Reawakening on Main Street
For a century, museums told the Ohlone story in the past tense. This summer, a small museum on Main Street in Los Gatos let the Muwekma Ohlone tell it in the present tense, from the horses of the Trail of Truth to the return of cultural fire.
Trail of Truth riders lead their horses across the Golden Gate Bridge, 2024. The journey is the subject of NUMU’s Reawakening exhibition. Photo: Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation
Visitors who grew up in California schools may remember the old display: a diorama, a basket behind glass, a placard explaining how “the Ohlone” lived, as if they had stopped living. That way of telling it shaped generations of Bay Area children. It is also part of what the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has been fighting against for decades.
In June 2026, New Museum Los Gatos, known as NUMU, opened an exhibition that tells the story another way. A second one followed in July.
Two Shows Under One Word
The museum gathered both exhibitions under a single title: Reawakening. According to NUMU, both were “developed in partnership with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, San José State University Dept. of Anthropology, and New Museum Los Gatos.” Their purpose, the museum says, is to highlight “Muwekma Ohlone cultural practices, land stewardship, and their ongoing efforts to restore their federal recognition.”
That last clause matters. A public museum in Santa Clara County is presenting the Tribe’s fight for recognition as part of its living culture, not as a footnote.
A gallery at New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU), photographed in 2016. Photo: Victoriaahalll / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The first show, Muwekma Ohlone Culture and Connection in Pursuit of Recognition, opened June 19 in the Mike & Alyce Parsons Reception Gallery and runs through Nov. 29, 2026. It centers on the Trail of Truth, the Tribe’s 2024 horseback journey from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C. In NUMU’s words, the riders “traveled with sacred horses gifted to them by the Lakota Nation, and were supported by several tribal nations across the US that welcomed them on their land and reinforced their message to the US Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
The second, Reciprocity of Land, Sea, and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, opened July 17 in the Spotlight Gallery and runs through Jan. 3, 2027. The museum describes it as a look at the Tribe’s land stewardship, “including cultural burns and the cultivation of native plants that provide resources for regalia making, food, and traditional healing.” It also covers the reawakening of the Chochenyo language, along with dance, music, song and ceremony, which NUMU frames as “the Tribe’s ongoing cultural revival after a century of erasure following the loss of, and the fight to regain, federal recognition.”
The exhibitions trace “the Tribe’s ongoing cultural revival after a century of erasure following the loss of, and the fight to regain, federal recognition.” —New Museum Los Gatos
The Ride Behind It
The Trail of Truth left Crissy Field in San Francisco on Aug. 4, 2024. Riders and walkers crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with the horses, joined by relatives from other nations. The Miwok elder Richard “Razzle Dazzle” Regudo was among those who stood with Muwekma singers and dancers at the send-off.
Main Street in downtown Los Gatos. NUMU is at 106 E. Main St. Photo: Ramkumar Menon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The riders reached Washington in October 2024, around Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and asked the government to affirm the Tribe’s never-terminated status as the successor to the Verona Band of Alameda County. What happened next is part of the exhibition’s story too. National Park Service police confronted the riders over the horses on the National Mall. The Stanford Daily reported that nine people were arrested, and quoted Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh saying officers “were threatening to confiscate our horses and euthanize them.” National Park Service police said at the time that the group had been given three dispersal warnings.
Two years later, those horses are part of a museum exhibition about Muwekma resilience. That fact carries its own message.
Horses, Words and Fire
The Tribe has been drawing the threads together in public. In an October post in its Chochenyo language series, it wrote that “Every Chochenyo word carries generations of knowledge, memory, and lived experience.” For the Muwekma Ohlone, it added, Kawwayu “represents more than a horse.”
Blue elderberry in flower. The second Reawakening exhibition looks at native plants the Tribe cultivates for regalia, food and traditional healing. Photo: Krzysztof Ziarnek (Kenraiz) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The second show’s attention to cultural burning comes at a telling moment. California now has a legal framework for tribal cultural burning agreements, but the 2024 law that created it, SB 310, provides for those agreements only with federally recognized tribes. The Muwekma, whose ancestors tended these hills with fire for thousands of years, are left outside that framework because Washington has never corrected its error. An exhibition about reciprocity with the land is also, quietly, an argument about who gets to practice it.
Thank You, and If You Go
NUMU credits the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, with funding the project in part, with additional support from the Farrington Historical Foundation and the Borgenicht Foundation. The Foundation thanks the museum’s staff and the San José State University Department of Anthropology for building Reawakening with the Tribe rather than about it.
NUMU is at 106 E. Main St. in Los Gatos. Its website lists hours of Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Trail of Truth exhibition closes Sunday, Nov. 29, 2026. Reciprocity of Land, Sea stays up through Jan. 3, 2027.
The diorama era is over. Go see what replaced it.
Editor’s note: Exhibition descriptions and quotations come from NUMU’s exhibition pages; the Trail of Truth account draws on The Stanford Daily (Nov. 4, 2024) and the Tribe’s posts. Charlene Nijmeh is president of the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation, which publishes this newsletter.