The Warp and Weft of Landscape

This article highlights the role of Native Yosemite peoples in shaping landscape photography in the Yosemite Valley. It examines Carleton Watkins’s 1861 Yosemite Album, which famously proved critical to winning support from Congress to set Yosemite Valley aside for conservation. Evidence of historic Ahwahnechee village sites, the genocidal invasion of the Yosemite Valley, and the traditional ecological management practices of basket weavers that appear in Watkins’s photographs counteract the longstanding association of the images with the virtues of the conservation movement—and historically resituates them as witness to an ecological crisis inaugurated by colonial occupation of the Yosemite Valley.