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Reclaiming Wahhoga - Decades after destruction, Yosemite welcomes home Native Americans
Located at 37.7400 -119.606 - just North of campground four
Spring 2025 - National Parks (NPCA) - Reclaiming Wahhoga - Julia Busiek - Deborah Tucker is 56, and for most of her life, the Tribe has focused that fight on about 4 forested acres on the valley floor sandwiched between a busy park road, a bustling campground and a 3,000-foot granite wall. Known as Wahhoga, this was the last Indigenous community in Yosemite before the Park Service evicted the remaining residents in 1969. “The Park Service came and burned the cabins out,” Tucker said. “I guess they felt they needed to get rid of our people and create more of a Park Service-type environment for visitors.”
11/20/19 - Clio - The Wahhoga Village - Calvin Chappell - .. in Yosemite National Park, just North of campground four, is a site which represents the systematic removal of the Ahwahneechee people from the park, over the course of the last one hundred and fifty years. Since the arrival of the Mariposa Battalion in 1851, the Ahwahneechee people have been systematically forced out of the park through means of violence, objectification, and segregation. In 1996 the last Yosemite Indian, Jay Johnson, moved out of his home in the village, marking the complete gentrification of the valley which the Ahwahneechee people had called home for the past 8,000 years. In 2018, Superintendent of the Park, Michael Reynolds signed a document giving building rights and land use to the American Indian Council of Mariposa County. While this attempt at reconciliation is a step in the right direction, the effort is undoubtedly too little too late, and the irony of giving a gift of land back to a people who were forced from their homes onto that land overshadows the sentiment of reconciliation.
6/2/18 - Fresno Bee - Decades after destruction, Yosemite welcomes home Native Americans - Carmen George - Native American elders and Yosemite National Park Superintendent Michael Reynolds talk in June 2018 about the native community rebuilding Yosemite's last native village site, Wahhoga, destroyed by 1969 [videos 2:50, 1:28, 1:48].
SOURCES
Alley, Royston H. Yosemite Indian Cultural Center . June 2002.
Cothran, Boyd. “Working the Indian Field Days. The Economy of Authenticity and
the Question of Agency in Yosemite Valley.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 34,
no. 2, 2010, pp. 194–223., doi:10.5250/amerindiquar.34.2.194
David, Mark. “Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the
Making of the National Parks” New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.
Fragnoli, Delaine. “Naming Yosemite.” American Transcendental Quarterly,
vol. 18, no. 4, 2004, pp. 263–275.
George, Carmen. “Decades after
Destruction, Yosemite Welcomes Home Native Americans.” Fresnobee, The
Fresno Bee, 2 June 2018,
www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article212274659.html
“John Muir.”
National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior,
www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/muir.htm
Smith, David A.
“California and the Indian Wars: The Mariposa War.” California and the Indian
Wars: The Mariposa War, 1975,
www.militarymuseum.org/Mariposa1.html
“Yosemite Indians.” National
Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 17 Nov. 2018,
www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/yosemite-indians.htm
Image
Sources(Click to expand)
Macor, Michael. “Cedar Bark Houses in Yosemite.”
San Francisco Gate,
www.sfgate.com/science/article/How-the-Miwuk-tribe-is-reclaiming-part-of-12866845.php
Ahwahneechee and Park Visitors Pose during an Indian Field Day.
Richards, Jamie. “Yosemite National Park Superintendent Michael Reynolds,
Center, with Tribal Elders and Members of the Wahhoga Committee at the Wahhoga
Village Site in Yosemite Valley.” The Fresno Bee, 1 June 2018,
www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article212274659.html
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