Yosemite Lodging and Cabins

Jeannette Simons, the park's Native American liaison, said Yosemite consults with seven area tribes, including a couple of Paiute bands in the Eastern Sierra, not just the Southern Sierra Miwok. "I have no indication from any of these tribes that they view these people (the Andrews and Rhoan group) as any authority," Simons said.

"A lot of the things we have in the park are based on a historic period" in the 1900s when there was a Miwok village in Yosemite, she said.

A statue and 1949 photo of "Chief Lemee," a park employee who danced in Miwok and Plains Indian regalia, have been criticized by the Paiutes "because some of the regalia maybe wasn't authentic to their tribe," Simon said. "But that's part of history."

History has blurred the lines between the tribes. The Southern Sierra Miwok tribe includes Miwok, Paiute and Chuckchansi Indians.

Brochini, the Miwok chairman, is also Italian.

He says he's related to Rhoan through an old Paiute medicine man and to Miwok spiritual leader Jay Johnson.

"There are very few of us that are full-blood today," said Johnson, 65.

Brochini, 56, works now in the park – along with several other Southern Sierra Miwok. He grew up in the old Yosemite Indian village beneath Eagle Peak that will be the site of the proposed new Wahhoga Indian Village.

"There were songs, traditional spiritual healing sweats, a roundhouse, and I remember going to sleep listening to hand-games," he recalled. His great-great-grandmother, Mary Wilson, was captain of the tribe and decided who married whom.

On a frosty Saturday morning earlier this month, while a bobcat roamed the park's snow-covered paths, Rita Sago, 63, of Sacramento visited the Indian village already built for visitors. She showed Angie Kilcher, her 19-year-old granddaughter, the sweat lodge and roundhouse built by the Miwok.

"It's such a sacred and awesome place," Sago said. "The first time I came to the roundhouse, I felt I belonged here. I was very emotional – it gives you a sense of what this place was before the Europeans."

The Miwok village proposed under Eagle Peak will include a cultural center, cooking facilities, a sweat lodge and a larger roundhouse to host Miwok ceremonies, including the spiritual healing Bear Dance.

The new village will require an archaeological dig, cost $6 million and take about two years to complete, Brochini said. The Miwok have approached neighboring casino tribes, the nonprofit Yosemite Fund, and the park for help.

There may be room to tell some of the Paiute story in the new village, Brochini said – "We are all one people."

The Paiutes aren't convinced. "We're losing who we are," said Rhoan's uncle, Pat Rhoan of Mariposa. "I don't want my grandchildren being taught they're Miwok."

Laura Wass of the American Indian Movement, a national advocacy group, has sided with the Paiute. Park officials aren't respecting or honoring "the true history of this spiritual land," Wass claimed.

Michael Moratto, an anthropologist who wrote an 800-page report on Yosemite in 1999, said both Miwok and Paiute share the park's human history dating back 13,000 years.

"The relationship between those two groups was very complex and very longstanding," he said. "The Miwok have no obsidian, yet almost all their tools are made of obsidian. They got it through trade with the Paiutes coming west over the top every summer. Sometimes they'd get caught in an early snowfall and spend the winter in Yosemite.

"Lost in the current controversy is the other 1,200 square miles of the park beyond the valley, where there were a lot of different Indians with lots of different land practices," Moratto said. "For any group to claim they held the entirety of what is now the park in perpetuity is not consistent. "

Moratto understands the Paiutes' frustration, but said, "I don't know of any park in the nation that has tried as hard as they have to work with Native American people. They've really tried to do the right thing, but the issues are complex. The only way this is ever going to be resolved is to have neutral people gathering all the information that's relevant to both sides and come up with an accurate historical account."

Simons, the park's Indian liaison, said of the Paiute activists, "We appreciate their information and opinions, and as the park gets funds and we're putting up revisions, we'll use these materials as a reference."

But, she said, "we're not going to just take their information and pull books off the shelves and change the signs."