For a century, museums told the Ohlone story in the past tense. In downtown Los Gatos this fall, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is telling it in the present tense, and in its own words.
New Museum Los Gatos, known as NUMU, is running two companion exhibitions under the banner Reawakening. According to the museum, 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” to highlight “Muwekma Ohlone cultural practices, land stewardship, and their ongoing efforts to restore their federal recognition.”
That last phrase matters. A public museum in Santa Clara County is presenting the Tribe’s recognition fight as part of its living culture, not as a footnote.
Two shows, two timelines
Muwekma Ohlone Culture and Connection in Pursuit of Recognition is in the Mike & Alyce Parsons Reception Gallery from June 19 through Nov. 29, 2026. It centers on the Trail of Truth, the Tribe’s horseback journey from California to Washington, D.C. NUMU says 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.”
Reciprocity of Land, Sea, and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe runs in the Spotlight Gallery from July 17, 2026 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 revival of the Chochenyo language, 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.”
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 ride that started it
The Trail of Truth left Crissy Field in San Francisco on Aug. 4, 2024, as this paper reported at the time. Riders were joined by a delegation of Oglala Lakota, Piipaash and other Native riders and youth. The demand was simple: that Congress and the Administration affirm the Tribe’s never-terminated federal status as the successor to the Verona Band of Alameda County, which the federal government recognized in the early 1900s and which an Indian agent dropped from federal rolls in 1927.
The riders reached Washington in October 2024, around Indigenous Peoples’ Day. What happened next has not been forgotten. Shortly after they arrived, National Park Service police confronted the riders over horses on the National Mall. The Stanford Daily reported that nine people, including Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh’s husband, were arrested. Nijmeh told the Daily that officers “were threatening to confiscate our horses and euthanize them.” NPS police said at the time that the group had been given three dispersal warnings.
Two years later, the horses at the center of that standoff are in a museum exhibition about Muwekma resilience, a fact that carries its own message.
Horses, language and the work of revival
The Tribe has been connecting those threads publicly. In an Oct. 13 post on X in its Chochenyo language series, the Tribe wrote that “Every Chochenyo word carries generations of knowledge, memory, and lived experience,” adding that for the Muwekma Ohlone, Kawwayu “represents more than a horse.”
The second exhibition’s focus on cultural burning also lands at a moment of change in California fire policy. The state now has a legal framework for tribal cultural burning agreements, but the 2024 law that created it, SB 310, authorizes those agreements only with federally recognized California tribes, according to the legislative digest. The Muwekma, whose ancestors burned these hills for thousands of years, are left out of that pathway because Washington still refuses to correct its 1927 error. An exhibition about reciprocity with the land is also, quietly, an argument about who gets to practice it.
If you go
NUMU is at 106 E. Main Street in Los Gatos and is open Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the museum’s website. The Trail of Truth exhibition closes Sunday, Nov. 29. The land and sea exhibition stays up through Jan. 3.
The Muwekma Times plans further coverage of the exhibitions before the Trail of Truth show closes. Readers who have visited are invited to send their impressions to the newsroom.
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