The Healdsburg Museum recently opened a new in-person exhibit, its first since the COVID-19 pandemic, that looks back at the native peoples who have called the area home for countless generations.
The exhibit, titled, “From Diggers Bend to River Rock: People and History of Dry Creek Rancheria,” will be at the Healdsburg Museum now through May 29, 2022.
A joint project between the Healdsburg Museum & Historical Society and the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, the exhibit is made possible in part by funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services grant award, the Sonoma County Vintners Foundation, the Healdsburg Tourism Improvement District, the Merritt & Pamela Sher Family, the Community Foundation Sonoma County and members of the Healdsburg Museum & Historical Society.
Healdsburg Museum Executive Director and Curator Holly Hoods and Sherrie Smith-Ferri, a retired museum director and a member of the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, joined forces to research and implement the new exhibit.
“Sherrie and I have known each other for 25 years. She is the retired director of the Grace Hudson Museum and the museum has kind of been a big sister museum to the Healdsburg Museum,” said Holly Hoods.
Hoods said Smith-Ferri has advised the Healdsburg Museum over the years on Native American artifacts, and other items in their collection.
“We already had a relationship, but this is an exhibit that I had always hoped to do from a native perspective, and Sherrie was working on a cultural center exhibit and we talked about doing something together,” Hoods said.
Smith-Ferri grew up in Healdsburg. She got her doctorate in anthropology and worked in several museums. She recently retired from the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah.
“One of the projects that I was asked to do by my tribe when I retired was to help design and create a long term history exhibit and a new community center and tribal archive that they’re planning to build on the rancheria. Holly heard that I was retiring and asked if I would be interested in doing this exhibit and I thought, ‘why not combine the work for both together,’ and so we went and were successful in getting a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services on behalf of the tribe and the museum to help fund both projects.”
About the exhibit
“I really look at this exhibit as having two audiences. One is native audience and one is a non-native audience … I think the younger generation of the tribe needs to know our stories and to remember them,” Smith-Ferri said.
Since growing up in Healdsburg, Smith-Ferri said she’s noticed a whole new population in town that comes from outside areas and doesn’t know the stories or the history of the area.
“I think a lot of the older families don’t necessarily want to remember the stories. It’s important that we as a community in light of the Black Lives Matters movement and just this idea that we need to be honest about what’s happened in the past in part so we can all move past it and be able to heal together,” she said. “That’s kind of how the exhibit came into being. I believe it is an important exhibit and it will bring people from around to come and see it.”
The exhibit will be at the museum for eight months, in part because there are so many elements to it that took time to set up.
“Our museum will be able to benefit from not only this exhibit, but also a lot of the research and the historical material that has been generated by this exhibit. That will also be able to inspire our long term displays and the idea of having it be from a native perspective, as opposed to an ethnographic perspective, people telling their own stories handed down through the generations is real valuable,” Hoods said.
Hoods said Smith-Ferri was a good person to have on the exhibit team since she has her foot in both the museum world, the world of scholarship and research and as an expert in basketry — which is a large aspect of the exhibit — and as an elder in her tribe.
“She has the respect of the community in many communities, and so the native perspective is that she’s drawing on all sources to tell the story and using museum objects and photos. It is a much bigger reach than our museum traditionally has had,” Hoods said.
She said it’s exciting to have new stories, precious items and photographs to share.
“In a big way this is about relationship building and that is a very exciting and wonderful thing,” Hoods said.
Smith-Ferri said many of the objects in the exhibit evoke quite personal stories.
For instance, “You have photographs in the museum labeled as ‘native.’ One of those photographs is my grandma in her baby basket with her uncle. It was taken in the Plaza. We used to tease her about that photo because she’s got this very grumpy look and she was not a grumpy person,” Smith-Ferri said.
While some photos in the exhibit are dated and documented, there are some in the collection that were anonymous.
When the exhibit opened on Sept. 30 and people started coming in to see the exhibit, once in a while, someone would recognize a relative or a friend or themselves in one of the photos, bringing home one of the tenets of the exhibit, “We have always been here.”
Smith-Ferri said, “You have relatives who come in who go, ‘I can tell you about that photo and who’s in it.’ You start to see how interconnected native people were in this community.”
Another touchstone of the exhibit is the idea of home, and how the Dry Creek Pomo and Western Wappo peoples had a home, lost their home and then gained home with the rancheria.
“The rancheria was set up for what they called the landless Indians,” Smith-Ferri said.
“Rancheria” is a Spanish term for Native American settlements that are small areas of land set aside around a native settlement. They are similar to a reservation and are peculiar to California.
According to the museum’s description of the Dry Creek Rancheria, “Dry Creek Rancheria is a place, a California Native people and a wealth of stories about both. The place is located in inland northern Sonoma County. The Native people are both Dry Creek Pomo and Western Wappo. The stories begin in the long ago time when Animals were People and continue up to today. They are narratives of beauty, tragedy, family, creativity, resistance and survival: the mundane and the remarkable.”
Other exhibit features include nearly 80 baskets from coastal to inland Sonoma County, cardboard cutouts, personal artifacts and items from the rancheria among other pieces.
“I would say a strong message to come away with with this exhibit is they were here, they’ve always been here and they are strongly still here,” Hoods said. “I do think there’s a tendency to have this sort of anthropological perspective of the culture and the traditions being so different from the white people’s traditions. In this exhibit there’s a lot about the history that ties them together.”
Those who contributed to the exhibit include families and private collectors. The exhibit includes baskets and other materials from the collections of Dry Creek Rancheria; the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; Healdsburg Museum & Historical Society; members of Dry Creek Rancheria; tribal members and families; and many other private lenders.
Visiting the exhibit
The Healdsburg Museum has free admission and is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The museum is located at 221 Matheson St. Tours are available by appointment.
