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. "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
 he 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 Hafalia, 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 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 Hafalia, 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 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 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."
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @pfimrite