The walls were all smoky and greasy, and it was a wonderful way to create a home when my family was in Oklahoma."

Jacob Crane, Tsuut'ina, recalled growing up at the center in his youth. An entrepreneur and producer, Crane credits the people at the center for guiding him like an older sibling at many crucial moments.

"If it wasn't for places like this," he said at the gathering, "I wouldn't be on the career path that I am now."

While staff, donors and board members—past and present—mingled, and old friends hugged one another, Mary Louise Santacaterina, the center's grants manager, welcomed everyone with the program for that day's appreciation luncheon.

"This event is for all of you and for everyone who has walked these great halls before us," she stressed.

Rose Jakub, Navajo, offered the prayer, current division directors gave status updates on their operations and executive director Alan Barlow, Navajo/Diné, along with members of the center's board, offered their thoughts on the center's progress. The guests, too, had their turn to share stories and reminisce during an open mic portion of the luncheon.

"We've got a great future ahead," Barlow remarked to his tablemates.

That future will include a series of events throughout the year, as the center and its patrons celebrate the milestone of a half-century in operation with the theme "Honoring tradition, memory and vision." In recognition of the anniversary, City Weekly conducted interviews and combed through archival materials to explore how the Urban Indian Center came to be and where it goes from here.

Neither Bright Nor Pleasant
The lands that came to be known as Utah have hosted indigenous inhabitants for at least 10,000 years. The successive arrivals of Spanish explorers, fur traders, Latter-day Saint pioneers and the U.S. government further complicated the terrain, with peaceful interactions as well as violent clashes occurring between the different groups with regularity.

Subsequent federal policies forcing Native Americans into reservations fostered additional strain while efforts at Native American assimilation into white cultures through boarding schools produced cultural erasure.

"Everything has been screwed up since 1492," said Dena Ned, summarizing the historic and generational legacies of settler colonialism, wherein "there was no other voice, there was no other way" beside that of those with the power.

By the middle of the 20th century, efforts of forced assimilation took on a new tack when the U.S. government began its process of "termination," whereby it no longer recognized the sovereignty of assorted tribes, sold off reservation lands and forced those it displaced into urban areas. Add to this picture the natural birth rates, poverty conditions often afflicting rural reservations and an inflow of students during school years through initiatives like the Indian Placement Program, and, by the 1960s, Utah's urban Native population had nearly tripled in size, with almost half of the state's overall population located along the Wasatch Front.

Mary Ellen Sloan, in a 1973 study, divided Salt Lake's urban Native American population between residents, migrant workers and transients—representing by her estimation over 40 different tribes. While housing discrimination existed generally, the migrant workers especially had to "contend with substandard housing and housing shortages, a lack of formal education, inadequate medical and dental care, and various legal problems," Sloan wrote.

The United Council of Urban Indian Affairs—a conglomeration of local Native American organizations using seed money from "Great Society" programs—elaborated on these challenges in 1972: "Urban adjustment, finding employment, or a house, transportation, legal assistance, problems of alcoholism, police relations, education, health, cultural and spiritual deprivations—one or more of these problems exist for almost all of the 4,000 to 5,000 Indians in the Salt Lake Valley," it stated. "Many of them face a future which is neither bright nor pleasant. Many of them are in need of social and economic services which they are not receiving because many of them, when they come into the city, are not aware of the facilities and services already available."

A Dream Begins
Resources were offered through state Family Services, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Salvation Army and assorted religious congregations. The University of Utah's Alcoholism Training Center was particularly popular. But the United Council proposed something even more accessible and all-encompassing—a place where one could find all these scattered services in one location and which fostered Native American culture to boot.

Reaching not only Native Americans in Salt Lake but also those in Fort Duchesne and Fort Hall, this was the dream that would become the Urban Indian Center. And such a dream's success would be realized, as Council coordinator Frederick Harden (1936-1992), Winnebago, said in the Model Neighborhood News, "when the Native American can retain his culture and function comfortably in a different society."

Harden later explained the idea to the Deseret News in 1973: "In one room, a man would be seeking a job through the employment service. In another, a married couple would be seeking financial advice. Upstairs an alcoholic might be receiving therapy. Downstairs Native American women could be weaving a rug while youngsters play pingpong."

Harden had already founded the Storefront Walk-In counseling center (at 11 S. 400 West, razed to make way for the Delta Center), and with Dr. Dan Edwards, Yurok, established an alcohol therapy program through the Salt Lake City & County jail at the start of the 1970s.

They were not alone in such activities—as with so many others, they were proponents of the renewed consciousness of Native American culture that was bubbling across the country. This consciousness took differing forms, from quiet interactions and coalition building to dramatic events like the Occupation of Alcatraz (1969), the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) and the Occupation of Wounded Knee (1973).

Edwards remembers Harden as "tough," "smart" and "a nice guy" with a knack for repairing radios. Nola Lodge, an Oneida elder, added that Harden was a "fearless and articulate" activist "who knew his history."

Intertribal and Multiethnic
Working with the Salt Lake County Commission, and with the support of Gov. Calvin Rampton (1913-2007) and Sen. Frank Moss (1911-2003), the United Council sought out a suitable location for their proposed center. Should they build? Should they use an abandoned school building? These options neither seemed feasible nor desirable.

