Garance Burke
The Mercury News
May 7, 2009

Yosemite National Park will review its visitor brochures, information booths and historical archives to ensure that local tribes’ ancestral ties to the treasured landscape are accurately reflected.
Acting Superintendent Dave Uberuaga requested the sweeping reexamination of the park’s tribal relations program, including an oft-visited American Indian replica village built near Yosemite’s falls, last month.

National Park Service officials say no other park has undertaken such a broad review of its storytelling about the sometimes brutal confrontations that helped to create the country’s cherished preserves.

The park’s look back comes after criticism from the Mono Lake Paiutes, some of whom dispute how Yosemite’s history has been portrayed.

A handful of vocal members claim they were the park’s first stewards and the Southern Sierra Miwok—highlighted in many of the visitor exhibits—have played down the Paiute role in the area.

For three years, Paiute activist David Andrews has scoured archives at the University of California, Berkeley, pored over Eadweard Muybridge’s photos of Yosemite Indians and petitioned park rangers to change what he terms historical wrongs in the park’s displays.

“Before they would tell us go to away, and that we shouldn’t questions,” said Andrews, who started the campaign. “Now we see we have a democratic society where we can access government records and request change. This looks like hope to me.”

Miwok tribal officials did not immediately return calls for comment, but in the past have disputed the Paiutes’ claims.

Both Paiute and Miwok peoples survived the Mariposa Battalion, the bloody massacre of 1851 in which white settlers drove out those living in Yosemite Valley.

Five years later, tourist magazines were promoting Yosemite’s craggy mountains and swift rivers as a pleasuring ground for the moneyed classes of San Francisco. By 1892, most surviving Indians had left the area, or had taken jobs working as maids, tree fellers or dancers to entertain visitors.

Today, members of seven American Indian tribes advise the park on its interpretive programs, including two Paiute bands in the Eastern Sierra. One, the 800-member Southern Sierra Miwok tribe, has a long-standing agreement to conduct traditional activities and protect American Indian cultural resources inside the park through its tribal nonprofit.

The Miwok also have helped to craft plans to build a new cultural center on the grounds of the old Indian village, to include a sweat lodge and a roundhouse.

Those construction plans now will be reviewed by park managers, ethnohistorians and National Park Service experts, said Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman.

“These people have legitimate concerns,” Gediman said. “Our review could fundamentally change the way we look at American Indian history in the park. On the other hand, it also might not.”

Pat Parker, who heads the Park Service’s American Indian liaison office in Washington, said she plans to take part in the process. Her office issues guidelines detailing how parks should work with tribes to ensure visitors are told a complete history, an increasingly important function for an agency striving to stay relevant to diverse audiences.

“When this review is done I think everybody in the National Park Service will look at it,” said NPS spokesman Jeff Olson. “What do we do with newly discovered information? What do we do with new points of view that come to the fore? Interpreting those issues is how the national parks look at being relevant every day.”

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