Skott Brandon Vigil
(Dakota/Southern Ute)
1977-2010

The Department of History and the wider campus community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison mourn the sudden and unexpected passing of Skott Brandon Vigil, a fourth-year graduate student and Ph.D. candidate. Our hearts go out to his family, friends, fellow students, and professors.

When Skott graduated from Star Valley High School in the western Wyoming town of Afton, he had no intention of continuing his education. An enrolled member of the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe and a Southern Ute descendant, he had been the only American Indian student at his school and found few role models there. Skott worked in groceries stores in Wyoming, laid tile in California, and canned salmon in Alaska. Then, when he was 19, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) sent him on a mission to Hong Kong, where he did a great variety of work on behalf of the church; learned Cantonese; met his future wife, Janice; and gained crucial confidence in himself. Skott returned to the U.S. and again took up a range of employment, working at a post office in California, as a carpenter in Wyoming, and again in an Alaskan cannery. In 1998, he and Janice married, and he applied to Brigham Young University-Hawaii, where Janice had already been admitted. Skott and Janice both earned bachelor’s degrees there in 2004. Now the father of two children—Maccabeus and Douglas—Skott took up work teaching high school history to a diverse group of students in Kailua, Hawaii. He had caught the history bug. After a year of teaching, Skott began a master’s program at the University of Wyoming, where he worked with historian William Bauer (Wailacki/Concow), now of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. While in Laramie, Janice and Skott had their third child, Cordelia.

The master’s thesis that Skott completed at the University of Wyoming is a singular piece of scholarship—a family history deeply rooted in the historiography of both the nineteenth-century southwestern borderlands and the twentieth-century U.S. West. One side of Skott’s family descends from those Indigenous peoples who were taken captive and sold into hispano households in New Mexico during the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. territorial periods. His Southern Ute ancestors, however, maintained a Ute identity and moved back and forth between both Ute and hispano worlds. For his thesis, Skott interviewed older family members and consulted archival records to reconstruct this deep past of captivity and slavery. He also traced his family’s more recent history as agricultural workers in the rural West, where relatives toiled in the sugar beet fields of Colorado and as strawberry pickers in California. Deeply attuned to the everyday injuries of colonialism, of class, and of gender, the thesis is also a tale of tenacity and even triumph—not least because Skott himself lived long enough to tell it to an academy that had once seemed a foreign and alienating space to him.

But he did not live long enough for those who loved him, including those of us who had the great pleasure and deep honor to work with him here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Skott came to UW in 2006 to study with historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), now of Yale University. In the halls of the Humanities Building, we knew Skott mostly as a promising graduate student with a bright future. But Skott had another life at UW and in Madison. He participated faithfully in the vibrant, local American Indian community. He studied the Ojibwe language here. He was a member of the Wunk Sheek Singers, the student powwow drum group, an endeavor in which his sons joined him during the past couple years. And, this spring, he was the graduate student representative involved with the opening of the new American Indian Student Community Center on Brooks Street. Skott was also an active member of the LDS congregation at Madison First Ward on Regent Street near Hilldale Shopping Center, where he taught young children and where he and Janice helped to coordinate ward activities.

When we lost him, Skott was well on his way toward completing his dissertation research. He was making plans to begin a Susan Kelly Power and Helen Hornbeck Tanner Fellowship this summer at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In his dissertation on nineteenth-century Colorado, Skott was bringing together stories that most often have been told separately—of Cheyennes and Arapahos on the plains, and of Utes in the mountain valleys. He was studying the reasons why the Cheyennes and Arapahos, on the one hand, and Utes, on the other hand, followed different trajectories in their relationships with the U.S. government in the decades following the U.S.-Mexican War. As members of Cheyenne and Arapaho bands met their horrific fate at Sand Creek, for instance, Northern Ute bands were negotiating the largest Indian reservation in the U.S. Skott sought to explain these differences, as well as the circumstances that led to the decline of Ute power later in the century. But there was more to the story Skott wanted to tell than the divergent fates of different Indian peoples. Even as he acknowledged the importance of competition over land and resources in explaining Colorado’s Indigenous history, Skott contended that questions of group identity, attachments to place, and emerging hierarchies of race and culture deserve a more prominent analytical place in the historiography. He was convinced that only by showing how various peoples—Utes, Cheyennes, Arapahos, westering Anglo Americans, and northering hispanos—laid claim to places, and justified those claims with their own understandings of themselves as members of collectivities, could one explain the processes by which almost all Indians ultimately were forced out of Colorado, even as those same Indians refused to relinquish a sense of themselves as Ute, or Cheyenne, or Arapaho. Skott’s work was both intercultural and intertribal; that is, he insisted that one cannot understand how peoples lay claim to space, how they make places out of space, without attending to all of the various peoples who occupy that space.

Those insights came out of wide reading, but also out of a life lived in the very shadows of that history. Skott was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1977, and he died of heart failure at the age of 33 in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, our hearts, too, are broken, as we grieve the loss of so kind, so intelligent, so gentle a soul. No one who took the time to know Skott Vigil could but love him and hold him in the highest regard. We are all poorer for having lost him, but, at the same time, we are so blessed for having known him. In time, our broken hearts will mend, and Skott’s memory will lay claim to the space left vacant by his passing.

Susan Lee Johnson
Professor of History