Reclaiming Wahhoga

For most people, Yosemite Valley is a place to visit, marvel at and eventually, reluctantly, leave. For Deborah Tucker, this canyon, framed by the soaring landmarks of El Capitan and Half Dome, was much more: It was a fixture of her childhood. “Both of my parents were park employees, and leaving me at the house alone wasn’t an option, so I was up there pretty much every day,” Tucker said. The family lived about half an hour away in the Sierra foothills, but they returned to the valley outside of work hours, too, spending weekends hanging out with cousins, aunts and uncles at Tribal gatherings and ceremonies.

Tucker and her family are members of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, also known as the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, a Tribe with thousands of years of continuous connection to Yosemite. It’s a connection they’ve had to fight to maintain for nearly two centuries, as Tucker’s people have been at turns attacked, exploited, ignored and evicted by state and federal agents.

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.” At the time, her parents were living at Wahhoga with their young family. When park staff demolished the village, save for one cabin that they relocated for agency use, “everyone who was living there just dispersed and had to go out into the surrounding towns,” Tucker said. “My parents went to Mariposa, so that’s why that’s where I was born and raised.”

[SPRING 2025] Reclaiming Wahhoga roundhouse

The roundhouse at Wahhoga, shown here under construction, was completed this winter using only traditional materials.

SOUTHERN SIERRA MIWUK NATION

Members of the Tribe have worked to get this land back under Tribal stewardship and available for Tribal use ever since. And after decades of stalls and stalemates, it’s happening. In 2018, the Park Service entered into an agreement with the American Indian Council of Mariposa County that gives the Tribe co-stewardship responsibilities related to how Wahhoga is developed and managed for the next 30 years. The seven Tribes traditionally associated with Yosemite celebrated another milestone this winter with the completion of a roundhouse, a traditional structure made of granite blocks and tree trunks that is used for ceremonial gatherings.

Tucker’s dad, Bill Tucker, was among the earliest voices calling for Wahhoga to be restored to Tribal control. Shortly after the Park Service displaced his community, Bill joined Les James and Jay Johnson, fellow Park Service colleagues and Tribal citizens, to pitch the idea of creating what they referred to as an “Indian cultural center” on the newly vacant site.

Since then, progress toward that vision has “ebbed and flowed with various park leaders and their willingness to acknowledge that there were Indigenous people in Yosemite before it became a national park,” said Tiśina Parker, Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation treasurer and a descendant of another family displaced in 1969. The park did build a facsimile of a Native village in the 1970s, but for the most part it was not intended for Native use. Parker credits recent steps toward an Indigenous-led cultural center at Yosemite to the persistence of leaders such as Bill Tucker, James and Johnson. “Every time someone in park leadership said no, they said, ‘We’re still here. We’re still asking for it. We’re still going to make this happen,’” she said.

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The Tribe’s painful history in Yosemite dates back to 1851, when a state-sanctioned militia launched a violent, two-year campaign to eradicate the valley’s Indigenous inhabitants. In the ensuing decades, they endured an onslaught of soldiers, miners and ranchers, and eventually, park managers: The 1890 bill that established Yosemite National Park authorized the removal of anyone attempting to make a home in the park without permission. 

Still, many Native people found work in the park as laborers, merchants, craftspeople and cultural demonstrators. By the 1920s, Indigenous families had even reestablished a village on a site their ancestors had occupied near where the Ahwahnee Hotel stands today. That stately building was completed in 1927, thanks in part to Tribal laborers, but not long after, the Park Service decided to tear the village down to make room for a medical clinic. By 1933, the agency had completed a cluster of spartan cabins at Wahhoga, about 2 miles away, to house the families they’d displaced. And then, a generation later, history repeated itself.

“The park made the decision again that it wasn’t appropriate to have an Indian village in Yosemite Valley,” said Erin Davenport, Yosemite’s deputy cultural resource program lead and the Tribes’ main contact for the Wahhoga project. Davenport said park historians haven’t found a record of the agency’s justification for the 1969 demolition but noted that it roughly coincided with an expansion of Yosemite Lodge, right across the street. “I assume it’s similar to the construction of the Ahwahnee Hotel,” Davenport said. “We start putting lots of visitors someplace, and we then want to put the Indian residential area somewhere else.”

