The Last Eviction

The settlement that stood near here was not a tourist attraction, though the Park Service tried to make it one.

From the eighteen fifties through the middle of the twentieth century, Ahwahneechee and other Indigenous families lived in Yosemite Valley in a community the Park Service eventually called the Indian Village. In the nineteen twenties, the Yosemite Curry Company, the valley's primary concession operator, incorporated a version of the village into the tourism experience, presenting it as an authentic display of traditional culture. Residents were expected to perform for visitors. The arrangement was exploitative and the residents understood it as such.

The Indian Village was not a museum exhibit. The people who lived there were living. Families across several generations occupied the cedar-bark structures and later the frame houses. They maintained kinship connections to communities throughout the Sierra Nevada. Their presence in the valley was continuous from before the Mariposa Battalion arrived to the moment it was ended by federal order.

In nineteen sixty-nine, the National Park Service demolished the remaining Indian Village structures and evicted the last residents. The eviction is documented in NPS administrative records and in oral histories collected by the Yosemite Research Library. It ended a human presence in the valley that had lasted for thousands of years.

No marker currently identifies where the village stood. The NPS has added interpretive materials about the Ahwahneechee to several visitor centers since the twenty-tens. The ground near where you are standing does not have a sign.

The descendants of the Ahwahneechee, members of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County and affiliated Southern Miwok tribal organizations, have been working with the NPS to expand acknowledgment of this history in the park's interpretive programs. That work is ongoing. The question of who gets to tell the story of this valley, and in what form, is not resolved.