As the sun poked through the trees of Yosemite Valley on a recent morning, a handful of men in plaid shirts, thick vests and baseball caps gathered beside a picnic table where smoke billowed from a stone-size bundle of burning herbs.

This group of Native Americans had come to the wooded spot, just steps from a campground where tourists poured from Subarus and minivans, to visit the grounds of the former Indian village of Wahhoga. Before proceeding, they waved the smoldering mugwort and sage around their bodies, to purify themselves and the place.

“We’ve had a hard time here,” said Bill Tucker, 79, of Mariposa, who once lived at this site where his family’s long story of struggle begins.

More than 150 years ago, state-funded militias forced the indigenous people from their settlements beneath the towering cliffs of Half Dome in a little-discussed, brutal chapter of Yosemite history. Those who resisted were captured, even shot or hung. “My great, great, great grandmother had to go above Mirror Lake and hide in the caves,” Tucker said. “She couldn’t make any noise. The guys would come in and go looking for her.”

This year, Tucker and the other Native American men are seeking to reestablish their place in the iconic Sierra landscape.

The group of mostly Southern Sierra Miwuk members is expected to get the go-ahead from the National Park Service next month to restore the centuries-old Wahhoga village next to the Camp 4 campground, not far from Yosemite Falls. They plan to build a seven-acre enclave with bark homes, acorn granaries, a sweat lodge and other traditional dwellings. While the tribal members won’t live at the property, they will congregate, worship and socialize here, in the heart of a national park.

“This is really unique for a park,” said Scott Carpenter, the park’s cultural resources program manager, who has been helping the group push ahead with the project. “We can’t give all of Yosemite back to the tribes… but at least they can get some recognition of their story and continuity of their culture.”

Already, the tribal members, whose ancestors first inhabited the area at least 7,000 years ago, have begun constructing a stone round house, marking the spiritual hub of what will essentially be a living museum. The sacred structure will anchor a historical section of the new village, reserved primarily for Native American activities. A second section of village will feature a modern community center to showcase the history of the indigenous people for the public.

Members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk also are expecting the U.S. government to make a decision this spring on the group’s petition to become a federally recognized Indian tribe. While upwards of 800 people have identified themselves as Southern Sierra Miwuk, many of whom now live in the Mariposa area near the park, the group has not won the status they’ve been seeking for 36 years. The federal designation brings benefits such as medical assistance, social services and additional land rights.

“We’ve been left out for a long time,” said Bill Leonard, chairman of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, a proxy for the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. “We’re coming together now as one tribe of people that show our connections not just to Yosemite National Park but to Mariposa County and the whole area… We’re fighting for our sovereignty.”

The Southern Sierra Miwuk’s lineage traces to the many villages of tipi-shaped bark homes that flourished along the Merced River before the Europeans arrived in the early 1800s. They were among several tribes that picked berries along rushing creeks, hunted deer in high-country meadows and wove clothing and blankets of rabbit and bear.

Part of the reason that the Southern Sierra Miwuk has not been federally recognized, Leonard said, is that they sought to stay in Yosemite when it became a park. Unlike other groups who moved out of the area and established themselves elsewhere, his people didn’t stake out an independent community, or rancheria, making it harder to demonstrate their autonomy.

After the raids on the Native Americans ended in the middle of the nineteenth century, the tribe’s members went back to Yosemite or came out of hiding. Instead of picking up with their old lives, however, they mostly integrated with the new settlers.

By the latter half of the 1800s, the area was rapidly becoming a vacation destination — with roads, hotels and a small bustling town to serve visitors. President Abraham Lincoln officially pronounced Yosemite a state park in 1864, and in 1890 Congress designated it a national park. Native Americans found jobs in the tourist trade, sometimes selling baskets or performing dances for visitors. They lived in small camps not far from the sight-seers, often in primitive bark homes similar to what they’d occupied centuries before.

In the 1930s, more development in Yosemite prompted park officials to relocate the longtime residents back to the site of their ancestral village Wahhoga, where some of today’s tribal members have their earliest memories.

“I lived right there,” said Tucker, pointing to the soft forest floor that hosted one of the 15 former cabins of the resettled community on the recent spring morning. “I remember it well.”

About 60 people inhabited Wahhoga when Tucker was there in the 1950s. They tried to retain much of their traditional lifestyle, he said, holding spiritual ceremonies, gathering wild mushrooms and cooking with native plants even as the modern park emerged around them.

Their acorn flour, a dietary staple, was milled in the same rock mortars used by their ancestors thousands of years earlier.

“We made patties out of it,” Tucker said, noting the sweet residue left on the pots after the acorn dishes were prepared. “It was like eating candy, pulling it right off.”

Tony Brochini, 66, who was born in the area, also shared fond recollections of the 1900s-era Wahhoga. One of his earliest is fishing as a child near lower Yosemite Falls. One evening, he and his friends lost track of time, and when they finally returned home, their worried parents and a search crew from the park service were waiting — not very happily.

“We had a grand entrance of rangers and flashing lights,” Brochini recalled. “We got our butts spanked.”

The boys were grounded. To ensure that they wouldn’t go anywhere, they were forced to dress in women’s clothing. Brochini remembers wearing a yellow and brown dress with daisies, and staying home for a week

“This place is near and dear to our hearts,” he said. “It’s our home.”

The Wahhoga that Brochini and Tucker were raised in, however, did not last. The cabins were aging, and by the 1960s, the park service was shutting down the area. Some tribal members who had jobs in the park found housing elsewhere in Yosemite Valley while others moved away.

Less than a decade after the last resident left in 1969, tribal member Les James, 83, was already raising the issue of reclaiming the storied community.

“We asked for our village back,” James said, remembering his conversation with the park superintendent four decades ago. “And we got our foot in the door then, but it seems like everything we do takes a while.”

It wasn’t until 2009 that the tribal members got official approval from the park service to begin the process of rebuilding. Shortly after breaking ground, however, the park service halted the work due to safety concerns.

Part of the problem was the plan to use traditional materials to build the village — no cement, no nails, no rebar. Constructing the dwellings as they were in the past, with wild grape vines lashing logs together and stacked rocks serving as walls, conflicted with modern building codes.

The group has since addressed the issues. Restoration of the village, still with original materials for the historical buildings, is scheduled to restart next month when the park service signs off on a proposal for the Wahhoga Committee, made up of tribal members, to manage the property for a trial period of 30 years.

Since the group will be responsible for financing the restoration, the work is expected to proceed slowly. Only the cost of completing the round house has been secured. Tribal members say they’ll likely have to raise funds to rebuild other structures, which could cost upwards of $10 million, even as they’re trying to keep expenses down.

They’re collecting materials on the cheap, using granite mined at local quarries and lumber felled in nearby forests, and their labor is being donated by a work crew from the Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians in Amador County.

Much of the historical side of the restored village could take shape late this year.

“I don’t think there’s any hard feelings about anything that’s happened to us,” said James, who is looking forward to wrapping up his long campaign for the Southern Sierra Miwuk tribe. “There were hard feelings in the past. But you don’t dwell on that. You have to roll with the punches. That’s what we’ve been doing. We’re just want to hang on to our tradition.”

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander