Miwok

Talk about that.

Well, Ewoks are an important part of Marin County's local heritage for several reasons, the most prominent of which is that the name of the Ewoks, George Lucas has admitted, was borrowed in part from the local indigenous people, which are called the Coast Miwok.

That's spelled M-I-W-O-K.

And so you have throughout the Renaissance, this extreme blurring of fantasy and reality.

And I think the Ewoks are kind of this strange example of this.

Like, how did that all start?

Well, you know, it kinda goes all the way back to my days of being the race director of Miwok in the early years.

And, uh, first couple years, Kelly Sheehan, now Kelly, uh, McNerney, uh, put it on, and I ran.

And a friend of ours, Rick Nordin- Norkin, decided to make sort of a celebratory beer, uh, for the finishers, and he did it in his bathtub the first couple of years [laughs]

And so I went with a IPA recipe, um, that was, uh, pretty similar to Redhook ESB up there in, uh, the Seattle area.

And, uh, and everybody loved it.

We called it Miwok Trail Ale.

And, uh, we had a kinda funky label that we put on it with, uh, some, some, some of the race logo stuff, and it was quite popular.

But it appeared some preferred the taste of human flesh and eschewed the long and tiring hunting trips in favor of consuming those who died of disease and malnutrition.

At one point, a scouting party, looking for the most efficient way ahead, came across two Miwok Indians named Luis and Salvador.

They had once been party members, but had attempted to move on when the supplies had run low.

At the time they were discovered, they had not eaten anything for nine whole days and were dangerously undernourished and weakened as a result.

However, instead of attempting to rescue and save the lives of their Indian friends, one of the scouting parties simply shot them there and then before carving off chunks of their flesh with a hunting knife.

On January 12th, the group stumbled into a Miwok camp looking so deteriorated that the camp's inhabitants initially fled, fearing them to be the spirits of undead souls who wandered the snow-capped mountain range.

Once it was clear that they were in fact the survivors of a disastrous expedition, the Miwoks gave them what they had to eat, acorns, grass, and pine nuts, completely unaware that the group had murdered and eaten two starving members of their tribe.

They were shaken, starving, and had arguably sold their souls to stay alive.

Here are just a few of the many legends originating from the Yosemite area.

The Fish Women, a Miwok folk tale.

It is said that thousands of years ago, when the Awaniches were still a young nation, the Merced River was the home of the fish women, or mermaids.

The mermaids were beautiful creatures, having the tails of fish, complete with scales and fins, and the upper bodies of gorgeous women.

They tied the threads of the net to his toes and held him underwater until he drowned.

Then they untied the brave and carried him away to their hidden land beneath the river, and neither the brave nor the mermaids were ever seen again.

The Pohono Legend The Miwok Pahono legend holds that Yosemite's Bridal Veil Falls is haunted by an ancient evil spirit that manifests in the form of an alluring and captivating wind.

The story is told of an older woman and a maiden of Awani who were picking berries along the stream above Bridal Veil Falls when something evil happened.

Now, long before it was named for the devil, Mount Diablo was the center of the universe.

For the Ohlone and Miwok peoples, it was the point of creation, a sacred peak known by names like Tush Tak, meaning at the dawn of time.

Their myths tell of a great flood that covered the world, leaving only the summits of Mount Diablo and a neighboring peak as islands.

From here, creator beings like Coyote and Eagle brought forth a new world and new people.

He's also very renowned for replica bows, especially Native American replica bows.

So that's That chapter has a lot of information about that, the Miwok bows and other bows that he creates, which is very different from, let's say, Eric Strikespear in Austria, who also makes a lot of beautiful replica bows, but his are a lot of...

European bows, the Home Guards, the Molagabets, the T-Bird Big.

So his brand is Sparrow bows.

Not just walked it, tended to it lovingly and understood it spiritually.

The word Yosemite, derived from Yohemiti, translates to, they are killers in Miwok.

Historically referred to the name that the Miwok gave to the Awanichi, the resident indigenous tribe of the area.

Previously, the region had been called Awani, translating to big mouth by the Awanichi.

The term Yosemite Miwok is easily confused with a similar term that translates to grizzly bear and is still a common misconception.

Now, Yosemite National Park is a national park of the United States and California.

It borders the Sierra National Forest and the Stanislaus National Forest.