Your feet are over a mineral hot spring here at the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza, 140 North Indian Canyon Drive, between Andreas Road and Tahquitz Canyon Way — the downtown home of the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. The museum was established in 1991 and is sponsored by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, and it was the first Native American museum admitted to the Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program. Its core exhibitions cover Cahuilla culture and history along with the Florence Patencio Collection, named for a significant cultural leader of the community.
The ground under this plaza is the reason the town is here at all. A mineral hot spring rises on this block, the Cahuilla have used it for centuries, and it sits inside Section 14 — one square mile of reservation land in the middle of downtown. When the federal government laid out the reservation in the 1870s it granted the tribe alternating square-mile sections in a checkerboard, interleaving their land with railroad parcels and leaving much of it nearly impossible to use or lease.
This plaza is what it looks like when a tribe finally builds on its own square, on its own terms. The square mile under this plaza is Section 14, and the Cahuilla never left it.