Additional grants and the fundraising efforts of university students got the word out, but it was when Carpenters' Hall—a former union meeting place—became available that the dream at last became a reality. With the passage of an appropriations bill at the Legislature in early 1974, $185,000 was supplied for the purchase of Carpenters' Hall with the express purpose of it becoming a Native American center. By July, the building was being leased at $1 per year for United Council operations.

"Up until about 1980," Lodge recalls, "There was a revolving series of directors," with several coming from out of state. Private funding was often spotty and that which came from government entities tended to fluctuate depending on who was in charge.

Lodge vividly recalls when the Reagan administration severely cut funding to Native American programs upon its ascent to power, subsequently impacting the center's job training, food bank and dentistry operations as well as their monthly powwows.

"It was really tough," she said.

Speaking with The Salt Lake Tribune in 1981, then-center director Courtney Reddoor Sr. (1924-1987), Assiniboine, agreed with Lodge, adding that because of severe underfunding of the reservations, even more Native Americans were then coming to the city and seeking aid.

"It is not uncommon to have families arrive with no extra clothing, no food, no jobs, no fuel, no housing and no prospects of employment," he reported.

Lodge explained that these kinds of dire straits—then as now—are most common for Native Americans in urban areas, caught as they are between the frictions of state, federal and reservation policies.

"The center is primarily funded by the Indian Health Service, and you have to be legally enrolled in a tribe to take part in their programs," Lodge said. "For urban Indians, that's sometimes not possible. Each tribe has the right to establish their own rules about who can be enrolled."

While tribes are generally supportive of urban Indian centers, many opportunities to meet a person's needs can be missed as a result of such complexities. Such were the circumstances routinely experienced by the center's staff and clientele over the next several decades. But they made do with what they had, and still managed to foster services and cultural events.

From art shows and voter drives to rodeos and film screenings, the center has been a driver for so much local activity over its 50 years. It has even leased out its space for punk rock shows and wrestling matches.

Former center director Gail Russell (1933-2021), Chemehuevi, was particularly instrumental in securing funding for the center as well as making spiritual and health practices like the sweat lodge more available to Utah's urban Native Americans—particularly those who were incarcerated. And by 1992, the building was owned outright by the community.

"It's really intertribal and multiethnic," Russell told the Tribune. "There are a lot of different tribes in the Salt Lake City urban area, and it is their community center. They choose to share it."

COVID Reset
And share it they do. Directors have come and gone over the years. In that time, generational, cultural and tribal tensions have arisen; health and economic disparities have shown up; and the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be particularly difficult to recover from. But there are indications that the center's future is indeed bright.

A new medical clinic in Murray is slated to open this June, and many cultural events are set for the remainder of this year.

"COVID helped us get a little bit of a reset," remarked Kristina Groves, Ute/Hopi.

Heading up the center's behavioral health programs, Groves remarked upon their ongoing efforts to integrate Native practices with mainstream health programs.

"Accessing mental health services is often difficult for anybody," Groves said, "but especially for Native American people."

Encouraging community interaction and the act of storytelling particularly goes a long way for a person to find healing and wholeness, organizers say.

"You're really trying to ensure that you're meeting [people's] expectations but also that you're being culturally appropriate and humble," stated Community Health Services director Penelope Pinnecoose, Ute/Shoshone/Arapaho. "A lot of times our tribes differ in terms of values, and so when we look at our programs, we have to take a holistic view."

Among the community's Wisdom Keepers—a group of elders who routinely meet to socialize, plan activities and provide cultural guidance—dialogue continues with Barlow, the current executive director, to find a spiritual leader who will be able to conduct the sweat lodges once again. Barlow and his staff appear attentive to the needs of the Wisdom Keepers as well as to the numerous other people of varying ages who visit, recognizing that the entire center was built by the determined vision of countless people who had less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand, as the Apache saying goes.

"The collective efforts with our board and our staff are to make sure that this vision continues," Barlow told luncheon guests. "Even when we don't always agree—especially when we don't agree."

That's a sentiment whose application encompasses more than just the center's staff, as Groves asserts. She invited the public to look into visiting and volunteering at the Urban Indian Center as but one way to get in touch with that spirit of mutual connection and support.

"We live in a society that is very polarized right now," she observed, "and figuring out how we're similar goes a long way."

Or, as Fred Harden once said to the Tribune, quoting Sitting Bull: "Let us put our minds together and see what kind of lives we can make for our children."

The Urban Indian Center is planning a series of events for its 50th anniversary, in addition to its regular monthly programming. Highlights are listed below, with additional information and updates available at uicsl.org.

April 13: Weaving Communities & Making Connections Powwow, with the University of Utah American Indian Resource Center (Huntsman Center)

April 27: Humor Healing Comedy Show (Urban Indian Center, 6 p.m.-8 p.m.)

June 1: Intermountain Championships Powwow and Community Blessing (Rivers Edge Deer Park, Heber)

June 27: Family Field Day (Murray Park Pavilion No. 2, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.)

July 19-20: Fashion Show and Native Market Days (Thanksgiving Point Electric Park, Lehi)

September: Defend the Sacred Powwow (TBD)

Additional Dates TBD: Code Talkers Memorial, Cultural Fire Events, Adopt-a-Native-Elder Gathering of Elders, "Dedication Wall" Unveiling and Gala