“Promised Lands: California’s Unratified Treaties and Native Resilience” Now Open at the Autry Museum

On July 8, 1852, the U.S. Senate met behind closed doors and voted down 18 treaties with California’s tribes. The agreements would have set aside more than eight million acres for Native people. Senators rejected every one of them, then ordered the paperwork sealed.

The documents stayed hidden until 1905. In the half-century between, most California Indians were left homeless.

Those lost promises, and the people who outlasted them, are the subject of “Promised Lands: California’s Unratified Treaties and Native Resilience,” which opened Oct. 3 at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park.

The deals grew out of a federal commission sent west soon after statehood. Starting in 1851, three commissioners crisscrossed the state and met with tribal leaders. Under each agreement, the signers gave up claims to their wider territory in return for a guaranteed reservation. Back in Washington, California’s congressional delegation lobbied hard against ratification, and won.

The Autry developed the show with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Galleries pair archival records with contemporary Native artwork, photographs, and the voices of local Indigenous communities. Much of the story comes from their point of view, focusing on what happened next: how families kept their bond with ancestral homelands when no ratified agreement stood behind them.

With more than 600,000 artworks and cultural objects, the Autry holds one of the country’s largest Native American collections. Its campuses sit on the traditional lands of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples, in Tovaangar, their name for the Los Angeles Basin and southern Channel Islands.

Additional support came from Leslie and Aaron Kern, the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, and the Paloheimo Foundation.

If you go: The museum is at 4700 Western Heritage Way. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Closed Mondays. Details at theautry.org.