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When the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission met for its monthly meeting in Ignacio this month it was the first time since the state parks and wildlife departments merged in 2011 that the commission met on tribal land in Colorado.
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And for the leaders of Colorado’s two federally recognized tribes — the Southern Utes, whose land the meeting was on, and their neighbors, the Ute Mountain Utes — it was an opportunity to bring up a grievance.
Not only has the 13-member commission never met on tribal land, there has never been a tribal representative on the commission. That is a major point of contention for Southern Ute Tribal Council member Andrew Gallegos and Ute Mountain Ute Chairman Selwyn Whiteskunk.
“The Southern Utes have been residents of Colorado since way before the settlers came in,” Gallegos said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “So who better to manage their own land than the people that were here since the beginning?”
Gallegos said he applied to be on the commission in 2023. After making it through two interviews with Gov. Jared Polis, he said he didn’t make the final cut for a seat.
“But if there were two seats reserved specifically — one for Ute Mountain and one for Southern Ute — we wouldn’t have to battle the overall population of the other Colorado citizens that apply for these seats,” he said.
Gallegos and Whiteskunk questioned why there is no dedicated commission representative for the tribes, given each has a cooperative wildlife management agreement with CPW on a huge swath of land called the in southwestern Colorado. The confederated Ute tribes ceded the Brunot area to the federal government more than 150 years ago, but retain hunting, fishing and ceremonial rights on it.
Around 200,000 Coloradans, or or about 3% of the population, identify as Indigenous or Native American, said Stacey Coleman, assistant director for tribal affairs in the state Department of Natural Resources. In addition to the Ute and Southern Ute tribes, at least 45 other indigenous groups maintain documented historic, ancestral and cultural ties to Colorado. And the tribes in Colorado continue to care for and steward Colorado lands “they caretook and stewarded since time immemorial,” Coleman added.
Other governing bodies have tribal representation, including the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Ponderosa Pine Beetle Task Force and the Colorado Forest Health Council, a Department of Natural Resources spokesperson noted.
But Whiteskunk, Gallegos and other tribal members are wondering when or if they will ever have a seat at what some call the most important commission in Colorado, overseeing an agency with a $365 million budget and decision-making power over 40 game species and more than 600 animals and plants considered species of greatest conservation need.
“We have a voice that’s not going to be silenced”
During his opening remarks at the CPW Commission meeting July 16 at the Southern Ute’s Sky Ute Casino Resort, Whiteskunk said he has lobbied the legislature, the governor and the commission itself for a tribal seat “because we need to protect our rights and our areas.”
He was alluding to hunting and fishing rights on the tribes’ two reservations — a combined 400,000 acres — in southwestern Colorado and the , 3.7-million acres of prime wildlife habitat in the southern San Juan Mountains hemmed in by Ridgway, Pagosa Springs, Cortez and Dove Creek.
The Brunot area has : In 1873, the confederated bands of Utes ceded it to the federal government after they’d been pushed onto reservations and the government decided to open the land to white settlement and mining.
The agreement said the Utes could continue hunting and fishing there “so long as the game lasts and the Indians are at peace with the white people.”
But over the next 150 years the land within the Brunot area has become a patchwork of federal land, state land, local jurisdictions, private homes and private property as cities and towns like Durango, Telluride and Silverton formed, said Ernest House Jr., an enrolled member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and director for the Center for Tribal and Indigenous Engagement at the Keystone Policy Center. The result “greatly reduced the original area from what it was,” he said.
Both tribes have their own natural resources departments with biologists who manage wildlife on their reservations and the Brunot land. Both have their own rules, hunting season dates, regulations and bag limits. And tribal courts prosecute any hunting-related crimes by tribal members, said Aran Johnson, division head for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe’s Wildlife Resource Management Division.
Meanwhile CPW manages hunting and fishing on non-tribal lands and in the Brunot area for nontribal hunters and anglers.
“And today (the tribes and CPW) have not just wolf reintroduction but wolverines and beavers and fill-in-the-blank animals” to comanage, House said. “There should be a strong focus on the Brunot area (regarding) how information is shared not just on animals but on things like wildfire mitigation work.”
The tribes’ history with the state over hunting has been . It includes a 1972 dispute between the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the state over on-reservation hunting rights and a wildlife management memorandum of understanding — an agreement that outlines shared goals, roles and a common plan of action — in the Brunot area that wasn’t solidified until 2008.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe created a new memorandum with the state in 2013 after a tribal member was ticketed by a CPW wildlife officer for hunting there without a state tag, House said.
