Story by Chiori Santiago

By the time she was 17, Julia Parker knew only those parts of California paved or fenced or surrounded by walls. From her birthplace on the Kashia Pomo/Coast Miwok reservation, she'd been moved to a foster home in Santa Rosa, then to Stewart Indian School near Carson City. Nothing she'd seen prepared her for the moment when, as a teen, she arrived in Yosemite National Park for a summer job.

"When I first came to the valley, what impressed me most was the water," she recalls. "So much water flowing over granite, so strong."

In this place that felt like home, Parker settled with her husband, Ralph, and raised four children. If you visit the Yosemite Museum, you'll find her there today, remembering the old ways. Running in the background of all she tells you is the music of Yosemite streams.

"Everything we need to live, everything I need to make my baskets, it all comes from water," she says. "Water feeds the willow, the tule, the dogbane. Water is powerful. So when you make an Indian basket, it's going to last, oh, pretty much forever."

Cone-shaped burden baskets three feet high, tiny toy baskets three inches across; winnowing baskets, seed beater baskets, cereal-bowl-size gift baskets-Parker makes them all. At 73, she's one of maybe half a dozen expert weavers who know the Miwok-Paiute tradition.

"I had to learn; I didn't grow up with it," she says. "At boarding school they told us we had to forget our ways. 'Don't be an Indian,' they said. At Yosemite-well, there were real Indians here. My husband's great-grandmother was running around these mountains in 1851, before any Anglos got here."

Ralph's grandmother was Lucy Telles, who'd revolutionized California Indian basketry and demonstrated her methods at Yosemite's Ahwahnee Indian Village.

"I'd bring my children and we'd just sit and watch all day," Parker says. Gradually, she learned the secrets mothers pass along to daughters. "To be a basketmaker, first you have to be a gatherer. I had to learn where the willows grow, where to find white root, blackened fern, and the redbud shrub. When Lucy died, the Park Service asked me to take over her job. I thought it should be a person indigenous to Yosemite, but the elders approved of me."

Now that Parker is an elder, she's intent on preserving not only basketry but bygone games, stories, foods, and ceremonies. She leads workshops, visits schools, and has taught three generations of family weavers: daughter Lucy Parker, 46, Lucy's daughter Ursula Jones, 28, and Ursula's daughter Naomi Jones, 6.

Which is probably why into each of her baskets, along with redbud and willow, Julia Parker threads a little prayer of gratitude that she found such a place and lived in it for more than half a century.

Story courtesy of California State Tourism.