Heart of a Tribe: After 27 years of advocacy and leadership, the Ute Mountain Ute chairman is ready to rest

GUNNISON COUNTY

Sitting on his horse watching his fellow ranchers ride onto Pine Crest Ranch to gather their cattle, Manuel Heart, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe until Nov. 7, was exactly where he wanted to be. 

Sun glinted off small, silver hoops that dangled from his earlobes. Butter-colored chaps covered his Levi’s. The back of his canvas vest bore the ranch name, a forest mosaic and “Ute Mountain Ute Tribe” in colorful embroidery. And the saddle beneath him was worn to a polish. It was 60 years old, a gift from his grandfather, who was alive when the tribe still had a chief, before it followed other Native American tribes in adopting a constitution, transitioning to a tribal council and creating a legislative body, in 1940.  

Heart was going to ride out with the other members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe to round up their calves and move them toward a corral used to funnel them onto a truck headed for a sale barn a couple days later. As he scanned the 20,000-acre ranch the tribe bought after losing land to the Navajo Nation in 1950, a smile creased his face. He’d been dreaming of this moment for weeks as he traveled the West on diplomatic missions. He’d been to Denver, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City. To the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs and the Ten Tribes Partnership meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’d even visited a Mormon temple. And more obligations were coming. The ranch was where he went to relax. 

When he isn’t traveling, Heart spends most of his time on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation near the town of Cortez in southwestern Colorado. It’s a beautiful spot, at the base of Sleeping Ute Mountain, which the tribe recognizes as a sleeping warrior. The reservation takes in 900 square miles across Colorado and parts of New Mexico and Utah. 

In Colorado, the tribe owns a 7,700-acre irrigated farm and ranch enterprise with 800 head of cattle. There’s a travel center, a casino and 500 million tons of coal beneath the ground. But the community of 1,700 registered members (out of around 2,000 both on and off the reservation) also faces challenges related to public health, housing, gun violence, education, drought and, in some ways, its own ability to advocate for itself. 

Heart spent 27 years on the tribal council — 12 as a council member and 15 as chairman.  

During that span, he helped raise awareness about gun violence on a reservation a U.S. attorney once described as “the murder capital of Colorado;” ushered in the tribe’s first charter school dedicated to preserving its culture; closed the reservation amid harsh blowback during COVID. And in 2023, with Southern Ute Tribe Chairman Melvin J. Baker, he made Colorado lawmakers take stock of the needs of the state’s two federally recognized tribes by giving the first Native American address to the General Assembly, after introducing legislation requiring the assembly to invite the tribes to speak on an annual basis.   

Heart calls this forcing of attention “a different kind of war” than the wars the Utes fought for their land and freedom, a history barely taught in Colorado classrooms. On some fronts, they may be starting to win. 

But the Ute Mountain Ute people are still fighting for access to basic services — like health care to address their diabetes epidemic, a permanent location for a new charter school dedicated to teaching Ute language and culture, a grocery store closer than 15 miles away, more than seven tribal police officers to cover the communities of Towaoc, in Colorado, and White Mesa, in Utah.  Access to land. Access to water. 

Heart addressed all of these during his tenure with the support of his wife, Marie, who has stood by his side since 1994, he said, and supported “the obligations to my tribal leadership role.” But now he was tired. He looked out across the sagebrush-covered mesa sandwiched between Blue Mesa Dam and the 3.7 million-acre Brunot Agreement hunting and fishing area, and said, “I want to stop and breathe.” 

With Selwyn Whiteskunk winning the election for Heart’s seat on Oct. 10 and Heart’s official retirement starting Nov. 7, soon, he can. But he can’t fight his instincts. He’s already hoping Whiteskunk will consult him on various tribal issues. And he’s worrying about many things, including the ranch. And wolves.

Rushing in and shutting down 

One way to understand someone is to learn about their childhood. Heart’s was uniquely Western.   

