ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
Belongings: What We Bring, What We Leave Behind is a Sonoma County community storytelling exhibit and public event series exploring migration, memory, loss, resilience, and belonging through meaningful personal objects and the stories they carry.
On view September 4–October 4, 2026 at the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum, the project invites immigrants, refugees, displaced people, long-time residents, and community members of all backgrounds to share objects connected to family, homeland, identity, survival, transformation, and home.
At its heart, Belongings asks: What do we carry? What do we leave behind? What helps us belong?
These questions are especially meaningful in a place shaped by many layered histories of movement, displacement, survival, and community-making. The land now called Sonoma County is the ancestral and continuing homeland of Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo, and Wappo peoples who have lived here since time immemorial. This was not empty land. It was known, tended, loved, and home long before colonization, settlement, migration, and modern borders.
The exhibit invites visitors to reflect not only on stories of arrival, but also on what it means to belong on land where others already belonged — and where Indigenous people continue to live, remember, resist, and care for culture, community, and place.
Rather than presenting objects as artifacts separated from their stories, Belongings centers the “living artifacts” of people who are here today: objects carried across borders, passed between generations, held through loss, or preserved through change. Here, the people connected to these objects can tell us what they mean — the memories they hold, the journeys they survived, the people they represent, and the futures they imagine.
The exhibit will also include interpretive panels that place personal stories within a larger context of migration, displacement, colonization, borders, and belonging. Throughout the month, the museum will host live storytelling events, community programs, and visitor participation activities designed to create connection across cultures and generations.
Belongings builds on the community response to Chinatown Unearthed: Facing the Past for a Better Future, which explored erased voices from Petaluma’s past. While that exhibit looked toward histories often left behind, Belongings focuses on preserving voices in the present — especially those too often unheard, invisible, or excluded from public narratives.
The project is led by members of the Petaluma Historic Chinatown Park Committee in partnership with the Asian American Pacific Islander Coalition of North Bay, Poetry of Remembrance, Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League, and community collaborators.
Together, we hope to create a space where stories are shared with dignity, care, and humanity — and where visitors leave with a deeper understanding of one another, the land beneath their feet, and the responsibilities that come with belonging.
A rice bowl found in Petaluma's Chinatown
(Photo: Archeological Resources)
