The story is here.  The story about the museum is excellent.  The framing of the story as a “happy accident” and the “government’s blunder” is very strange–it was an accident and blunder that the Southern Utes remained on their land and are able to use their mineral resources for themselves?  Not being removed was a happy accident?

It’s not often that you hear of Native American tribes flourishing thanks to the U.S. government, but that’s what happened to Colorado’s Southern Ute.

With the help of a historic government blunder, the Southern Ute have become one of the country’s wealthiest tribes — so wealthy, in fact, that they’ve just transformed their old museum into an impressive new cultural center in Ignacio, Colo. It’s called the Southern Ute Museum and Cultural Center and it’s housed in a new $38 million building. The hope is that the center will help boost tourism, but it’s also meant to teach outsiders and tribal youth about Southern Ute history and culture.

History’s Happy Accident

In the late 19th century, the U.S. government divided the Ute people into three different tribes, sending them north or west and letting some stay where they were.

An excerpt from the better part of the story:

When the Southern Ute decided to diversify their already impressive financial portfolio by opening a casino, it became clear that the time had also come to update their museum.

“It was an awful little building, maybe not even 1,000 square feet,” Burch says. “So we decided to build a place where we could have a showcase for our children and grandchildren, and they would always know their culture.”

The community set out to retrieve Ute artifacts from all over the world and bring them home — priceless white clay pottery, intricate beadwork and glorious baskets by White Mesa weavers.

But for many Southern Ute, the most meaningful part of the museum is its display of family photographs. It was there that former tribal Chairman Matthew Box discovered a long-lost family photo.

“It is a picture that has my mother, my uncle Leonard, my grandpa and my dad and myself. And we’re all sitting around a drum,” Box says.

Box gets teary-eyed looking at it. He says he had never seen the photo — which was taken in the 1980s — before it was put on display at the museum.