One searing summer day in 2002, Millie Browne, dressed in a coral shirt over a white top and white slacks, stood under an umbrella in the rock-strewn desert landscape where Palm Springs’ first inhabitants learned to live in harmony with a harsh natural environment.
When the photographer was ready, Browne stepped out from under the minimal shade and sat on a boulder, smiling for an image that would be published in that October’s issue of Palm Springs Life. The location was the proposed site of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians’ museum; Browne chaired the board of directors, and the tribe had just unveiled renderings of a curving main structure and domed, 150-seat auditorium expected to open in 2005.
Sixteen years later, the tribe is breaking ground on a 5.8-acre cultural center in downtown Palm Springs that Jason Swenson, project manager from the San Diego offices of JCJ Architecture, says is targeted for “substantial completion” in early 2020.
Still showing an affinity for cheerful color (this time sporting a bright magenta top) and still chairing the museum board, Browne
sits down in tribal administration offices to talk about the journey she has followed for some 30 years.
“Why didn’t I give up? Because I believed in [the museum]. I knew it would happen,” she says. “And I hope it does before I die,” she adds with a laugh that reveals an appreciation for life’s vagaries.
Browne grew up in Section 14, a square mile of reservation land bordered by Indian Canyon Drive, Alejo Road, Sunrise Way, and Ramon Road — specifically, in a home where the post office now sits. “My mother was very involved in the community and in helping others. She instilled in my sister and me that we have to give back — that we should be thankful for where we were and what we had,” she says.
What they had wasn’t much. They lived in a one-bedroom, one-bath house with a combination living room/kitchen. Browne and her sister shared a pullout bed and bathed in a galvanized tub that also was used for laundry. Browne nevertheless feels she had a “great” childhood.
“All the kids knew each other. It wasn’t like we were living in a community that was all tribal members; it was a mix of cultures. We didn’t see any differences. We didn’t even consider ourselves poor or rich. We knew there was an El Mirador [luxury hotel], and tourists would come into town. But in summer, businesses boarded up their buildings, and we had the run of the town. We skated from Alejo to Ramon. It became our place,” she recalls.
Her progressive mother, Elizabeth Pete Monk, served as president of a business association and on the country’s first all-woman tribal council. Browne was named Mildred Lucille after her mother’s sister, who had died from dysentery as a baby.
“Everybody always called me Millie,” Browne says. “I tried to change it as I got older, but no one would call me Mildred.”
She exhibited a natural talent for art, winning awards from the Rotary Club and two Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Key Awards for a rug she designed in a high school class.
“We went to Los Angeles and then to New York for the Gold Key Awards. My mother was very proud; she was jumping and yelling. It was kind of embarrassing for me at that age,” she recalls.
Although she graduated from Palm Springs High School in 1964 with high honors in art, she “didn’t have a passion for it,” she says.
Her early adult years became filled with the tasks of raising five children as a stay-at-home mom. Browne’s first husband, Ray Patencio, became the tribe’s youngest council member when he was elected chairman in 1972 at the age of 21. During their 12 years of marriage, they had four children: two girls and two boys. In her second marriage of 14 years to Fred Morris, she bore another son. This year, she celebrates the 26th anniversary of her third marriage, to Dave Browne.
“I was consistent. My husbands weren’t,” Browne says with a sense of humor that seems as ever-present in her character as her commitment to preserving her tribe’s culture. After enrolling her fifth child in kindergarten, she says, “I got the bug to do something.”
That “something” turned out to be chairing the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum board of directors — a position she has held since its formation in 1991.
A rendering from JCJ Architecture of the proposed Agua Caliente Cultural Museum show the gathering plaza and hot mineral pool.
Browne joined the Tribal Cultural Committee, which came about in conjunction with a flood-control project planned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Tahquitz Canyon reservation land.
“The tribe wanted the committee to determine what we needed to build a lab and storage building,” Browne says of the space intended for historical findings turned up during excavation. After two years of “nothing much happening,” she told Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians chairman Richard Milanovich, “I am done.”
“I wanted to do something,” she explains, adding that Milanovich agreed that the effort lacked progress and proposed that she be the one to spearhead it. Eventually, Browne recalls, the committee decided, “This is so much work that we might as well create a museum, and everybody said, ‘That is a great idea.’
“Not that everybody knew what a museum entailed,” she adds, acknowledging even her own naiveté at the time.
The real impetus for creating a facility for exhibits on Native American and, specifically, Cahuilla culture was the tribe’s desire “to get information out to the community about the way we see ourselves,” Browne says. “If we build a museum, we can tell our stories. Rather than others interpreting us, we should interpret ourselves.”
She figured it wouldn’t take long: “Five years, maybe 10,” she says with the chuckle of amused hindsight.
She points out that the tribe in those days lacked a revenue-generating casino (it now operates the Spa Resort Casino in downtown Palm Springs and Agua Caliente Casino Resort Spa in Rancho Mirage), and that it depended on income from its Spa Resort Hotel (now closed) and admission to the Indian Canyons’ palm oases, trails, and picnic grounds.
Although reservation operations are exempt from taxation, the committee applied for the more commonly understood 501(c)(3) designation to encourage contributions to museum-building funds.
“But nobody took us seriously, so the board said, ‘We have to make ourselves visible,’ ” Browne recalls. They did not have to look far. Palm Springs city officials had approached the tribe about adding its cultural presence to Palm Canyon Drive’s Village Green Heritage Center, which houses the Palm Springs Historical Society.
“Well, if they’re going to take us seriously, we could open an information center with exhibits and charge 25 cents,” Browne says. “But we couldn’t get anybody in. So we lowered admission to 10 cents and couldn’t get anyone in.”
