Southwest Museum
Southwest Museum
The Southwest Museum is an awesome collection that traces Native American cultures through some 10,000 years of history in this area. Native voices describe the adaptation and continuance of their traditions in the Southwest and in California home of the largest urban American Indian population in the nation.
The early inhabitants of this area, the California Indians came to this area for the same reasons people continue to come here: for the climate, natural resources, and room to expand. In fact, people have been harvesting the wild bounty of California for thousands of years.
The natural bounty of California would lend itself well to sustaining these early Native American residents through its plentiful resources include grasses, seeds, root crops, nuts, cactus, land mammals, birds, fish, sea mammals, shellfish, minerals, and raw materials such as obsidian and steatite that tools and hunting implements such as arrowheads were made.
In several museum exhibits you will learn how there were about 60 Native Tribes in the area and they all spoke different languages but got along and traded food and items among themselves. Starting in the mid-1700s, rapid, often violent colonization disrupted California Indian life. Under the Spanish, Mexicans, and European Americans, American Indians suffered starvation, forced labor, disease, and military rule.
Native populations declined drastically. Although people adapted to new ways of life such as herding cattle and using new plants, they did not abandon their traditional beliefs, many of which continue today and are highlighted in many exhibits in the Southwest Museum.
Additionally, you will see amazing art, handicrafts such as jewelry and baskets from long ago and some made just this century to show how old traditions have carried forward virtually unchanged.
Come see the artifacts, both ancient and new and learn about these fascinating people that continue to live in this area today.