He was born on the reservation in 1961, and his grandfather, Leslie Heart, raised him. A love of ranching took Leslie to Pine Crest as often as he could, with little Manuel tagging along. Manuel wasn’t very good at staying with the adults, however. Once, while herding cattle with them, he lagged behind to try fishing in a creek. Panic ensued when the adults returned to ranch headquarters and noticed they were without him. They found him. No fish.

Another memory: Leslie, much older, shrunken by age from his original 5-foot-5 height. He owned a largish horse, Benji, and Manuel owned a smaller one, Cannonball. “All of a sudden, grandpa took over Cannonball,” Manuel said. He’d speed by, braids flying. “Why’s grandpa riding Cannonball?!’” everyone would ask. Peals of laughter. “But Cannonball was spicy,” Manuel says. “Grandpa was a great rider.”

When Manuel was young, he asked Leslie why he hadn’t become a tribal leader, and Leslie told him because it was too stressful. Don’t get into it, he advised.  

Manuel took a circuitous route, learning to ranch, attending a Native American boarding school in Phoenix, picking up a few trades, and doing various manual labor jobs before running for council at age 37.  

Ernest House Jr., a fellow tribal member, policy director at the Keystone Policy Center and son of the longest-serving Ute Mountain Ute elected official, Ernest House Sr., said when Heart became a council member he wanted to charge in, upend the old guard and start changing things immediately.

But young council members learn quickly how challenging it is to be a leader in tribal politics, in part, House said, because it’s so hard “trying to understand and balance both the issues at home within the community versus the issues outside of the community.”  

A key example: COVID, which House said “could have easily wiped out the whole tribe” had it taken hold of the reservation, where the obesity rate, prevalence of diabetes and percentage of tribal members over 50 made people especially vulnerable to the illness. 

Heart and the council put the tribe on lockdown, closing 12 of the reservation’s entry points, establishing a curfew for tribal members and setting up a checkpoint on the main road into Towaoc. 

House said Heart’s orders were “like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ I mean, we have kids that go to school off reservation. We don’t have a grocery store. We don’t have so many things in our community.

“So to shut off that main line of needs and services, while creating a process of getting food to the reservation and having it distributed to elders, and thinking about how to balance the cultural aspects instead of losing his cool especially amid pushback — that was probably one of the most impactful points in Manuel’s career.” 

Which is saying a lot, considering the catalog of things he’d already done. 

Tackling tribal issues 

House also praised Heart’s efforts to raise awareness of on-reservation gun violence, an issue he said “tribal leaders are always going to have to pay attention to.” 

Indeed, gun violence has plagued the reservation for decades, with a cluster of homicides in 2006 earning it the reputation “murder capital of Colorado.” While the name is outdated, shootings have continued, just like off the reservation. 

In December 2024, for example, a gunman fired an assault-style rifle 24 times into a home in Towaoc, killing a 7-year-old who was sleeping inside. Jeremiah Hight, 23, was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of second-degree murder of a child in Indian Country, and one count of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. 

Nine months later, the Ute Mountain Ute Gun Violence Coalition co-hosted an event with Colorado Ceasefire in Towaoc in response to that shooting and others. A few days after it ended, Destiny Whiteman, 24, the sister of one of the organizers, was killed when Duran Wade Lang, the father of her child, allegedly shot her when she was sitting in her car.

The coalition called for tribal leadership to declare a state of emergency “for the urgent coordination of resources, interagency support and protection for families at risk.” 

When asked about the incident, Heart said he wouldn’t comment until all of the facts had been laid out. But he also had legislation before the tribal council to create a gun ordinance meant to curb the use of guns on the reservation.

“On the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, a lot of tribal members shoot their guns off,” he said. “But what goes up must come down, and we needed to steer away from that because over the years, more and more tribal members were using guns.” He also wanted accountability for tribal members who commit firearm-related crimes to have “more teeth: they could get dis-enrolled from the tribe, lose tribal membership, be taken off the reservation forever.”

The tribal council didn’t pass the ordinance. “It’s still tabled right now and I don’t know if it will come to fruition during my time,” he said. He also looked at the relationship between alcohol consumption and gun violence on the reservation and said 90% of court cases involving firearm crimes have included alcohol. Currently “we’re a dry reservation,” he said. But he wonders if, because so many people are drinking anyway, becoming a “wet reservation” and starting programs to address substance abuse would help the situation.

