By Roy Cook

John Muir could not see the Indians for the trees. We do not know why Muir was blind regarding the original people in all of the beautiful National Park locations he waxed about so eloquently. Indian people are the true conscience of the American character. John Muir saw the trees and sat on the glaciers but did not note the Tribal people that were living in Yosemite at the same time. This omission is not unique to this individual. We can see time after time, area after area; Tribal people are invisible to non-Indian eyes. We must always look to the future and our Indian children.

The KPBS Ken Burns series on the National parks is a beautifully presented cosmetic overview of events that resulted in the largest land grabs of Federal/Indian land. The series is entertaining and informative but the basic truth of the settled existence of the original Americans that lived in these lands for 50,000 or more years is sadly lacking.

The illegal invasion of California and the illegal US Senate disregard of the Federal Treaties of Peace and Friendship is one of the saddest chapters in Western American history. Included below are some of the original articles of non-military brigands who tried to claim military justification for their self-serving land and resources greed. They are in the original writer’s text for you to determine your own judgment of events. Our US Constitution LEGALLY will not allow the taking of land without due process and just compensation. Might does not make right. No phony war against peaceful people. No ratified Treaty, no legal claim to California. It is all Indian land.

The Miwok called Yosemite Ahwahnee or “mouth,” because the valley walls resembled a gaping bear’s mouth.

L. H. Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion named Yosemite Valley in 1851. The Battalion was formed by local miners in the foothills after neighboring tribes, feeling encroached on their lands, raided Savage’s Trading Post, killing several people there at the time. Mr. Bunnell named the valley in honor of the tribe they were about to capture and drive out of their home, Yosemite Valley. Pioneers at the time often disregarded native place names or didn’t know them and used place names of their own making.

The Yosemite people called Yosemite Valley Awooni or Owwoni for (gaping) “large mouth,” where the stem Awo or Owwo means “mouth” and the suffix ni means “large.” This referred to the appearance of the Yosemite Valley walls from the village of Ahwahnee, which was located on the valley floor. The spelling used by Bunnell was “Ahwahne” and later “Ahwahnee.” The Yosemite people called themselves as Ah-wah-ne-chee, or “dwellers of Ahwahnee.” Ahwahnee originally referred to the largest and most powerful Indian village in the valley (located 1/2 mile west of Yosemite Village and south of Northside Drive), but the word also came to mean the entire valley.

When asked, Chief Tenaya, tried to explain the meaning of “Ahwahnee” by using sign language. Tenaya “by the motion of his hands, indicated depth, while trying to illustrate the name, at the same time plucking grass which he held up before me.” Major Savage mistakenly interpreted Ahwahnee to mean “deep grassy valley,” when Tenaya was signing “mouth.”

Miwok or Me-wuk (Southern dialect), by the way, is the Miwok word for “people.”

John Muir’s attitude toward American Indians evolved over the course of his life. From the KPBS documentary, we learn of his strong upbringing as a Christian and his ability to recite the New Testament. From later reports, we learn that his earliest encounters with American Indians were with the weary tribes of Winnebago Indians in Wisconsin, who begged for food and stole his favorite horse. In spite of that, he had a great deal of sympathy for them for “being robbed of their lands and pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood.” His early encounters with the Digger Indians in California left him feeling ambivalent after seeing their lifestyle, which he described as “lazy” and “superstitious”. Keeping in mind the climate of opinion that was prevalent at the time we can still expect better empathy and not just sympathy from Muir. Carolyn Merchant criticized Muir, believing that he wrote disparagingly of the American Indians he encountered in his Sierra Nevada travels in 1868 (My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)). In the book, Muir focus is still on the trees when he actually praised the American Indians for their low impact on the wilderness, and disparaged the white man’s comparably heavy impact. Muir’s attitudes towards American Indians grew more respectful over time, especially after he lived with them while traveling in the California and Pacific Northwest wilderness.

Posted on October 10th, 2009 by hunwut
Filed under: Interesting