The Park Service runs a summer and fall series at the Yosemite Museum called Connecting to Traditions, and it is one of the few things in the park you can walk up to, sit with, and learn from directly. Indigenous artists demonstrate basket weaving, beadwork, acorn preparation, and stone tool knapping, the living practices of the peoples who have tended this valley for thousands of years, long before it was a park. The demonstrations are free, open to all, and this is the season to go.
Demonstrations take place at or just outside the Yosemite Museum in Yosemite Village, next to the visitor center, shuttle stop 5. Times are posted at the Museum rather than fixed in advance, so check the day you visit. Everything here is free.
The schedule is subject to change, which is another reason to ask at the Museum when you arrive.
Yosemite has seven traditionally associated tribes, and the land you drive through was shaped by them: the black oaks kept open for acorns, the meadows burned to keep them meadows, the plant materials gathered and worked into baskets so fine they hold water. Most visitors move through all of that without ever meeting the people who carry it. Connecting to Traditions closes that gap. You get to stand a few feet from a weaver splitting sedge root or a knapper striking a blade from obsidian, and you get to ask questions of the tribal members doing the work.
That is a rare thing, and a generous one on the part of the artists. It is easy to treat a national park as scenery. These demonstrations are the reminder that it is also a homeland, tended by living cultures who are still here, still practicing, and willing to share an hour with whoever shows up. If your trip overlaps with any of these dates, put the Museum on your list. It is the best free hour in the park this summer, and it does something a viewpoint cannot.
The demonstrations sit alongside the park's free ranger programs as the interpretive heart of a Yosemite visit. Take both if you can.