In September, several weeks after after Whiteman’s death, he also acknowledged the role lack of law enforcement plays in the violence, saying “law enforcement for the Ute reservation, which is about 600,000 acres in three states, is four officers. We had seven, and were asking for 10.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal program “took three away based on cost-of-living increase. Then we lost three more after President Trump took office.” 

Southwestern Colorado is also in the middle of a historic drought, and Heart has been trying to navigate water rights for the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch, the sprawling enterprise where cattle are raised and corn and alfalfa are grown. 

In 2021 the tribe was informed its water allocation for irrigation out of McPhee Reservoir would be just 10% of what they needed to keep producing enough crops to pay their annual overhead, and this year the operation stopped irrigating 60% of its land and laid off farm workers. The crop plan for 2025 only included the existing, high-value alfalfa needed to sustain the farm and ranch.   

“I think it’s hard maintaining economic stability for a tribe that’s not just a sovereign nation, but also the largest employer in the county,” House said. “You’re the president and CEO of a multimillion-dollar operation. Oh, and by the way, there’s also a huge thing there called culture. You know, how do we continue to instill Ute culture?”

For Heart, it involves “purposely weaving in and out of Ute and the English language” when he’s speaking, House said. 

And the creation of the Kwiyagat Community Academy, which opened in 2021. 

It’s the first charter school on a reservation in Colorado, Montessori-based, he said, and focused on teaching Ute history, language and culture as well as STEAM curriculum.  

“We even have an app we created that’s a dictionary with 8,000 Ute words and counting,” Heart said. Kwiyagat Academy started with kindergarten through second grade. It now serves students in kindergarten through fifth grade, and the tribal council is working to expand educational reach on the reservation. Heart is also looking at starting a junior college and a vocational school. “I want to give our kids every opportunity possible,” he said. 

But he’s also tied up in another issue that keeps him up at night: diabetes, which “probably impacts Native Americans more than any other ethnic group,” he says. 

“And yet we have very limited Indian Health Service, which, by treaties, they’re supposed to give us,” he added. “But they can’t even fund a regular health clinic on the reservation. I can’t even find a nurse under the Indian Health Service to do foot care. And that’s where diabetes challenges are. If you don’t take care of yourself and you clip your toenails in the wrong way and you get an infection, the next thing is going to be amputation of the toes. After that, it’s going to the foot. After that, the leg. By that time, the tribal member is so depressed they’re going to give up on dialysis. That’s what’s happening. I’m trying to look at Medicaid, Medicare and bring in programs outside of IHS. Because IHS will not fund it.” 

That’s one of the reasons he created as many opportunities as he could to speak directly to legislators. 

Engaging lawmakers 

One of the most powerful ways was through his and Chairman Baker’s history-making demand for recognition by the General Assembly. 

Heart said he did it because he had learned over time that concerns he raised about the tribe with most leaders would “go in one ear and out the other,” and that “if you want certain legislation to happen in a certain fiscal year, you have to address it to the full body.” 

He’s been able to engage several lawmakers on several critical issues.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet championed expanding tribal access to drinking water, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, by providing the Indian Health Service with $3.5 billion for their sanitation deficiency list and the Bureau of Reclamation with $1 billion for rural water supply projects.

After the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and other tribes struggled to access the funding because their projects required planning and other preconstruction work before being considered “shovel ready” by the government, Bennet, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse cosponsored the Tribal Access to Water Act to increase funding to support the projects.  

Bennet in an email said he has been “honored to partner with Heart” as the two “worked to expand Tribal access to water, build affordable housing and preserve Ute culture and language through education and stewardship. As Chairman, he helped establish Bears Ears and Camp Hale as National Monuments, raised the voice of tribes in the Colorado River Basin, advocated for protection of the Dolores River basin, and sought stronger federal recognition for the Tribe’s land in Gunnison County.”