While some people working for the park moved to employee housing, others were permanently ousted, and the community’s long-standing connection to the valley was dramatically changed. A few years later, park officials carved out a spot behind the park museum to build the interpretive site known as the Indian Village, complete with facsimiles of the Indigenous structures settlers encountered upon arriving in the valley more than 100 years before.

“I think the park meant for the Indian Village to be a tourist attraction, or to educate visitors, basically,” said Parker, the Tribe’s treasurer. “But because our people were still there in the park, even working for the park in many cases, we basically started using it for our own purposes, and it became an active cultural center.”

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Parker said some of her earliest childhood memories involve going there for bear dances, part of annual Indigenous ceremonies and celebrations up and down the state. The roundhouse built by the Park Service at the Indian Village “was always one of the main ones on that circuit,” Parker said — in part because so many California Tribes, including the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, aren’t federally recognized and don’t own much land on which to build roundhouses.

As more Tribes have regained ownership or stewardship of lands within their ancestral territories, “now there’s a pretty robust spiritual practice among California Native people,” Parker said. “It’s my personal belief that holding our celebrations in the Indian Village of Yosemite was instrumental in reinvigorating that for Tribes all over California.”

While that village still stands, and Parker reckons Tribes may still use it for ceremonies going forward, she believes Wahhoga has greater significance than the Park Service-created site ever could. “Because it was the last village site of our ancestral families, Wahhoga has a sentimental and spiritual connection to our ancestors,” Parker said.

Critically, Indigenous people now have a say about what happens at Wahhoga, which Parker sees as evidence of the Tribes’ sovereignty and cultural resilience. Members of any local Tribe can consult with the Southern Sierra Miwuk to propose uses for Wahhoga or pursue traditional practices independently. Last fall, Parker and Deborah Tucker began a project to construct an acorn granary. Others have built umachas, traditional dwellings, on the foundations of long-destroyed cabins. Parker hopes the lessons learned at Wahhoga can inform and inspire campaigns for greater Tribal autonomy elsewhere in California. To that end, she recently helped host a daylong learning session for an intertribal cohort at Wahhoga.

The village is still a work in progress. The seven associated Tribes are trying to raise $6 million for more facilities, including a meeting space and caretaker accommodations (though the Tribes don’t intend for people to live or camp on site). The Park Service, for its part, is working to bring water and electricity to Wahhoga, as well as parking. Davenport said each decision entails careful reconciliation between park policy and Tribal knowledge and prerogative.

That hasn’t always been easy. For instance, there was a question about whether the Tribe’s original design for the roundhouse met building codes, in part because the Tribe eschews modern materials in its ceremonial structures. “We had to hit pause for almost a decade while that got worked out,” Davenport said. Eventually, the Tribe found a Native-led firm that helped them establish that the roundhouse could meet code requirements using only traditional materials.

Davenport said deliberate, collaborative decision-making at Wahhoga could change management practices throughout the park. For instance, when bears get too close to human food in a campground near Wahhoga, park staff try to scare the animals away with rubber bullets and flash bangs. “But bears are revered as ancestors of the Tribe, so that kind of treatment, especially in a ceremonial site, is problematic,” Davenport said. She hopes to send members of local Tribes out on patrols with wildlife management staff, a first step toward identifying more mutually agreeable methods.

In a move that Tribal members and Yosemite employees alike describe as a step toward healing, Wahhoga recently welcomed the return of the only cabin the Park Service didn’t destroy. Back then, park staff picked up the cabin and moved it about a mile down the road, for use as an administration building. In 2023, they hauled it back to Wahhoga and settled it in the exact same footprint it had occupied half a century earlier.

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Tucker and her father, now in his 80s, were present for the cabin’s homecoming. “I speak for him on the Wahhoga Committee now, because he is a little bit older,” she said. “But Wahhoga is my dad’s baby.” Though Tucker regrets that her dad’s allies, Johnson and James, died before they could see their lifelong dream of a Tribal cultural center at Wahhoga realized, she is thrilled — and relieved — about the recent progress.

Wahhoga is “finally really flourishing,” she said. Today, her people can visit the sweat lodge, hold ceremonies in the roundhouse, gather acorns, cut and stack wood, “all the stuff we need to do as Tribal people to maintain our land and our connection to the land,” she said. And while the elders’ vision for a fully restored Wahhoga may be years off, Tucker remains steadfast.

“This is their fight, their partnership, their passion,” Tucker said. “I’m just trying to do everything I can to see it come through in my dad’s lifetime.”