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this week, I am posting an old episode that was subscription only. I’m sorry. I caught the ‘vid. Back to regular programming next week!

In Yosemite, for thousands of years before the discovery of gold, Native Americans traveled through and inhabited the area that the Sierra Nevada’s melting snow spills dramatically over rocky cliffs on the walls into the Valley. Waterfalls that sit over three thousand feet above its floor. The treasures the park holds are unduplicated, each wonder differing from the next, each overwhelmingly spectacular.

Welcome back to Queens of the Mines. This is Season 4. Yosemite.

This season of Queens of the Mines explores the making of Yosemite National Park and true stories of women who were there along the way, and women that were there before.

In this episode, I am going to tell you about To-tu-ya, who was later known as Maria Lebrado. She was part of that 5 percent and she was the last survivor born of the Ahwahneechee band that was driven out of the Yosemite Valley by the Mariposa Battalion during the Mariposa War. 

5,500 years ago, Indigenous tribes were the first to settle what we now know as Yosemite. The most recent native group to live there was primarily an extension of the Southern Sierra Miwok. They had named the Yosemite Valley “Ahwahnee” and they referred to themselves as the Ahwahneechee. People of the valley. The Ah-wah-nee´-chees had been a large and powerful tribe and 171 years ago, before white men arrived to Yosemite, there were 37 indigenous villages in the area with over 10,000 Miwok living there. 

After a war, and what the Miwoks called the fatal black sickness, the majority had died or had fled to live with other tribes. When it was all said and done, only around 500 of the 10,000 Miwoks remained. That is five % of their population.

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Have you ever experienced the breathtaking California wilderness? Yosemite National Park is known for its giant waterfalls and granite cliffs. Boasting Giant sequoia groves, grand valley, and lakes and streams. Yosemite receives over 3.5 million visitors annually. Just before the United State’s largest migration, the California gold rush, Yosemite remains vastly untouched and was the home of 10,000 California Miwoks. 

Join me Andrea Anderson through the history of the making of Yosemite National Park and the women that were there along the way, and before. 

Queens of the Mines- Yosemite 

Premieres September 19th 2023

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