When you find yourself on Yosemite tours, as you enter the park grounds you’ll be offered a Yosemite National Park brochure with a map of the area sightseeing attractions. Within that brochure is an iconic image of a Yosemite Indian woman with her baby strapped to her back, with Yosemite Falls in the background. It’s the same widely recognized photo that can be seen in many books about the west and particularly identified with Yosemite. But the image, as it is in the Yosemite brochure, is always used to suggest the life of the Yosemite area Indians, the Miwoks. The woman in the photo is not a Miwok, but a Paiute; the original Indian settlers in the area and the first Indians to encounter white men in the area, long before the Miwoks which at the time, had lived on the other side of the Sierra Nevada range.
The reason for that is clear as Yosemite for years has been misled by the Miwok Indians to further their significance, heritage, and claim to the area around the Yosemite Valley. They were even successful at getting Yosemite officials to “reinterpret” events and dates, and in doing so effectively wrote the Paiute Indians out of their rightful claim to the valley. The photo was taken in 1901 by the well known Yosemite nature photographer of his day, JT Boysen. The woman is from the Paiute tribe which resided in nomadic fashion in the area between the Yosemite Valley and Mono Lake – often referred to as the Yosemite-Mono Lake Paiutes. In the photo used for the Yosemite brochure and on the Yosemite National Park Service’s website, the woman is not referenced but in both examples the image is used to illustrate the Miwok Indians. In fact, her name was Suzie McGowan with her daughter Sadie (their adopted western names, often influenced by those for whom they worked). Suzie and her daughter were frequently photographed in the early 1900s and she became equally well known for her woven baskets as her photographs. Some of those basket works can be viewed at the Indian Museum at Yosemite. Suzie died at a relatively young age during childbirth and was survived by three daughters, Sadie, Minnie, and Carrie. Possibly even sadder than her passing is that her personal legacy as well as that of her people, the Paiute Indians, isn’t being acknowledged and honored. The Paiute Indians were driven from Yosemite Valley by the Miwoks with the help of white men and the military and since then, they’ve managed to get Yosemite National Park officials to begin the park’s history from that point forward for the sake of simplicity. The truth goes further back and is more detailed and nuanced, and that history belongs to the Paiutes, regardless of how photographs get manipulated or misrepresented by Yosemite park officials or what information gets handed out at the park’s entrance, or spoken on Yosemite tours.
