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Indian weaving to be shown inYosemiteSharing Traditions exhibit opens at museum Tuesday toshow richness of native life

6/3/13 Indian weaving to be shown in Yosemite - San Francisco Chronicle

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Liz Haf alia, The Chronicle

Julia Parker, 84, weaves a basket the traditional way at the replica Indian village behind the museum at

Yosemite National Park, a craft she learned from a famed Indian weaver.

By Peter Fimrite

June 2, 2013

Yosemite National Park --

The wood bark shelters and grinding stones at the American Indian village behind the Yosemite

Museum represent to Julia Parker her awakening as a Native American.

Parker, 84, is one of the country's most

celebrated basket weavers, a traditional craft

that is also one of the last remaining

expressions of indigenous culture, spiritualism

and art in America.

She learned the art from Yosemite Indians who

had carried the craft down through the

generations. It has made her Yosemite

National Park's most prominent representative

of a culture dating back thousands of years, a

connection that makes her both proud and emotional.

"This is one of the last sites of the Ahwahneechee people," said Parker, as she walked last week

through the village, pointing out the roundhouse and granary painstakingly duplicated from historic

photos of remnant Indian structures still standing in the 19th century.

Parker's intricate work will be featured at the museum along with artifacts, baskets and other

collected pieces from renowned Yosemite Indian weavers during a new exhibit called Sharing

Traditions, opening Tuesday. The exhibit, paid for with $102,000 from the Yosemite Conservancy,

is celebrating 84 years of basket weaving and American Indian cultural outreach at Yosemite

National Park.

"It's an important piece of American history," said Mike Tollefson, president of the conservancy.

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"The exhibit focuses on 80 years, but really it goes back to the first people who occupied the valley

and carried that tradition forward."

Parker, who has spent much of her adult life in the village behind the museum demonstrating weaving

techniques and pounding acorns, is an unlikely representative of that history. How she got to this

point is a remarkable story that is representative of the displacement, cultural disintegration and loss

of identity suffered by many Native Americans during the 20th century.

It all began in the small Sonoma County town of Graton, where she was born in 1929. She and her

four siblings were Coast Miwok and Pomo Indians, but she never knew that. She was a young girl,

around 5 years old, when both of her parents died. How they died was never revealed, but she and

her siblings soon found themselves living on a farm with foster parents, milking cows and doing other

chores.

Liz Haf alia, The Chronicle

Julia Parker walks in the replica Indian village at Yosemite with its roundhouse and granary carefully

duplicated from historic photos of remnant Indian structures still standing in the 19th century. Parker

has been here since she was a teen: "This is one of the last sites of the Ahwahneechee people."

'I just accepted it'

When Parker was an adolescent, her foster mother announced that she could no longer take care of

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them.

"When she couldn't take care of us anymore, I never felt sad. I just accepted it," Parker said. "I

remember my foster parent said to me, 'Don't ever forget you are a little Indian girl,' but she never

said what type of Indian."

Parker was sent to the Stewart Indian School in Nevada, the primary boarding school for American

Indians in the West between 1890 and 1980. The school's 83 buildings are now listed on the

National Register of Historic Places.

She became friends with a group of Indian children from Yosemite at the school and remembers

ringing a bell at the school to celebrate the end of World War II. When she was 16, she left to find

work during the summer, but her friends persuaded her to come with them to Yosemite.

Parker said she remembers the sound of Cascade Falls when they first reached the valley.

"I didn't know anything about Yosemite at the time, and I'll always remember that sound," she said.

"It impressed me. I was stunned, but it felt like I belonged. I felt like this place was waiting for me,

like a mother."

Liz Haf alia, The Chronicle

Melvin Mann and his wife Esther Mann (right) listen to Julia Parker as she weaves her basket at the

Yosemite museum in Yosemite Valley, Calif., on Wednesday, May 29, 2013. Parker moved to Yosemite

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at the age of 17 and quickly began learning the craft of basket weaving from her husbandÕs

grandmother and premier basket weaver, Lucy Telles.

Married at 18

After graduating from the Indian School at age 18, she married Ralph Parker, the grandson of Lucy

Telles, who is believed to be the last full-blood Mono Lake Paiute. The Ahwahneechee, the original

inhabitants of Yosemite who are believed to have been Miwok, mixed with and traded extensively

with the Mono Lake Paiutes, before being driven out of the valley by soldiers in the 1850s. The

mother of Chief Tenaya, the most famous Ahwahneechee chief, was a Mono Paiute.

Telles was a famous weaver who spent five years making a 36-inch-wide basket that won a

competition at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. She and other tribal

elders took Parker in and taught her how to collect and weave a basket out of sedge roots, willow

and redbud.

"When I went into their village is when I became an Indian," she said. "I was told when I finished my

first basket, 'Give it away and then you will be a weaver.' "

Weaving, Parker learned, is only one part of making a basket. She was taught to stake out her own

special area for collecting plants, to offer a prayer and song when taking from the earth and to

"scrape the willows until they sing to you."

She learned never to make a basket after a death in the family, "because if you are sad, your sadness

will go into the basket while you are weaving it."

When her baskets are complete, Parker gives something back to the earth in the form of an offering.

Preparing food also has its intricacies. She learned the importance of offering the first acorn to the fire

spirit and the proper way to peel and pound acorns into mash. She was taught how to cook in the

baskets using hot rocks.

Parker has since studied Indian baskets at the Oakland Museum, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of

Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington,

D.C. She has developed her own style, but she maintains the traditional Yosemite Indian methods

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and uses local materials.

"When people look at a basket, they don't realize that there is so much more to it than what you can

see," she said. "I feel each basket comes with a personality and a story. It is the story about the

plants that live along the river and grow up with their feet in the water. It is the story about the culture

that gave birth to the basket."

Baskets at museums

Her baskets are on display at museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. She once made a

basket for Queen Elizabeth. She has been employed by Yosemite National Park as a cultural

demonstrator since 1960, following in the footsteps of Telles and, before that, Maggie Howard, who

began showing tourists weaving and food preparation skills at Yosemite Museum in 1929. They, too,

are part of the new exhibit.

Parker has taught the traditional ways to her sons and her daughter, Lucy, who is expected to take

over for her mother as a park interpreter when she retires.

Her reputation as a master weaver actually helped her discover her own heritage about a decade

ago. She had been asked by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria to teach basket weaving.

When she arrived in Graton, she recognized her childhood home and neighborhood. The memories

came flooding back, including an image of a woman wailing on the ground next to a pair of boots

during the funeral ceremony for her father.

She learned only then that she was Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo.

"It turns out I lived on Parker Hill Road," she said, with a laugh, "and I ended up being a Parker."

It is a life that has come full circle, but Parker said her heart remains in the historic village behind the

museum near the Merced River, where the original inhabitants of Yosemite Valley once lived.

"I think about these ladies who came before me," she said, her eyes welling up as she stood next to a

grinding rock used by generations of Indians. "Their baskets are still here and they say to me, 'Don't

forget me. Don't forget me.' I never will."

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Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @pfimrite

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