Within the 1850s, miners, settlers and troopers violently drove them out of the Yosemite space in the course of the Gold Rush.
Now, 175 years later, the Southern Sierra Miwuks’ descendants have begun to reclaim a number of the land again.
Final week, the tribe, primarily based in Mariposa, closed a deal to buy 896 acres of scenic forests and steep outcroppings alongside Yosemite Nationwide Park’s western border. Bought by the Pacific Forest Belief, an environmental group primarily based in San Francisco, the panorama close to the intersection of Wawona Street and Glacier Level Street consists of groves of incense cedar, white fir and sugar pine bushes, with breathtaking views from Henness Ridge throughout the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Merced River.
“Having this significant piece of our ancestral Yosemite land back will bring our community together to celebrate tradition and provide a healing place for our children and grandchildren,” mentioned Sandra Chapman, tribal council chairwoman of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. “It will be a sanctuary for our people.”
The deal is the most recent instance of a rising pattern in California: tribes working with environmental teams and state businesses to get better lands misplaced generations in the past, typically buying their first territory for the reason that 18th or nineteenth centuries.
Funding for the $2.4 million sale was offered to the tribe by the California Pure Assets Company as a part of a state program that helps tribes purchase land.
The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, a local tribe that lived within the Yosemite space for 1000’s of years till being pushed out within the 1850s, bought 896 acres alongside the Yosemite Nationwide Park’s western boundary at Henness Ridge on Dec. 1, 2025 from the Pacific Forest Belief, a San Francisco environmental group, for $2.4 million. That is the view from the property wanting north towards Yosemite Valley. (Picture: Pacific Forest Belief)
The earlier proprietor, the Pacific Forest Belief, bought a lot of the land in 2004 from a household that had owned it since 1925. The property, which solely has one home on it, was zoned for building of as much as 19 ranchettes. Logged for many years, it was supposed to broaden Yosemite Nationwide Park to the unique boundaries that conservation pioneer John Muir, founding father of the Sierra Membership, had proposed within the Eighties when he advocated for Congress to first set up the park.
The growth of the park so as to add the property was supported by the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors, the superintendent of Yosemite, and different leaders.
But it surely by no means grew to become a part of Yosemite Nationwide Park. The switch was blocked by U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-El Dorado Hills. McClintock mentioned on the time that he didn’t belief the Nationwide Park Service to be steward. McClintock’s district consists of broad expanses of the Sierra Nevada, together with Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon Nationwide Park.
McClintock is certainly one of quite a few conservative Western Republicans who for years has opposed practically each effort to broaden federal land holdings within the West, preferring or not it’s held in personal possession for cattle ranching, logging, mining and different makes use of.
“When is enough enough?” he mentioned in a speech on the Home ground in 2009. “The public good is not served by the mindless and endless acquisition of property at the expense of the sustainable use of our natural resources, responsible stewardship of our public lands, and the freedom and property rights of our citizens.”
Requested in 2014 concerning the property, McClintock mentioned: “There is considerable resistance in the House and in my district to the acquisition of additional federal land without clear assurances that it will be properly managed and that public access and recreation will be guaranteed.”
Components of the property burned within the 2018 Ferguson Fireplace. The Pacific Forest Belief replanted 125,000 native bushes to assist restore it, and started conversations on a possible sale with the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, which has about 650 members, and a presence within the Yosemite space relationship again 1000’s of years.
“It was a compelling opportunity to provide land to the tribe and provide the park a good neighbor and steward,” mentioned Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Belief. “It underpins a cultural revival in concert with the land. In the end it’s an even more fitting outcome.”
Beneath the deal, the state retained a deed restriction that prohibits growth on the land, and language that requires continued restoration of the property with tasks corresponding to managed burns.
“We will be able to harvest and cultivate our traditional foods, fibers and medicines and steward the land using traditional ecological knowledge,” mentioned Tara Fouch-Moore, the Miwuks’ tribal secretary.
Because the tribe’s personal property, the land won’t be open to most people except the tribe decides over time to permit it.
Since its founding in 1993, the Pacific Forest Belief has preserved greater than 300,000 acres in California, Oregon and Washington.
Wayburn, the group’s co-founder, is the daughter of Edgar Wayburn, the previous five-time nationwide president of the Sierra Membership who helped lead efforts within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies to determine the Golden Gate Nationwide Recreation Space, enlarge Redwood Nationwide Park and go the Alaska Nationwide Curiosity Lands Conservation Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed in 1980. That legislation doubled the scale of America’s nationwide park system, expanded Denali, Katmai and Glacier Bay nationwide parks and established huge new nationwide parks together with Wrangell-St. Elias, Gates of the Arctic and Kenai Fjords. Edgar Wayburn was shut buddies with photographer Ansel Adams, whose black-and-white pictures of Yosemite rank amongst its most iconic pictures.
Regardless that her group held the Yosemite-area property for 20 years by many ups and downs, Laurie Wayburn described the ultimate outcome as very rewarding.
“It’s a joyous moment,” she mentioned. “This is a wonderful outcome for the land and the people.”
The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, a local tribe that lived within the Yosemite space for 1000’s of years till being pushed out within the 1850s, bought 896 acres alongside the Yosemite Nationwide Park’s western boundary at Henness Ridge on Dec. 1, 2025 from the Pacific Forest Belief, a San Francisco environmental group, for $2.4 million. (Picture: Pacific Forest Belief)
