Through June 15, 2025 | Autry Museum of the American West | Los Angeles, CA

Native Resistance

An exhibition at the Autry Museum examines the impacts of the California Spanish Mission system from an Indigenous viewpoint.

“Mission Indians” is the term often used to describe the Indigenous peoples of Southern California who were forcibly relocated from their homelands to live and work at 15 Spanish Franciscan missions and their outposts between 1769 and 1823.

Local tribes were relocated and conscripted into forced labor on the mission, which stretched from San Diego to San Francisco, where they endured disease, starvation and torture. Many were baptized as Roman Catholics, their tribes renamed and forbidden to practice their Native ways—leading not only to physical death but to the decimation of their cultures.

River Garza (Tongva), What the City Gave Us, 2022, acrylic, spray paint and marker. Loan courtesy of the artist. Autry Museum; LT2023-59-1.

Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond, on view at the Autry Museum of the American West through June 15, 2025, aims to educate visitors about the potency of Native life in California, the historical efforts to erase these Indigenous peoples and their refusal to surrender.

In conjunction with multi-media works by revolutionary Indigenous California artists that include Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, and Tongva-affiliated artists Katie Dorame, River Garza, Weshoyot Alvitre and others, the exhibit spotlights the enslavement and brutality that Natives experienced in and around the missions while highlighting the resistance and fortitude that has carried them forward for the last 250 years.

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Oil & Gold, 2021. Museum purchase, Autry Museum; 2022.14.1.

Guest curator and director of Live Oak Consulting Deana Dartt (Coastal Chumash) explains, “As an alternative narrative about the settlement of California, Reclaiming el Camino provides a lens into the Native experience—offering visitors not only an opportunity for compassion, understanding and allyship for Native Californians, but also serves as an invitation to question the motives of maintaining such dominant narratives of colonization globally—and presently. This exhibit is not only a tale about past peoples, but the devices used to manipulate and erase living societies.”

Through June 15, 2025
Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond
Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 667-2000, www.theautry.org