This LAND Is Your AND

Four million people visit California’s Yosemite National Park each year. But for some, the Indigenous history of one of America’s most cherished places remains unknown. David Treuer considers the stories of the park’s original inhabitants—and its future.

- David Treuer

To drive north through California from Los Angeles to Yosemite National Park is to drive through history itself. My partner and I headed out from the city, across the Los Angeles Basin to the Grapevine, a snaking highway interchange above the San Fernando Valley; through the ancient bed of Tulare Lake, now drained and given over to pistachio and almond trees; and then the mining towns of the Sierra Foothills, where gold was discovered. At last we reached Firefall Ranch Yosemite, a new 55-room lodge that opened near the park’s Big Oak Flat entrance, on its western side, in 2024.

It was a little strange to stay in luxury as a way to experience wilderness. The two things don’t really rhyme for me. (Though the trend shows no signs of stopping—another glamping option, Under Canvas Yosemite, opened in April of this year.)

I grew up poorish on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. My family and community are Ojibwe, and we’ve managed to keep the majority of our homelands as they have always been: wild but predictable, uncomfortably swampy and aqueous.

So I grew up in the “wilderness,” though we never really called it that. We don’t really call it anything at all. To say “I’m going outside” is more common, though we have different words for it in Ojibwe. Ni-zaaga’am means “I’m going outside.” Agwajiing means “outside,” not to be confused with noopiming, which suggests being in the woods, and megwekob, which means to be in the deep, deep woods, or in tangled, brushy woods.

In all cases, for me, to be in the wilderness was to be on the ground: on my feet, lying down, in a tent, on pine needles, or on a bower made from the lower branches of a balsam tree. Gaawiin wiikaa api ayaaysiyaan megwekob,