Paiute Indians: Yosemite's history wrong

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — For decades, visitors to Yosemite Valley have been taught the history of the Southern Sierra Miwok, whose ancestral ties to the park are venerated in books, brochures and a replica Indian village built near the park’s roaring falls.

Now, a second band of American Indians is calling that story a total invention.

Joe Rhoan, who traces his ancestry to Paiute peoples from the park’s eastern edge, is one of potentially hundreds claiming that his elders were the park’s first stewards and that the Miwok downplay the Paiute role in the park’s records.

"The park manufactured a lot of its history,” said Rhoan, of Roseville. "You’ve got living direct descendants of the people in old photos displayed in exhibits telling the park they have the wrong signs up, and they’re not listening to us.”

Yosemite historians chafe at the suggestion that their exhibits could be wrong. They say the exhibits have been crafted over years drawing from academic research, geological records and careful consultations with seven Indian tribes that advise the park on its interpretive programs, including two Paiute bands in the eastern Sierra.

Yet as the nation’s parks start to reconcile the sometimes-brutal events that helped to create cherished wilderness, these kinds of fights over recognition are beginning to surface, said Bob Sutton, the National Park Service’s chief historian.

"In the past, we operated with this idea that great men made American parks what they were, so we wrote stories about a lot of great white men,” Sutton said. "In some instances, the history we have on the books may not be accurate, and we need to take a lot of care in making sure we’re telling it correctly.”

Rhoan’s great-grandmother Maria Lebrado was one of the few survivors of a massacre in 1851, in which white settlers drove out the native families living in and migrating through the valley. Five years later, tourist magazines were promoting Yosemite.

By 1892, when conservationist John Muir founded the Sierra Club, most surviving Indians had left the area or had taken jobs as maids, tree cutters or dancers to entertain visitors.

Tony Brochini, chairman of the 800-member Southern Sierra Miwok tribe, was born in the last Indian village in the valley in 1951 and grew up exploring the park’s flowering meadows and swift rivers.

He said the Miwok have been cautious not to overstep their leadership in keeping Indian cultural and spiritual traditions alive in Yosemite.

"We’re the indigenous people of Yosemite Valley and have the most lineal descent to this area, and are the spiritual leaders for all tribal activities,” Brochini said. "The disgruntled ones want that whole history changed.”

Paiutes are mentioned in three-dimensional displays at a refurbished visitor center that opened last year, on signs in the native museum.

Rhoan and another Paiute activist, David Andrews, have sent Yosemite’s tribal liaison reams of information that they say demonstrates the park’s improprieties.

Andrews, a member of the Walker River Paiute reservation in Nevada, said firsthand accounts from the mid-1800s invasion prove Tenaya, the Ahwahnee Indian chief, was Mono Lake Paiute. He cites Eadweard Muybridge’s early photos of Yosemite as further evidence that early inhabitants were Paiute.

"They’re angry that a decision was made to replicate a Miwok village. It’s one topic – no more, no less,” Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. "We’re not going to pull the books off the shelves according to one person that calls us on the telephone.”

Still, officials said the group’s critiques have in part spurred park historians to consider taking a second look at its Indian historical materials when funding is available.

Pat Parker, chief of the agency’s American Indian liaison office in Washington, said the park service planned to issue new guidelines detailing how parks should work with tribes to ensure that visitors are told a complete history.

"What people know about the landscape in our parks, the body of knowledge that they’ve carried through from generation to generation and have memorialized in songs and stories is a resource to be protected just as much as the trees and the rocks and the fish,” Parker said.