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Another memorandum of understanding between the Ute Mountain Utes and CPW over wolf management has been “making its way through a formal government-to-government consultation process” since January of 2025. CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins said the agency expects an announcement about it soon. (The Southern Ute Indian Tribe already finalized their agreement with CPW that ensures the agency will not release wolves in the Brunot area, that tribal members are compensated for livestock attacks and that the same rules for killing wolves attacking livestock apply to them as to non-natives.)
The “medicine wheel” of tribal engagement
When the agreement between the Ute Mountain Utes and the state was updated in 2013, some Colorado residents said they were “uneasy with it” because it allowed tribal members to hunt and fish in the region under their own tribal regulations instead of being subjected to standard Colorado state licensing and bag limits.
And when the Southern Utes updated their Brunot Agreement in 2008, House, who helped facilitate in his then-role as executive director for the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs, remembers “getting anglers and hunters that were yelling at me over the phone, saying the Indians were going to kill all the animals and take all the fish.”
But five years ago, the Keystone Policy Center, an organization that helps governments create inclusive policies, partnered with CPW to develop a guide for tribal collaboration in conservation, outdoor recreation and adapting to climate change as part of its statewide outdoors strategy launched by Polis and a consortium of state outdoor agencies.
The resulting guide includes a “medicine wheel” created to help public and private partners, tribes and others “achieve tangible outcomes for the benefit of people and the environment,” by “uplifting the core values that underpin meaningful Tribal collaboration — Relationship, Respect, Reciprocity, and Relevance,” it says.
It’s also tied to money: Organizations that prioritize Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, or the localized, intergenerational body of knowledge, practices and beliefs that Indigenous communities have developed about their ecosystems, can secure state grants for landscape-level conservation.
“It’s an 80-page document, and it’s probably the first time in Colorado Parks and Wildlife and DNR’s history that there’s been a guide to working with tribes, with background education, not just about the Bruno Agreement, but about tribes in general and what their what their priorities are on a variety of different things,” House said. “We put it forward two years ago, and over the last year, myself and staff from CPW have been going around the state, kind of training and working more specifically in that document with communities.”
But what about that CPW commission seat?
Over the past year, CPW has increased its efforts at including the tribes in state wildlife and land management decisions.
It held the state’s first-ever tribal summit at the annual Partners in the Outdoors conference in April, bringing together eight different tribal nations to discuss priorities around wildlife, recreation and conservation.
The decision to bring a commission meeting to the Southern Ute reservation this month involved the Department of Natural Resources, Coleman said, which “ensured that we talked to the Southern Ute government before deciding to have the meeting on their reservation and ensured we were welcomed there because it is tribal lands.”
The Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes also have seats on the State Trust Lands Conservation and Recreation Work Group, the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board and the CPW Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy working group, a representative from the Department of Natural Resources said.
But it still eats at Southern Ute Tribal Council member Gallegos that tribal members have applied for seats on the CPW commission and haven’t been appointed.
In an email to The Sun, Polis spokesperson Eric Maruyama defended the process, writing “since 2019, 202 individuals have applied for appointment to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission.” Of those, six identified as Native American, with two from the Southern Ute tribe, Maruyama said.
Polis did interview Gallegos, Maruyama wrote, and “appreciated his willingness to serve and his thoughtful application; while he was not appointed, he was a compelling finalist.”
And, Maruyama pointed out, in the Polis administration, “Native Americans represent at least 2% of all board and commission appointments. He encourages members of all tribal nations to apply for board and commission seats.”
Going forward, if CPW wanted to create commission seats dedicated to tribal members, Travis Duncan, another CPW spokesperson, said it would take a change to Colorado Revised Statute . The law currently mandates the commission has 11 voting members, including three representing hunters and anglers, three agricultural producers, three recreationalists and two at-large members appointed from the public. It also requires the commission to include two nonvoting ex officio members, the executive director of the Department of Natural Resources and the commissioner of the Department of Agriculture.
The simpler route would be to appoint a Southern Ute or Ute Mountain Ute tribal member to one of the existing positions.
Following Gallegos’ and Whiteskunk’s comments at the CPW commission meeting, Coleman said “it’s great they’re raising this and wanting to discuss it, because it’s really important.”
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