Heart said he found support in the legislature for his dream of expanding Native American history curriculum beyond the Kwiyagat Community Academy to schools across Colorado, to address things like the deadly Native American boarding school history, stolen water rights, white people forcing Native Americans onto reservations and Aboriginal lands lost “not by guns and knives and bows and arrows,” he said, but by people intentionally misleading them to believe “the Great Father in Washington, D.C.,” wanted them to give their lands away. 

State Sen. Jessie Danielson said she worked with Heart and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council on everything from abolishing the use of Native mascots in sports teams, to establishing the Office of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, to protecting wild bison, guaranteeing the right to wear regalia in graduation, the Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Amendment and more.

And Colorado Department of Agriculture Commissioner Kate Greenberg said the tribe’s farm and ranch enterprises received funding from the agency’s ACRE3 renewable energy grant program to implement a hydroelectric turbine system. “These interrelated issues of water conservation, land and soil health management and expanding the opportunity to increase market capacity, are top priorities for CDA’s partnership with the Tribe,” she added.

Heart said he persuaded Gov. Jared Polis and Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera to write an “apology letter” acknowledging the Indian boarding school history, like one President Joe Biden wrote in 2024.  

Polis says he’s grateful to Heart “for his dedication to open, productive dialogue that has helped to forge a stronger and more beneficial relationship between Tribal governments and the state.” Primavera said Heart “imparted on me knowledge and wisdom that I will always be thankful for.”

Over his tenure, he met with secretaries from the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations and that now, in President Donald Trump’s second term, “I’ve been meeting with new secretaries in the different departments, USDA, Treasury, Energy, Interior.” 

But House says tribal leaders like Heart carry too much weight on their shoulders, even though Heart “has been really good at balancing it.”    

“He’ll meet you at Pine Crest Ranch one day, and he’ll be in D.C. the next day. He’ll be back in Albuquerque the next, and he’ll be on a raft with Senator Hickenlooper talking about the Colorado River the next. He has dedicated his life, his service, to the tribe, and that’s important. I think that’s hard to find these days, especially within not just our national political climate but also within the tribal political climate.” 

But Heart has also elevated his home away from home, the place he loves, where he goes to breathe, relax, round up cows and ride horses, on his list of priorities. 

 

Back to Pine Crest 

Since 2022, he’s been advocating for federal action on property owned by Native Americans, including the Pine Crest Ranch. 

Pine Crest currently has an unrestricted fee land status, which makes management tricky.

The tribe’s 1950 purchase of the ranch was the result of a historic legal dispute between the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Navajo Nation around overlapping claims on land rich in uranium and oil and gas reserves. The U.S. Supreme Court awarded it to the Navajos and the Department of the Interior paid the Ute Mountain Utes a sum of money with which they bought the 20,000 acres the Pine Crest Ranch now sits on, in Gunnison County.

The land is rich in empty spaces, steep canyons, hidden waterfalls and elk.

Heart sees the herds when he’s rounding up cattle or riding his half-blind horse, Old Grey, through the aspens. Tribal members hunt them. Each time Heart has killed one, he performs a ceremony thanking the animal for giving its life. The elk are plentiful and protected from outside pressure. But there are times each year when the ranch is empty, and nontribal hunters have trespassed onto the property and poached. 

When the tribe purchased the land, the federal government didn’t designate it reservation, or trust, land which would have given the tribe complete sovereignty over it. Instead, the powers that be gave it restricted fee status without consulting the tribe.

Unrestricted fee status means the county can collect taxes. But as Heart said at a White House Tribal Nations Summit in 2022, “when we call for law enforcement, they say this is Indian land and they have no jurisdiction.” A county road also runs through the ranch. Heart said the county doesn’t maintain it.

He wants the ranch’s status changed to trust land, which would make it tax exempt and give the tribe full sovereignty over it. If that happened, they could do things like create their own wildlife management plans. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and the Gunnison County commissioners are all behind changing the status. But it’s been hung up in Trump’s executive orders and Heart wasn’t able to push it forward. Just like another important issue the tribe needs resolved before Colorado Parks and Wildlife, at the end of the year, lands the state with a new batch of wolves. 

