I had a funny incident happen to me one summer in Yosemite. I was a regular visitor in those days, going camping once or twice each year–sometimes three times counting a winter visit in a snow-covered cabin. Mostly I chose late spring or early summer for at least one of my yearly visits. I especially liked the third weekend in June since that coincided with the summer ceremonies and two or three days of the Miwok Big Time Pow-Wow. Being inside the Round House for singing and dancing was one of the highlights of my visits every summer.
They got so used to seeing me in the Indian Museum that I began making friends with Miwok tribal members. I became especially close to one of the cultural demonstrators and we maintained our friendship spread out over many years. Outside the Museum and but a hop, skip, and a jump away one could travel back in time and see the old pioneer cemetery. In one small area there were a few headstones for Miwok ancestors who lived and died in Yosemite.
I was visiting there one warm summer’s day to pay my respects. There were stone granite memorials for the important Americans whose lives were entwined with Yosemite but for the half-dozen Indian markers, that was a different story; they were small and made of wood, curved at the top, usually with just one name upon it, like “Tom” or “Mary” or “Lucy”: that was all. One of the wooden markers stood out for it had a split in it for quite some time before someone managed to attach a bolt to keep the two pieces together.
On one of my visits, I saw someone had placed plastic flowers below the wooden marker for Lucy. This both pleased and bothered me. I was pleased to know someone still remembered the old ones but I was bothered because plastic flowers are not fresh flowers, and there’s a difference. I was standing close to these half-dozen markers, little more than stakes, wondering about the people who were buried there and was there a right way to honor and remember them?
I’d done quite a lot of reading about Native Americans in Yosemite. I knew the stories of some of these people whose final resting place was now the cemetery. Inside the Museum were old photographs on the wall of ancestors and their magnificent Miwok baskets, so one could begin to attach a name to a face. Some of the oldest had lived to be nearly 100 years old. Imagine living your whole life, a full century, in Yosemite!
The old women would once have been playful girls; then young women and mothers; and finally grandmothers and perhaps even great-grandmothers. You could see something of their lives in the lines and wrinkles of their faces if you looked carefully enough at the photographs in the Indian Museum. Some were noted for their longevity; a hundred years is, in any culture, a very long time. They would have been respected as tribal elders, as indeed they deserved to be.
I kept staring at one of the brown wooden grave markers in particular, the one that had a few plastic flowers in front of the marker, u-shaped at the top. Everybody was busy all around me; the world went rushing on its way. Who has the time to slow down and remember these people? I volunteered myself for a small assignment, to show a token of my respect.
I would go for a walk looking for real flowers with pretty colors and return to place them on this burial site. I figured the walk would only take a few minutes but the task turned out to be harder than I thought and quite time-consuming as well. As gorgeous as Yosemite is, a good deal of its scenery involves varying shades of green contrasted with granite-slabbed mountainsides, the steep cliffs offset with the hues and browns of rocks and trees. But pretty colored flowers in full bloom? Very few and far between, so far as I could tell. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place and needed to go beyond the pioneer cemetery and its immediate vicinity.
I decided to broaden the search which took me to one of the marshy meadows where a touch of color was available in the milkweed and other plants. Somewhere along the way this gesture of mine had taken on deeper meaning for me, the same as if I were picking flowers to place on the grave of my own grandmother. I never knew any of those Indians in the old photos but it began to feel like a solemn obligation to remember and honor them. The search for colorful flowers took forty-five minutes; nearly an hour had gone by before I returned to the Pioneer Cemetery, wiping the sweat from my brow with one hand and holding fresh flowers in the other.
As I got back I began to feel a little awkward. I knew that the Miwok people had proper ceremonies for important occasions and no doubt they had one for “remembering” but I didn’t know what it was. I decided that being polite was never out of season so I placed the flowers gently in front of the marker. Again I experienced a moment of uncertainty as to what to do next. I knelt down on one knee and held that position, not moving: just silent and still. It wasn’t a ceremonial ritual but it was sincere and I did everything with the utmost respect.
That’s when the funny thing happened, something so strange I hardly know how to describe it in retrospect. The first clue? I lost track of time. Honestly, I could not tell you how long I was there while I was kneeling, whether it was five or ten or twenty minutes. Thus, I found myself in for a bit of a psychic shock when I suddenly came back to my senses, not knowing that I was having such an unusual experience.
