For many, opening day of the New Mexico History Museum on Sunday was like watching their middle-school classroom history books come alive. For others, it was more personal, something akin to turning the pages of an old family scrapbook.

"Over here, grandma, look over here," Mitchell Yellowhorse called to his grandmother, Harriet Marmon, 68, as she neared the photo exhibit recalling the forced assimilation of New Mexico Indians into their conquerors' culture in the late 1880s.

"That's right next to your Aunt Jessie's house," Marmon said to Mitchell, pointing to an aging photo of Native Americans gathered outside a building on the Isleta Pueblo south of Albuquerque.

Marmon recalled the family stories of her grandmother, Susie Rayos Marmon, being forced with hundreds of other Pueblo Indians to travel to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where the goal was to eliminate the Indians' culture, religion and traditions, and replace them with those of the Anglo-Saxon invaders.

Despite the Carlisle teachers' best efforts, Susie Marmon, about 12 at the time, "didn't let them wipe her out," Harriet Marmon said.

Her grandmother returned to the Isleta and Laguna pueblos and taught not only reading, writing and the white man's ways that she had learned at the Carlisle boarding school, but also continued to instill the native culture and traditions in her students.

Marmon said her grandmother believed that "you save yourself through your strengths."

She said it is good that the museum did not ignore or gloss over the many hardships inflicted on the Pueblo people by a long list of occupiers.

"We didn't shy away from tough exhibits," said Mary Anne Redding, the museum's curator of photographs, "because then you are not telling the history."

In an example of the past meeting the present, Marmon noted that she and her grandson had taken the Rail Runner train from Albuquerque especially to visit the museum.

Sunday was the museum's grand opening, and about the time Marmon and her grandson were winding their way through the main exhibits, Gov. Bill Richardson was leading a delegation of dignitaries from as far away as Mexico City and Madrid, Spain, in ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Richardson thanked a host of New Mexicans, high and low, who had made construction of the museum possible.

Citing the contributions of New Mexico's many immigrants over hundreds of years, Richardson said the 96,000-square-foot museum "brings to life the stories of how we got to this place."

Richardson used a pair of 18th-century scribe's scissors to cut the ribbon separating the museum from the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors.

Other speakers included Ambassador Patricia Espinosa of the Mexican Foreign Affairs Ministry; Francis Levine, the museum's director; and D. Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo, the Spanish ambassador to the United States.

As though to demonstrate the speakers' points about multicultural influences, back in the museum, Roberto Ortega and his family from Albuquerque were admiring the Poncho Villa exhibit. In text and artifacts, including Villa's death mask, the display recalled Villa's 1915 and 1916 raids into New Mexico, and the efforts of the First New Mexican Infantry to capture him.

Ortega, who moved to Albuquerque from Chihuahua, Mexico, 10 years ago, called the museum's displays an important reflection of the contribution of many cultures to the state's history.

"This land used to be part of Mexico," Ortega noted. "We have a strong sense (of a mixing) of the cultures of Mexico and this land."

By 2 p.m. Sunday, about 7,000 people had passed through the museum's doors, Redding said.