Wolf MOUs

In December, CPW and the Southern Ute Tribe announced a memorandum of understanding on gray wolf restoration. 

A news release from CPW said the MOU “established a formal framework for continued collaboration between the sovereigns” as the state continues to implement the voter-approved program.

It also “recognized the sovereign authority of the Tribe on its Tribal lands and the Tribe’s treaty protected off-Reservation hunting, fishing, and gathering rights in the Brunot Treaty Area.”

The “Brunot Agreement Area” is approximately 3.7 million acres of the San Juan Mountains region the confederated bands of Utes were forced to cede to the federal government in 1873.

Included in the agreement was a provision reserving the right of Utes to “hunt upon said land so long as the game lasts and the Indians are at peace with the white people.” 

In 2008, the Southern Ute Tribe entered a new agreement, with CPW, that expressed the intent of both governments to work cooperatively toward long-term conservation of wildlife within the Brunot Area. The Brunot Area Hunting Proclamation, which includes bag limits and permit numbers, is updated yearly.

The MOU between CPW and the Southern Ute Tribe ensured a minimum 60-mile buffer will exist between any wolf release sites, the Utah state line and the exterior boundaries of the Southern Ute reservation. And CPW promised it will not release wolves within the boundaries of the Brunot Area. 

But nearly a year since the announcement, no such MOU exists between the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and CPW, even though CPW has said it will begin releases of the third group of wolves in its restoration program in December, and word is out that the agency plans to drop them in Gunnison County. 

Heart said CPW left the Ute Mountain Utes out of conversations regarding wolf reintroduction until he confronted the agency about it and leadership apologized. Still, Parks and Wildlife has had the MOU for months and its troubling, he said, because “the Southern Ute’s MOU only has ties to the wolves coming onto the Brunot Area and affecting their hunting, while ours is based on the ranch, so 20,000 acres right in the middle of Colorado.” 

Wolves so far have been released north of Interstate 70, in Grand and Summit counties, then south of I-70 in Eagle and Pitkin counties. But CPW has tracked a lone female wolf traveling through the Brunot Area, 50 miles from the Pine Crest Ranch twice, Heart said.

“And now this coming-up release will be Gunnison County, so we’re right in the heart of it. So our MOU is going to be a little bit more extensive than Southern Utes, especially because we have a number of cattle that are coming to this ranch, and we want to be able to protect them, because that’s our assets.”

They want the authority to shoot a wolf on sight if they catch it in the act of attacking their cattle (versus having to call a CPW biologist to come to the ranch and do an investigation to determine if they’d be justified in killing it). 

They also want the state’s livestock reimbursement program to take into account not just the direct loss of a cow and the indirect loss associated with wolf kills and attacks, but the number of years a cow killed by wolves could have calves, and the calves its calves could have, Heart said. 

When asked what’s holding up release of the MOU, Luke Perkins, an agency spokesperson, said in an email, “It’s making its way through CPW’s internal process and we are taking the appropriate time to ensure it meets the needs of the sovereign Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and CPW. These sorts of Tribal consultations and government to government agreements take time and it is very important to CPW to ensure they are not rushed at any step of the process.”

But Heart said the tribe should have more control over the process, because “we’re not like any other rancher in the state of Colorado. We’re a sovereign nation. We’re a government equal to the state of Colorado and equal to the United States government. 

“That is why it’s so important to put this ranch into trust, because it will give us more of a regulatory authority of how to deal with a wolf when it comes on to our tribal reservation. Just like a country within a country.”

While the tribe awaits CPW’s communication and the next release of wolves, Heart plans to spend a lot more time at Pine Crest. 

It’s his happy place, after all. Where, hopefully, amid all of the uncertainty, he can breathe and relax.

Corrections:

This story was updated at 1:28 p.m. on Oct. 24, 2025, to correctly describe the cause of Destiny Whiteman's death. She was allegedly shot by Duran Wade Lang, the father of her child. He has been charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.