Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley opened its new mixed-reality exhibit “Yuutka” (The Place of the Acorn) on Sunday, after federal grant cancellations and a court fight that pushed the project to the finish line. In the museum’s lobby, visitors walked past replicas of black oak trees and projected native plants and were able to use baskets equipped with 3D sensors to collect virtual acorns as they followed guidance tied to Ohlone cultural knowledge.
The exhibit is designed through a collaboration with community partners and young people from the East Bay Ohlone community, with project creators describing it as a bid to bring Ohlone perspectives into how science education can look and who gets centered in it. Lawrence Hall of Science researchers said the exhibit is the museum’s first mixed-reality display, and the first built in a collaboration with young people from the Ohlone community whose traditional homeland the museum sits on.
At the center of the experience is a virtual guide drawn from Dolores Lameira, an East Bay Ohlone matriarch, who appears in the exhibit as a cartoon coach encouraging visitors through the mixed-reality task. Vincent Medina, her great-nephew and one of the project’s creators, said in the exhibit walk-through that the guide “really looks like her,” reflecting the partnership’s emphasis on authenticity and community input into the design.
Lawrence Hall of Science associate director Jedda Foreman said the museum was aiming to challenge the idea that community knowledge should be treated as separate from scientific knowledge. Foreman said the museum is “considering community knowledge and Ohlone ways of knowing as part of that umbrella of what science means and looks like,” and staff described lessons embedded in Ohlone practices, ranging from the design mathematics of basket-making to knowledge about acorns and how they are prepared for eating.
The project’s youth participants—ages 7 to 22—worked in gatherings with researchers and Ohlone elders to learn traditions and translate themes into exhibit prototypes. The young science ambassadors later took on the name tappenekšekma, described as meaning teachers and learners in Chochenyo, and at least some participants brought hands-on experience from ceremonies and other learning, while others began to explore how they could stay involved in STEM through the exhibit-design process.
Funding is where the project’s timeline nearly broke. The museum had embarked on the series of exhibits in 2023 with a $1.4 million NSF grant, and then last year the Trump administration abruptly terminated the NSF funding as part of a broader cancellation effort affecting more than $1 billion in NSF grants, according to officials. The team described the cancellation as a direct threat to work that was intended to connect Ohlone youth to science while highlighting Ohlone understanding of the natural world.
In describing that moment, Medina said it was “very hard to ever tell anybody that their work wasn’t valuable,” and he questioned how rescinding grant support was being framed as eliminating waste while the work itself aimed to amplify community knowledge. The project continued anyway: Carlos Bojorquez, one of the youth participants, said the group still decided “to keep working, to keep trying to get our vision of this out,” framing the exhibit as a way to show people about Ohlone community members and “that we’re not gone and that we’re here.”
A legal challenge followed in an effort to reverse the terminations affecting federal research and education grants. Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley clinical professor at the school of law, said she began reaching out to faculty after trying to learn more about the terminations, and she later helped lead a class-action lawsuit filed in June 2025 on behalf of UC researchers whose grants had been terminated. In the case, the Department of Justice argued that federal law gives agencies discretion to refuse funding when activities do not align with administration policy priorities, and a federal judge, Rita F. Lin, sided with the researchers.
Lin agreed with the researchers and, later that June, issued a preliminary injunction ordering restoration of the Lawrence Hall of Science grants and other grants that had been revoked using form letters without specific explanations or tied to executive orders related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Attorneys for UC researchers also said they later won similar injunctions reversing grant cancellations at other agencies, and a UC spokesperson said the restored funding and related efforts had complemented the university’s own efforts to fight a proposed cap on the share of federal grants used for facilities and administration.
Even with the court order, the exhibit’s future remained uncertain as it moved toward completion. According to Lawrence Hall of Science researchers and staff, in April 2025—about two weeks before they planned to hold a community event to share exhibit prototypes—the NSF moved to terminate their grant again, along with other grants to the museum, citing a nationwide purge of projects, including those officials described as covering diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental justice. Later, the project’s principal investigator, Ari Krakowski, said she received an email from the university indicating that the NSF suspended the project’s grant again when the exhibit was nearing conference presentations, with the email referencing “foreign funding,” which the Lawrence researchers said was not accurate for a project they said had not received money from outside the U.S.
At the exhibit itself, staff described how the experience builds around the acorn as a staple in the Ohlone diet and an entry point into local ecosystems. Medina said the point of the interactive experience is to show what is possible when visitors connect cultural knowledge to understanding, saying, “To see it all come to be — it’s going to go a long way teaching about culture, building understanding and respect.” Researchers also said the project’s ’ottoy, or repair, initiative is part of broader efforts to improve UC Berkeley’s relationship with Ohlone communities through more than a single display.
Medina said the partnership strengthened further after the grant cancellations because museum staff did not waver in supporting Ohlone-focused work, even as funding was in dispute. He said the support “wasn’t wavering” and would be present whether or not the grant was there, underscoring how the exhibit’s opening became both a scientific education event and a test of how museums and communities adapt when federal policy collides with local knowledge and youth-led design.