Route 66 Has Long Appropriated Native American Culture—Now Indigenous Communities Are Changing the Narrative

If you drive Route 66—the iconic ribbon of highway built in 1926, unfurling 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica—you’ll encounter a lot of kitsch. There are fiberglass statues of mountain men, 1930s gas stations, neon-lit souvenir shops. And there are motels shaped like tepees.

“Tepees aren’t from the New Mexico, Arizona area,” says Sherry L. Rupert, CEO of American Indigenous Tourism (AIT), who is of Paiute and Washoe descent. She recently drove the highway from Albuquerque toward her home in Nevada and noticed jarring misrepresentations of the diverse Native American heritage along the well-traveled route. Some such remnants included wood statues of “old Indian heads in front of shops,” she notes.

In elevating American nostalgia, the Mother Road often capitalized on images of Native American stereotypes, giving profits to owners outside Indigenous communities, yet ignored Indigenous-owned businesses or cultural sites along or near the road. In reality, the highway touched the historic trade routes and ancestral lands of more than 25 federally recognized tribes. When Native American culture was visible along the road, it was reduced to Hollywood stereotypes or factually incorrect—as if all tribes were the same.

With Route 66 turning 100 this year, Indigenous communities are intent on changing the narrative and sharing their distinct stories and heritage. To that end, says Rupert, AIT has updated its guidebook, American Indians and Route 66, with information detailing a wide range of Indigenous tours, sites, cultural stops, and attractions. Destination Native America, AIT’s website promoting stops and businesses to celebrate the anniversary, has also created a map of the road’s tribal cultures, with a corresponding app where you can build your own itinerary.

To help you plan your road trip, here are some of Destination Native America’s meaningful stops.

Design by Elizabeth See

Take a cooking class at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Museum Hill

Santa Fe, New Mexico | Find on Google Maps

When it was first built, Route 66 crossed through New Mexico’s capital (before later bypassing the city in 1937). If you veer slightly off the highway to Santa Fe today, you’ll find the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, opened in 1987. Set in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the museum offers various cultural and artistic experiences, from the Santa Fe School of Cooking, where Indigenous chefs teach traditional cooking classes, to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, which exhibits work by the area’s most exciting artists. On Museum Hill, you’ll also find the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

See large-scale murals at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico | Find on Google Maps

Photo by K.D. Leperi/Alamy

This landmark institution tells the history and stories of New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo nations through exhibits, installations, murals, and other media. Through June 28, the Center will feature Indigenous Southwest Wild Style from North to South, an exhibit by Arrowsoul Art Collective, a group of Indigenous artists and performers. In large-scale murals, the show traces the significance in the Southwest of pictographic arts, a style of painting on ancestral rocks. The arrow, for example, is a significant image, because it was “used by all Indigenous peoples around the world for hunting and protecting,” the Collective says.

Eat a bison meal at Indian Pueblo Kitchen

Albuquerque, New Mexico | Find on Google Maps

In the past few years, with the rise of Indigenous chefs like Sean Sherman (Ogalala Sioux), who owns Owamni Restaurant, interest in the foodways of Native Americans has soared. Whether it’s a hunger for authenticity or curiosity about a growing culinary trend, food lovers are embracing the creativity and freshness of Indigenous cuisine. At Indian Pueblo Kitchen located inside the cultural center, you’ll experience the foods and flavors of New Mexico’s Pueblo communities. The restaurant has a “Pre-contact” menu—a reference to the time before 1492, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America—featuring an array of Indigenous foods, using ingredients like blue corn meal, candied pumpkin seeds, and roasted pinons. Try the sumac-smeared bison with pickled squash and pumpkin oil or seared trout with yam puree.

Witness the oldest village in America at Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum

Pueblo, New Mexico | Find on Google Maps

Photo by Traveller70/Shutterstock

Perched atop a sandstone mesa nearly 470 feet high sprawls the wondrous village of Acoma, with the Sky City Cultural Center below. Dating to 1150 C.E., the village’s 500 buildings make it the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America. A walking tour with an Acoma Pueblo historian and guide teaches guests about the city’s adobe huts and architecture, built to weather the southwest’s harsh summers. Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum also run tours focusing on the Acoma Pueblo’s renowned coil pottery.

