“Goodbye, Yosemite. Hello, What?”
“In 1851, California’s governor, Peter Burnett, said that he expected “a war of extermination” to continue “between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct,” and Senator John Weller later said that “the interest of the white man demands their extinction.” Toward that end, California spent the equivalent of $45 million in today’s money on two dozen state militia expeditions that murdered at least 1,340 California Indians, according to Benjamin Madley, a historian at U.C.L.A. and the author of “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873,” whose work I am heavily indebted to. The Army and its auxiliaries killed a minimum of 1,680 more, and vigilantes murdered at least 6,460. Congress reimbursed California for most of that money, retrospectively endorsing genocidal campaigns…
The best surviving account of the Mariposa Battalion comes from a member named Lafayette Bunnell. He describes tracking the Ahwahneechee into that deep glacier-cut valley midwinter and — alone in his group of uninterested killers — swooning over the booming waterfalls and soaring golden granite. Bunnell fascinates me because he was deeply responsive to the natural beauty of Yosemite, captivated by the opportunity to (re)name everything he saw and thoroughly afflicted with commonplace Victorian delusions about the supposed inferiority of nonwhites.
Bunnell finds well-tended homes and food stores and even smoldering hearth fires, but only one person, an elderly woman too frail to run and hide. Bunnell describes her as “a peculiar, living ethnological curiosity” and tells somebody to “bring something for it to eat.”…
In other words, Tenaya Lake — a place so important to me that I want my ashes scattered there — is named not in honor of Tenaya but in joyous celebration of the destruction of his people.”
Hugs for anyone who found it traumatic to read this — as a non-indigenous person, I pulled the quotes that I thought would be informative for other non-indigenous people. But I have seen white people do this with information about black oppression and I sometimes feel blindsided by that stack of detail.
So what I’m saying is — if this hurt, you don’t need to read the article. If it just made you sad, maybe uncomfortable because you kind of remember telling an “Indian burial ground” ghost story on a girl scout camping trip to Yosemite, then you should read the article.
