In this conversation between Paz Núñez-Regueiro, General Heritage Curator, musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and Colleen Ritzau Leth, Vice President of CORA Foundation, we go behind the scenes on the story behind an unexpected exhibition at the Palace of Versailles.
When visitors step into Versailles, they often expect grand royal interiors and stories of the French monarchy. What they don’t expect is an exhibition exploring Native American diplomacy.
For the last several months, that very surprise has delighted and engaged audiences from around the world.
It has become one of the greatest successes of 1725: Native American Allies at the Court of Louis XV, a landmark exhibition co-curated by Bertrand Rondot, General Heritage Curator, Château de Versailles, Paz Núñez-Regueiro, General Heritage Curator, musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, and Jonas Musco, Historian, Research Associate, in collaboration with CRoyAN – Royal Collections of North America. The exhibition is supported by CORA Foundation.
In the first of a new series, CORA Vice President Colleen Ritzau Leth and Paz Núñez-Regueiro examine the foundations of the project and how it has evolved. In an open and insightful conversation, they celebrate project’s ambitions and reflect on its outcomes, pointing the way for future initiatives supported by CORA.
Paz began the conversation by explaining how the exhibition has been met with overwhelming positivity with the most common reaction from visitors being their surprise at what they see.
“Obviously, the subject of the exhibition is a bit uncommon for people who are used to visiting Versailles,” Paz said. “One of the most rewarding things is seeing people discover the exhibition by chance and become completely captivated by the subject.”
Colleen agreed: “It’s been validating and wonderful to witness how expansive curatorial practice can be at Versailles, a recurring partner for CORA over the last few years – first with contemporary art and the Guillaume Bresson project, and now this. Many curators have traditionally worked within very specific areas of expertise, so seeing the specialist teams think more broadly, across different histories and wider historical contexts, has been a really exciting shift and something we are proud to support.”
The exhibition explores diplomatic relationships between Native American nations and France in the 18th century, a period of expanding international relations. The exhibition offers immersive and engaging insights on the worlds of Indigenous nations in the Mississippi Valley, just as the French began exploring and settling in this vast region they’d later name Louisiana.
The French, in turn, had to adapt to Native American diplomatic norms, and over time, their presence in the region came to rely on an economic, military, and political alliance with several Indigenous nations. Seen and understood as an alliance, this history expands audiences’ understanding of the period.
The exhibition opened with a visit from a delegation of 19 members of the Otoe-Missouria tribe from Indigenous nations of the Mississippi Valley, retracing the steps from their ancestors. 300 years prior to this date in the spring of 1725, two Missouria chiefs, an Otoe Chief and de Bourgmont’s Missouria wife travelled to France to meet King Louis XV.
This visit was a particularly poignant moment as Paz explains.
“It was really a historic moment. I think at least that’s how it felt for most French Partners and Native American Partners. We had 60 delegates from 10 different nations. Many were coming to France for the first time, so you really have to think about how to welcome them from the first day.
“My idea was to create a unity between all these people for the moment of the opening. So they arrived a week earlier, we had a Symposium – and many people had never met – they were sharing this story of the past, a moment of very strong unity.”
Paz explained that it was made even more symbolic in the timing for the 300th year anniversary. “The opening was very strong and there was a lot of emotion,” she said.
Colleen agreed, “It was certainly one of the most moving gatherings I’ve ever witnessed in a museum.”
American visitors have been particularly moved by visiting the galleries.
Paz explained, “We’ve had visitors say things like, ‘I’m from Ohio, and I had no idea this history existed … for me as a curator, it’s a privilege to meet people who feel personally connected to this story but are discovering it for the first time.”
French audiences are also encountering unfamiliar narratives, an extraordinary range of objects rarely if ever shown on display, and how they fit into national histories. Many have been drawn to intricate 18th-century maps, particularly handwritten manuscripts that reveal how French settlers documented Native nations and territories.
“They’re almost like comics from the past,” she said. “You can really enter the mind of this Frenchman living in Louisiana in the 1720s, and see how he was envisioning his native neighbours.”
Others are captivated by rare cultural artifacts, including a striking bison-hide robe that has become one of the exhibition’s standout objects on display. Visitors are also drawn to ceremonial objects such as calumets – among the oldest preserved examples in the world – which help bring Indigenous diplomatic traditions to life.
Portraiture has also become an unexpected point of connection. While visitors are naturally drawn to portraits of King Louis XV, many are equally intrigued by rare depictions of Native leaders, including the portrait of a Meskwaki warrior. These works help challenge and work to undo long-held stereotypes.
“People often arrive with a very 19th-century idea of what Native communities looked like,” Paz explains. “They leave with a completely different understanding.”
Youth engagement in the exhibition has been important for both organizing institutions; Versailles has organized a cinema club for youth and family audiences to explore modern-day, native community-produced films that tell the stories of indigenous life and cultural practices. School groups have enjoyed visits, and the very popular podcast series on the exhibition, produced by Versailles’ digital communications teams, has reached hundreds of thousands around the world, sharing the research, story, and message of the exhibition more broadly and ensuring the findings of the research are available in perpetuity as a learning resource.
Colleen reflected her own impressions of the exhibition, sharing that some of Versailles’ core audiences, who are ordinarily focused on the Ancien Régime, found an unexpected point of entry through the depictions of 18th century dance and performance – from a work by Pierre Alexandre Wille depicting one of the performances held in their honor, “Interior View of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, 1767”, or the score from the opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes.
“They know these works so well, but seeing them in this new context – the depictions of the dance and the performance alongside the material culture of native communities that inspired the performing artworks’ production – was a much richer experience and elevates our appreciation of this moment in history, as well as the various influences working on creative production at the time.”
Visitors will never see such an amazing selection of North American artefacts that are really the most important and culturally significant to the exhibition's native partners, in such a symbolic place like the Château de Versailles.
Moments like these reflect the exhibition’s broader success: bringing together two vastly different, yet once closely interrelated and mutually dependent, cultures through new research, deep historical understanding, and attenuation to the involvement and co-curation of present day indigenous leaders. Held on the 300th anniversary of the chief’s visit to Versailles, it truly brought the history forward to the present day, celebrating three centuries, and hopefully more, of cultural exchange.
Behind the scenes, the project required collaboration across numerous French institutions, including national archives, libraries, and museums that hold collections dispersed after the French Revolution. Château de Versailles became a natural partner in helping tell this story and it will forever by a part of an important record of exhibitions at the Palace, Museum, and National Estate of Versailles.
Ultimately, the exhibition challenges assumptions about what belongs in spaces like Versailles – and proves that museums can reshape how history is understood.
Sometimes, the most powerful exhibitions are the ones visitors never expect to find.
Scott Trowbridge
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