Go on a hike with Navajo Tours USA

New Mexico

Navajo Tours USA offers immersive hiking tours in northwest New Mexico, with a focus on the culture of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples. Founded in 2014 by Kialo Winter and his wife, Terri, the small outfit is New Mexico’s only Diné-owned tour company. Led by an Indigenous guide who tells stories of the landscape and its people, the treks meander through either the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area, Shiprock Peak, or Chaco Canyon, a sacred place for many tribes.

The Chaco Culture is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage site known for its ruins. More than 300,000 acres surrounding Chaco Culture National Park are currently involved in the ongoing battle, since the Department of the Interior recently proposed to revoke a 2023 public lands order in an attempt to drill for gas and oil in these protected lands. “As Indigenous peoples today, it’s our ancestral crossroads,” says Winter, who is of Diné and Zia descent. A thousand years ago, he adds, Chaco Canyon “showed evidence of governance, astronomy, and engineering. Indigenous people were always here.”

Shop for rugs and jewelry at the Hubbell Trading Post

Ganado, Arizona | Find on Google Maps

Photo by The Old Major/Shutterstock

On the Hubbell Trading Post website is this delightful greeting: “Wóshdę́ę́, please come in where the squeaky wooden floors greet your entry into the oldest operating Trading Post on the Navajo Nation. As your eyes adjust to the dim light in the ‘bullpen’, you’ll find you’ve just entered a mercantile.”

Located along the Hopi Arts Trail, Hubbell’s reflects a pivotal era in Navajo history. John Lorenzo Hubbell, a New Mexican trader who spent time with various tribes and learned to speak Navajo, bought the trading post in 1878. At the time, Navajos had returned to their homeland only a decade before, after their harsh internment by the U.S. government at a desolate camp in Fort Sumner. Recognizing their artistry, Hubbell began trading and selling Navajo jewelry, silver, artifacts, and intricately patterned rugs. In 1967, the Hubbell family sold the property and surrounding structures to the National Park Service, which has retained its distinctive character.

Explore cosmology, identity, and emotional stories at the Navajo Nation Museum & Library

Window Rock, Arizona | Find on Google Maps

Navajo Nation Museum houses a staggering collection of Indigenous art and artifacts spanning traditional and contemporary works, including grinding stones, weaving looms, and a trove of 40,000 photographs. The museum explores Navajo identity through Diné cosmology and creation stories, the community’s indelible connection to the land, and the traumatic period in the mid-19th century known as the Long Walk, when the government forced thousands of Navajos from their homelands to march to an internment camp. There’s a moving exhibit about the emergence of traditional Diné life after they returned home. The museum is also working to preserve Indigenous languages, and the library contains a wealth of genealogical records for researchers and historians.

See reclaimed artifacts at the Chumash Museum and Cultural Center

Santa Ynez, California | Find on Google Maps

Courtesy of Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center

After years of dreaming and planning by the Chumash people in California, the Chumash Museum and Cultural Center opened to the public in May 2025. Located on Highway 246 near Central California’s scenic coast, the 14,000-square-foot structure has a permanent collection of more than 24,000 historic objects, from baskets and hunting tools to musical instruments and ceremonial items. Building the collection was a struggle, since many of the tribe’s precious artifacts had been stolen over the years by various people outside the community and sometimes sold to art dealers. To retrieve them, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians had to first buy them back from private collectors.

Designed by renowned architects Jones & Jones, the museum’s large dome structures replicate and honor the way the Chumash people traditionally lived. Visitors can also learn about their unique culture by exploring a replica of a Chumash Village. The tribe’s enduring reverence for nature is visible in the site’s beautiful 3.5-acre-garden, where more than 11,000 endemic plants thrive.