The building design incorporates shapes and patterns from traditional Cahuilla baskets.
Deciding that it was more important to tell the tribe’s story than to raise money, the board chose to make admission to the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum free. Thus, the Village Green offers a glimpse into the tribe’s history and culture but does not help pay for a long-envisioned museum with archival storage and presentation space.
A Native American of Cherokee/Choctaw descent and a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, Seattle-based architect Johnpaul Jones drew up the 2002 plans for an Agua Caliente museum near Andreas Canyon, just north of the Indian Canyons entryway. But objections from some tribal members to building on what they considered sacred ground derailed those plans. In 2007, when Palm Springs was abuzz with plans for a revitalized downtown, the tribe put the museum site at Tahquitz Canyon Way and Hermosa Drive. Those comprehensive plans, which involved efforts by the city and a developer, as well as the tribe, succumbed to the Great Recession.
“We had selected our builder. We had finished construction-drawing plans. We were moving forward. Then the bottom fell out of the economy,” Browne recalls.
The dream was put on hold until the tribal council asked the museum board to consider another move — to a 5.8-acre site at Tahquitz Canyon Way and Indian Canyon Drive, where the Spa Resort Hotel once stood.
“They want to create a historical area that represents us and incorporates the hot springs,” Browne says.
In October 2017, the tribe unveiled its plans, with renderings by JCJ Architecture, for a cultural center that includes the museum within a complex with an interpretive garden trail and a spa and bathhouse that will “reopen” a hot mineral spring that has been unused since the Spa Resort Hotel was demolished in 2014.
With guidelines he had established for the original museum plans, Jones handed off the baton to JCJ Architecture, which has developed numerous tribal casinos and has been working with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians on the development of Section 14.
“Johnpaul was very gracious. He said he understood and wished us all good luck and happiness,” Browne says.
Though she admits to feeling frustrated over the prolonged process and multiple diversions that required a return to the drawing board, Browne takes a pragmatic approach. “Things happen in their own time, and not when you want,” she says. “I have learned patience and stick-to-it-iveness. I have learned to embrace change.”
She even shrugs off the downsizing of the museum; originally planned at 100,000 square feet, it is now 48,000. “In today’s age, there is so much you can do with animation and digitization. You just layer things. You present things differently, but the story doesn’t change,” she reasons. “We all have to adapt to a different kind of organization. I am just glad the museum is going to be done. Our culture will be saved. History will be saved. There will be a place for other tribes who haven’t been able to speak to put their voices out there.”
“If we build a museum, we can tell our stories. Rather than others interpreting us, we should interpret ourselves.”Millie Browne
Diana Richards has served on the museum board with Browne for about 17 years. “I think anybody else would have turned around and run with all the changes and as many years of work that she put behind it,” she says. “Millie has put her heart and soul into it from day one. She is now at the tail end and is going to see it through.”
As part of her commitment, Browne has attended classes presented by the Smithsonian and examined numerous museums with a critical business eye. “What I saw with most small museums is that somebody starts it with their [private] collection, and they’re never able to support it and properly take care of it. We have thought of this business-wise as well as culturally. A lot of small museums don’t have that luxury,” she says.
To that end, plans for the new museum include a prep kitchen and indoor and outdoor spaces that can be rented out (or used by the tribe) for events. As for the cultural aspect that drove her on, Browne says, “what I wanted was for future generations to know we were here. I didn’t want people to come to town and hear, ‘I don’t know who lived here. There were some Agua Caliente Indians, but we really don’t know much about them.’ ”
For more than 42 years, Browne has resided in South Palm Springs’ Twin Palms neighborhood, now living with husband Dave and three Labrador retrievers. (“They are our babies,” she says.) A daughter and two sons live in the area; her youngest daughter lives in Bozeman, Montana, and her youngest son lives just outside of Sparks, Nevada.
A couple of years ago, she traveled to China with two of her six grandchildren. In January, she went with them to Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland and saw the Northern Lights. “Dave is more of a homebody than I am,” she says of her husband, a former professional fly dresser (the June 2010 issue of Palm Springs Life showcased his artistry, including a bright red-and-yellow-tipped feather fly he titled Magnificent Millie).
Having recently turned 72, Browne says she probably will retire from the board when the museum is finally built.
“I would love to go to Africa and do a safari. I would love to see Egypt. [Chairing the museum board] is very confining. It’s a lot of responsibility, and I think I have earned the right to pass it on, because my job is done,” she says.
“My goal was to build a museum — to educate the public and give the tribe and other indigenous people something to be proud of. The potential has no boundaries.
“I am sure my mother would have been very proud of what I have accomplished,” she adds.
Indeed, she probably would be jumping and yelling — and this time, her little girl would not be embarrassed.
A National Presence
In 2004, Millie Browne visited Washington, D.C., and joined the ceremonial procession of Native Americans marking the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).
“We were first because we were the A’s,” she says, referring to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. “It was an absolutely unbelievable experience.”
The connection between the tribe and the Smithsonian Institution precedes that Sept. 21 celebration of the nation’s indigenous people. In 2003, the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum (despite its modest size of about 1,600 square feet) became the first Native American museum to be accepted as a Smithsonian Institution Affiliate. Even today, it is one of only four strictly tribal museums in the Smithsonian Affiliations program (the others being the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, the Seminole Tribe’s Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum in Florida, and the Abbe Museum of the Wabanaki Nations in Maine).
Another honor is in the making, after the NMAI director and two other Smithsonian officials visited the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in the Village Green Heritage Center and viewed the exhibition Section 14 — The Other Palm Springs. That exhibition will travel to the NMAI for an opening in early 2019.