The Autry Museum, Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond

Working with Native advisors, tribal community members and Native artists, Reclaiming El Camino takes a hard look at a painful past.

In teaching about the settlement of California and its missions, educational materials in institutions, K-12 classrooms and museums have often overlooked Native perspectives. Reclaiming El Camino illuminates the goals, motivations and impacts of the California Spanish Mission system (beyond religious ones) from an Indigenous viewpoint, a story many students and most people have never heard before. 

This exhibit explores three significant moments in time, commemorated in 2024, that demonstrate the way “El Camino” (meaning “the road”) is symbolic of oppression as well as revolution. The exhibition spotlights the enslavement and brutality that Natives experienced in and around the missions. It also reveals the resistance that Natives put up against missionaries and colonizers and that enabled their “survivance” over the last two hundred and fifty years. 

“This narrative takes you through the impacts and attempted erasure of Native people—under three colonial regimes, a multitude of laws and policies, stereotypes, and racist ideas—to today, where Native people continue to exist, resist and persist,” says Deana Dartt, curator of Reclaiming El Camino. 

This telling of history has been informed and created by the people most impacted by the ongoing waves of disruption, who despite the continued trauma of the colonial legacy, carved out places for revitalization and reclamation.

The goal of the exhibit is to educate about the vitality and courage of the First Peoples of California while also conveying that there is no true celebration of resilience without the knowledge of what has been endured and survived. It is indeed a triumph of will, courage and fortitude that Native Californians remain.

This exhibition was created in collaboration with guest curator, Deana Dartt (Coastal Chumash). Reclaiming El Camino’s is showing now through June 15, 2025.

Time:10 a.m. to 5 p.m., opening reception, Saturday, Jan. 27 

Cost: General admission, $8 to $16

Details: TheAutry.org/ReclaimingElCamino.
Venue: The Autry Museum in Griffith Park, Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Gallery, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles