Tenaya Lake: Naming Is Not the Same as Remembering
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Tenaya Lake carries an Indigenous leader's name because men involved in driving his people from Yosemite decided to give it that name.
The contradiction is documented unusually clearly.
Chief Tenaya led Ahwahneechee people during the violent conflict surrounding the Mariposa Battalion's 1851 campaign.
Battalion member Lafayette Bunnell later wrote that they named this lake for Tenaya.
In Bunnell's account, Tenaya responded that the place already had a name: Py-we-ack.
He understood the naming gesture not as honor but as a poor exchange for loss of homeland.
Whether every word in a memoir written later can be treated as exact dialogue requires caution.
The larger truth is secure.
American mapping frequently replaced Indigenous place names while celebrating individual Native figures after dispossession.
A name can preserve memory and erase it simultaneously.
The lake itself sits in high-country geography used by Indigenous people long before modern roads.
Trade routes crossed the Sierra.
Seasonal movement connected valleys and meadows.
The park landscape was not isolated wilderness.
It was networked human geography.
For visitors, “Tenaya” sounds like evidence Yosemite remembers Native history.
Ask a second question:
Who chose the name that appears on modern maps?
That question changes the monument.
The best way to honor Indigenous connection is not simply to repeat a famous chief's name.
It is to understand that people had their own names, routes and relationships to these places before military campaigns and tourism reorganized the landscape.