Malki Museum is the oldest non-profit museum founded by Native Americans on a California Indian reservation, and has been the inspiration for several other Indian museums. It has a unique history and is committed to preserving the cultural traditions and history of the Cahuilla Indians and other southern California Indian tribes. Malki also founded an academic publishing press in 1965, which has printed many high quality books and materials on Native American culture, including the well-known Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology.

The Malki Museum is the home of an ethnobotanical garden which contains only botanical species used in the daily life of the Cahuilla. It was built and nurtured by dozens of volunteers in response to numerous requests for information about how the Cahuilla Indians utilized plants for food, medicine, clothing, housing, tools, and arts.

This unique garden acts as a living illustration to the book Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian Knowledge and Usage of Plants, by Katherine Siva Saubel. Her mother, who was a Cahuilla medicine woman, taught her the traditional plants and their uses, which Katherine later wrote down with the help of anthropologist Dr. Lowell Bean. The information from this book is used in the self-tour guide for the garden. The term Temalpakh is a Cahuilla word meaning “from the earth.”

The garden was re-designed in 1994, and the new demonstration garden, covering roughly ¼ of an acre, replaced a smaller garden. It incorporated full grown plants from the smaller garden, including jojoba, manzanita, sugarbush, elderberry, desert willow, and ribbonwood. Many of the major plants used by the Cahuilla are represented, and all of the plants are drip-irrigated.