CALGARY'S CULTURE CACHE: GLENBOW MUSEUM

It's Around Here Somewhere:
This is Indian Land

Story and photo by Stephen A. Nelson

Brandon Sun / Canadian Press

The Glenbow Museum is just a stone’s throw from the Calgary Tower. And, as the jewel in Calgary’s cultural crown, you’d think it would be hard to miss.

Unfortunately, people seem to miss it all the time. Located in a nondescript, almost windowless edifice that looks like a mall/office building, we walked past the place twice before figuring out that you had to go into the “mall” to find the museum’s entrance.

Once inside the museum, we were glad we’d persevered — and wondered why we’d never been here before.

The star attraction of the Glenbow is the Blackfoot Gallery — featuring the story of this area’s first peoples, as told by the descendants of those tribes and nations that made up the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Of course, it’s a long and complex story and it would probably be best told over several nights. Ideally, it would be told by real storytellers to a real audience, sitting around a real campfire.

But the Glenbow has made an admirable attempt at working with the Blackfoot to help them tell their own stories through voice and video recordings, photographs and artifacts.

And we did get some insight into Blackfoot culture and history — from the beautiful stories of Creation to the horror stories of the residential schools.

Sometimes the story seems a bit simplified or uneven — like learning Biblical history from “Mysteries of the Bible” on A&E.

Still, of all the exhibits at the Glenbow, this seems to be the most careful, most complete, most “correct.” If other exhibits were done as well, you couldn’t hide this jewel for long.