The museum organizes its exhibitions around three themes: Nature, Spirit, and Family. These are not arbitrary curatorial categories but reflections of how California's indigenous peoples understood their world -- the land that sustained them, the ceremonies that connected them to forces larger than themselves, and the kinship structures that organized daily life. The collection includes traditional baskets of extraordinary craftsmanship, some among the smallest ever woven anywhere in the world. A redwood dugout canoe speaks to the engineering skill of coastal peoples. Ceremonial regalia and intricate beadwork demonstrate artistic traditions passed across generations. Hunting and fishing tools on display date back more than 2,400 years, physical evidence that these cultures were thriving millennia before European contact disrupted everything.

Among the museum's most powerful exhibits is one dedicated to Ishi, who emerged from the wilderness near Oroville, California, in 1911 -- starving, alone, and reputedly the last surviving member of the Yahi people. His entire community had been killed or driven to extinction by settlers and vigilante raids in the decades following the Gold Rush. Ishi spent his final years at the University of California's anthropology museum in San Francisco, where linguist Alfred Kroeber studied his language and culture. He died of tuberculosis in 1916. The exhibit does not present Ishi as a curiosity or a relic. It illustrates how Native culture was powerfully impacted and forever changed when outsiders arrived -- and how the Yahi's destruction was not an accident of progress but the result of deliberate violence against a people who had lived in California's foothills for thousands of years.

The museum's location beside Sutter's Fort creates an unspoken dialogue between two versions of California history. The fort tells a story of frontier enterprise and westward expansion. The museum tells what that expansion cost. Sutter himself enslaved Native workers and used violence to maintain control over indigenous laborers on his lands. The two sites sit only yards apart, and visitors who walk from one to the other cross a boundary that is geographical but also moral -- from the celebratory narrative of California's founding to the reckoning with what was destroyed to make that founding possible. The museum handles this tension not with lectures but with the quiet authority of its artifacts. Baskets woven with a skill that took lifetimes to develop. Tools shaped by people who understood their landscape with an intimacy that no newcomer could match.

In May 2018, Governor Jerry Brown allocated $100 million for the construction of the California Indian Heritage Center in West Sacramento, a new facility intended to replace the aging K Street museum with a space worthy of its subject. Land was transferred in June 2019, but the project was delayed in May 2020 when funding was redirected to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2022, the California State Parks and Recreation department selected Fentress Architects to design the center. Construction broke ground in April 2026, with full completion expected by 2032. Until then, the current museum continues its work in a building that has served this purpose for more than eighty years -- modest in scale but outsized in what it asks visitors to understand about the land beneath their feet and the people who knew it first.