An exhibit on treaties that is traveling Minnesota opened Friday at a Franklin Avenue gallery, its only stop in Minneapolis this month.

Professor David Wilkins spoke to a largely Native American audience on the topic of the exhibit--"Why Treaties Matter."

He urged the crowd at Native American Community Development Institute's All My Relations gallery to read treaties for themselves, something he said too few Indians do. He said it's also important for whites to know what they represent. "Non-natives know virtually nothing of the treaties their ancestors signed," he said. But their very rights to the land they own began with native cessions of territory.

Willkins, who is from North Carolina, holds an appointment in American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota.

He described treaties as largely extra-constitutional documents between sovereign nations, but said that federal courts have wavered in their interpretations of treaty rights. That creates an "ambivalent and paradoxical status" for tribal groups and their treaties.

The exhibit at 1414 Franklin Av. E. will remain through March 31. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m.Tuesday through Fridays, and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

The show consists of 22 panels portraying the development of treaties and treaty rights in Minnesota, plus recorded interviews accessible via touch-panel screens. The exhibit also will appear May 1-30 at.Fort Snelling and Aug. 23-Sept. 22 at Ramsey County Historical Society in St. Paul. Other Minnesota stops are planned.

The exhibit grew out of a partnership among the Minnesota Humanities Center, Minnesota Indian Affairs Council and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.