The Yakama Nation Museum opened in 1980 in the nation's cultural center on the edge of Toppenish, a building whose tall peaked roof is modeled on a winter lodge, and it is one of the oldest tribal museums in the United States. The nation planned it and runs it; its mission statement cites, by number, three Tribal Council resolutions passed between 1976 and 1979.
The exhibition hall, some 12,000 square feet, is built around full-size tule-mat lodges and runs as one story told by the people it is about: the seasonal round of roots, salmon and game before contact, then the treaty and the settlement years, then the boarding schools of the 1920s and 1930s, which the nation presents as an attempt to break apart families and end a culture. Dioramas, petroglyphs, basketry and beadwork fill it out, and an exhibit called The Challenge of Spilyay takes its name from Coyote.
The center around the museum holds the nation's library, a theater, a restaurant and a gift shop, and tipis stand outside. Toppenish itself grew inside the reservation after 1905, when a Yakama allottee, Josephine Lillie Parker, sold part of her land allotment to settlers. The museum asks visitors not to photograph the exhibits.
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