I had been “away” somewhere although I was not sure where: communing with the spirit of a Miwok elder, perhaps? I also experienced a second emotion that overpowered me. I knew that I had loved deeply my grandmother who was buried beneath the sod. I knew that this was truly my own grandmother, of that I had no doubt!
I should add here there is something odd about me and my own family history; I never knew any of my grandparents, believe it or not, on neither my mother’s or on my father’s side. My mother was orphaned as a child; my dad’s father had moved away while he was still a boy; and his mother passed within months of my birth. I never met them any of them. Nevertheless, while kneeling in the Pioneer Cemetery, I was absolutely convinced that I was really at my own grandmother’s grave. Unbeknownst to me, I had crossed from one time and place to another. That may sound strange, or other worldly, but there is no other way to describe it.
At some point in time, however, I became vaguely aware of the switch in viewpoint that was occurring. I was no longer thinking of my biological ancestors.[1] By “Grandmother” I now meant my Native American grandmother, whose spiritual kin I was—or so I was convinced at the time. That was the second surprise.
First, I was at my own grandmother’s grave; then I was a Miwok man at his grandmother’s grave. Even the first attempt to recover my wits had fooled me completely; I was honoring a grandmother I never met and thought that was real; then I was honoring a Native American Grandmother and it all made perfect sense both ways.
Indeed, when I finally emerged from out of that deep contemplation, I did not have a clue where or who I was. I had for the space of a half-hour lost touch with my own true identity. I suppose it was like having amnesia! But the well-rooted center of the human psyche always re-emerges, given half a chance. Soon I had another answer. I went from being a Cleveland-born Jewish kid to being a Miwok grandson born in Yosemite Valley.
It was the intermediate stage of this curious transformation that baffled and confused me.
An inner voice had been telling me I was at my grandmother’s grave, someone I had known and loved all my life and with whom I had just had experienced a natural communion. And that made sense at the time because there was no other truth than that one. This re-appearing knowledge was good enough for me because “being away” felt crazy and scary but now I knew who and where I was . . . (unaware that another transition had occurred).
I wasn’t Roger from Cleveland; of that person I no longer had any awareness. I was a Miwok grandson communing with his grandmother. Of that, I had absolutely no doubt! Indeed, I felt wonderfully reassured to have re-discovered my true identity and place in the Native American world. Everything made even more sense; I was Miwok in the Ah-wah-nee-chee valley.
And then, a new flash of recognition broke through the clouds: I realized I was still “gone”, still fooled and still not me! Then and only then, slowly but surely, my former reality reappeared; I recalled with certain knowledge that I had never known any of my grandparents. It was simply impossible I had deep feelings for my grandmother the same way children do who knew and loved their grandparents for years and years.
With a burst of concentrated effort I forced myself to look up. Like a stranger to my own being, I made mental note of where I was. I tried to remember how I got there—that I was a visitor to Yosemite National Park who had stopped for a brief moment in time in the Pioneer Cemetery to pay my respects to a long-ago generation of Native Americans.
I slowly talked myself back to normalcy. My name was Roger; I had no biological grandmother’s grave marker in front of me. I had “disappeared” for a while and gone to another place—I was tempted to say another dimension. Once again I felt rather awkward. I had been kneeling for quite some time so my knee was beginning to stiffen from being held in the same position for so long.
The day had progressed considerably; the sun was beating down and the heat, perhaps more than anything else, finally snapped me out of my reverie. The best I could do was to stand up silently, maintaining a dignified manner and taking a few steps back toward normal reality.
I had much on my mind to think over! I had experienced some sort of double-identity, first paying respects to my biological grandmother and then, as a Native American grandson, paying respects to his own true grandmother. Time stood still.
I am not sure what brought me to my senses but I remembered that I was visiting Yosemite’s Pioneer Cemetery. I strolled by the cemetery later that afternoon and noticed that my “fresh flowers” had wilted considerably while the original plastic ones were none the worse for wear—and so that began to make perfect sense, too.
Did something “out of the ordinary” truly happen? I cannot say with absolute certainty but it certainly seemed so at the time. I have a vivid memory of an episode in which a silent understanding, a communion, occurred while I knelt at the final resting place of a Miwok woman who lived a long time ago; something between her and me met and flowed on through time.
I was certain of only one thing: I had visited my Grandmother’s Grave.
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/pioneer_cemetery/
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[1] My maternal and paternal grandparents hail from Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively. They never set foot in Yosemite so far as is known.
