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For information, call the museum: 661-946-3055
Howard Arden Edwards, a self-taught artist, became enchanted with
the desert scenery around the buttes while visiting the Antelope
Valley. He homesteaded 160 acres on Piute Butte and in 1928, Edwards,
his wife and teenage son began building a home, which included
a special area he called his Antelope Valley Indian Research Museum.
In it he displayed his collection of prehistoric and historic Native American artifacts, which he interpreted in a way that he thought
would be instructive and entertaining for visitors. Some of his
imaginative descriptions can still be seen in displays in the museum's
upper gallery, his former research museum, now called California
Hall.
Grace Wilcox Oliver, who had taken some courses in anthropology,
purchased the property, reinforced the main building, expanded
the physical facilities, and added her own artifacts. She opened
the Edwards' house as the Antelope Valley Indian Museum in the
early 1940s and operated it intermittently for the next three decades,
gradually adding to the collections. Mrs. Oliver's approach to
interpreting Native American materials can be seen in the museum's
Southwest Room.
The artifacts represented in the Antelope Valley Indian Museum's
electronic catalog show the avid if sometimes idiosyncratic interests
of the original collectors. Many of the objects were acquired in
the early twentieth century by enthusiasts rather than scholars
and before current standards of archaeological provenance and record
keeping were established. Most of the objects in the Antelope Valley
Indian Museum were undocumented and many are identified as being
created by cultural groups that are not the names used by peoples
of those cultures. Serious research is currently take place to
identify these objects as accurately as possible and revisions
are ongoing.
Search the collections online.
 Local support for the acquisition of the property resulted in
the state of California purchasing the museum in 1979, with Grace
Oliver donating all of the artifacts. The majority of the museum's
collections emphasizes the Southwestern, California and Great Basin
Native Americans, although it contains artifacts from a number of other
geographic regions.
In the 1980s, the State Parks designated the museum as a regional Native American museum, representing the cultures of the western Great
Basin (east and southeast of the Sierra Nevada Mountains). Material
culture from local archaeological discoveries is occasionally added
to the collections.
Serious research identifying and assessing the objects in the
museum’s collections began in the early 1990s with the beginning
of an electronic cataloging project and is ongoing.
The museum has made every attempt to provide reliable identification
and descriptions of the artifacts, but cannot guarantee the accuracy
of these data.
In 2010, the museum completed a 4-year stabilization project to protect this landmark building and its collections. More information about the stabilization project.
The mission of the Antelope Valley Indian Museum is to provide
for the education, inspiration and benefit of the people of California
as well as those throughout the world with interest in the material
culture and lifeways of prehistoric, historic, and contemporary
Native American cultures and the unique folk art represented at
the park by
- providing programs, projects, and exhibits that educate, enlighten,
and inspire people to explore the cultures represented at the
Museum and to an ever-widening audience.
- supporting research and information dissemination that will
provide understanding of the links between these treasures and
the peoples who generated them.
- preserving the park's natural, cultural and historic resources
unimpaired for present and future generations.
Major interpretive themes of the museum are:
- the importance of the trade route through the Antelope Valley,
which linked and created an interaction sphere for three major
culture regions: California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest;
- the museum illustrates nearly seventy years of change/evolution
in the way Native American cultural materials are exhibited and
interpreted in museums.
 The L.A. as Subject database is an on-line directory of less visible
archives and collections that preserve historical materials related
to the Los Angeles region.
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