From Native languages to Hispanic heritage, Nevada State Museum looks to expand its reach
September 28, 2025 | In the PressFrom Las Vegas Sun (https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/sep/28/from-native-languages-to-hispanic-heritage-nevada/)
Intricate beaded patterns in yellow, black, white and turquoise weave across tanned hide in jagged designs, while fringe dances along the bottom edges of an ancient saddlebag.
This remarkable piece was crafted by hand by a Ute Nation tribal member more than a century ago.
Josef Diaz, curator of history and material culture at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, knew this artifact belonged in the museum, which is at the Springs Preserve on South Valley View Boulevard. The saddlebag would mark a significant milestone in becoming the first Ute Nation artifact in the museum’s collection of Native American historical items, an area where the institution has been notably deficient.
Despite facing budget cuts, declining donations and federal attacks on historical institutions, the museum has been working diligently in recent months to expand its collection of Native American artifacts and exhibits.
“The history of Nevada needs to involve all of the peoples and cultures that made where we are today. We didn’t just get to where we are today because of one ethnic group, so this happens to be for the Native Americans, but the Hispanic group is also one that’s been underrepresented. We have been doing a lot of things to increase exposure,” said Jim Parish, president of the Friends of Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas.
Diaz said the museum previously highlighted some Native American history in a now-closed exhibit that detailed the Old Spanish Trail, a historic trade route connecting settlements near Santa Fe, N.M., with Los Angeles. While that exhibit was running, Diaz recognized “one of our gaps was Native material,” prompting him to collaborate with museum teams to expand the collection.
Much of the museum’s previous collection was borrowed from its sister institution, the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. However, Diaz emphasized that “it’s important for us to have our own collection, especially when it comes to Southern Paiute material.”
In August, the museum announced the online publication of English-Paiute and English-Mojave dictionaries, both dating from around 1891. The dictionaries contain spellings and translations of Paiute and Mojave words, along with written Paiute names, titles, geographical place names and songs.
Working with partners including the Southern Paiute Language Group, Nevada State Library and members from the Paiute and Fort Mojave tribes, the museum preserved the books through digitization and made them accessible for public learning.
Feedback gathered from consultations with local Paiute and Fort Mojave tribal partners indicates that this initiative is a significant step toward deepening cultural ties within Indigenous communities.
Federal hurdles
The Nevada State Museum is working to expand its historical coverage at a time when museums face censorship pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration.
In late March, Trump issued an executive order targeting museums, national parks and other federal historical institutions. The order outlined plans to prohibit what he termed “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
Trump additionally stated that members of his Cabinet would remove mentions of historical transgender figures and rework any public monument, memorial, statue, marker or similar property that he believes “contains descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
“This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” the executive order reads. “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
In the order, Trump claimed the Biden and Obama administrations rewrote U.S. history “with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
During his time in office, President Joe Biden not only supported increasing access to museums through Executive Order 14084 — Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services — he also made efforts to increase the breadth of coverage relating to marginalized communities.
In June 2022, Biden signed a bill into law creating an eight-member commission to study the possibility of establishing a national museum dedicated to the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. Under the Biden administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities also established a nationwide program with traveling museum exhibits among other educational opportunities to promote African American history.
While the Nevada State Museum hasn’t been a direct target of the Trump administration’s American values directive, it has been affected by the administration’s decisions to pull funding from certain areas. Diaz said that regional and state museums “do rely on a lot of government funding” and that they have had to reduce some of their programming as a result of the cuts.
Parrish added that the museum’s summer fundraiser had received fewer donations than previous ones, which he believes could be attributed to a number of different possible reasons, including economic worries that have led many people to tighten their giving.
Diaz and Parish believe that continuing to teach history — and ensuring it’s done correctly by including everyone’s perspectives — is more important than ever.
“Many people have never left the state, and some of these topics are not covered in school or are covered very briefly, so this gives the museum the opportunity to address and talk about some of these topics, some of these people, some of these issues, and in an affordable way,” Diaz said. “They can come and visit the museum; they can bring the family in and make a day of it; they can visit the Springs Preserve. That’s our role, is to help bring knowledge forward and to educate people and be a safe place for families to be.”
Friends of the museum
Friends of the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas, was established in 2016 after a group of supporters felt that the institution needed an organization to assist the museum with fundraising, event execution and volunteer recruitment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the organization has shifted to becoming primarily a fundraising arm for the museum, providing basic expenses and, in the past few years, annual major artifact fundraising campaigns.
Recent projects covered by the Friends of the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas, include the conversion of an old washroom into an incubator for insects; restoration of some damaged artifacts; and the signature Museums in a Box — artifacts, books, records and lesson plans on 16 different topics of Nevada’s history packaged into boxes that can be shipped to schools. Parish said that Friends of Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas, pays for all the boxes, their maintenance and the shipping costs through the money they raise during the year. Last year, about 23,000 students in Southern Nevada were able to learn from these boxes during their classes, Parish reported.
The group also organizes Discovery Saturday, an event staged four to five times a year around international holidays — such as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead — to expose Southern Nevadans to different cultures through various activities. About 100 to 250 people on average are drawn to the museum for these events, Parish said. It’s all to get more people into the museum.
The organization also bought museum archival mannequins made to replace the old, donated plastic dummies from department stores that couldn’t be adjusted for sizes. Additionally, they purchased a blanket woven by Native Americans of the Pueblo tribe and used on the Spanish Trail in the 1840s. That Pueblo blanket was later added to the museum’s collection detailing the history of Native Americans who were part of Southern Nevada’s development.
This summer, the group set its sights on the $12,500 saddlebag — another nod to the region’s strong Native American history.
“This year, working with the museum, the museum — really, the curators make the choice, not us — they thought this saddlebag would be very emblematic of the time, because it was from the Ute Nation, and it’s very beautiful,” Parish said.
