Redding, Calif. ? A nearly forgotten American Indian tribe from northern California hopes a new museum exhibit will help raise awareness of its history and boost its bid for federal recognition.

For more than a century, baskets, a deerskin quiver, feather cape and other cherished items of the McCloud River Wintu were tucked away in the Smithsonian Institution’s vast storage warehouses. Last week, they returned home.

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They are part of “Journey to Justice: The Wintu People and the Salmon,” an exhibit about the tribe and their main food source. It opens Saturday at the new Turtle Bay Museum in this former logging town.

Linda Curl Malone, a Wintu, cries when she talks about how she anticipated seeing the baskets for the first time. “I kept telling my mother, who is 92 years old, ‘Just hang on, mom. Just stay with us until June,”‘ she said. Seeing those baskets was “like going home.”

Many Wintu were driven from their land after settlers arrived in the 1800s, then died of disease and starvation. Their numbers dwindled from 34,000 in the mid-1700s to a few hundred at the turn of the century.

With the construction of Shasta Dam in the late 1930s, the remaining Wintu watched as their dead were moved to a cemetery and water covered their sacred burial grounds.

Generations of Wintu have advocated for Indian rights, most recently applying for recognition by the federal government in 1993. About 1,500 Wintu who live in the Redding area are not federally recognized.

But 559 tribes, including the Cherokee and Navajo, are federally recognized, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The recognition process is complex and slow, and the Wintu’s efforts have been complicated because a treaty with Congress was never ratified in the 1850s, Malone said.

Recognition would allow the Wintu to exist as a sovereign nation and to receive health, housing and education benefits that other tribes get. It also means American Indians can submit an application to open a casino and legally hold religious ceremonies using the feathers of an eagle, a threatened species.

“It’s just amazing we’re still here today,” said Gene Malone, Linda’s 39-year-old son. Recognition would be “an amount of justice for the huge injustice that was done.”

The museum exhibit will probably be used as evidence demonstrating the Wintu’s relationship with the federal government, he said.

The Wintu sold or traded items to salmon breeder Livingston Stone, who sent the materials to the Smithsonian in 1875. They remained there until curator Alice Hoveman and Wintu educator Michelle Noonan retrieved them recently.

Among the artifacts is a skirt made of pine nut shells that may have been used in a Wintu puberty dance. The celebration of a girl’s coming of age was a lost practice until a few years ago, when Jill Ward planned a ceremony for her daughter, Audrey.

“To see it here makes me feel good, like a tradition might actually come back,” said Ward, gazing at the skirt in a display case at the museum. “It’s like loved ones from the past leaving a letter for you.”

The Wintu told Hoveman they “want the truth to be told,” Ward said. “So many times in schoolbooks and when teachers were talking about what happened, people just sort of gloss over the fact there were massacres, racism.”

Linda Malone hopes the 64 artifacts on loan from the Smithsonian will recall the Wintu’s proud heritage and combat old stereotypes.

“I want to show we’re not wild, lazy savages,” said Malone, 58. “We were great hunters, fishermen, sportsmen.”