graphic the valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

Tenaya was named after a great Yosemiti warrior.  He has never left the Merced valley or the rocky outlines of Yosemite Park.  He and his Yosemiti parents have lived deep in the hidden valleys of the park, eating off the land, scavenging those things left behind by the tourists, out of sight of the rangers.  He has never been to school and, although he can read well enough, he understands little of the world described in the occasional newspaper he finds.  There is not a rock face he cannot climb, not a turn of the wind and weather he cannot interpret.  He never questions the life he has been nobly born into - until Lucy.   He has always understood that he bore some responsibility to challenge with any means possible the world's encroaching hotels and hamburger stands that are about to alter his valley forever  - until McKenzie.  A survivor and a warrior, he finds his clear sense of purpose blurred by these strange new passions.  And if the Sampson and Delilah similarity wasn't enough from the beginning, a natural disaster of biblical proportions will make it clear in the end.  The language is sometimes poetic, the tragic Native American history woven throughout all too familiar, and the jumping back and forth in time sometimes confusing but you can't help wanting to read to see what happens in the end.