About Buffalo Nations

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The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum became the reality of a life-long dream of Norman K. Luxton, a successful businessman, journalist, adventurer, and great friend to the Stoney people, who lived in Banff from 1902-1962. His dream was the creation of a building to house an aboriginal collection celebrating the culture of the Plains Indians. The Luxton Museum (as it was previously known) began as a free museum in Mr. Luxton's Sign of the Goat Curio Shop (now known as the Banff Indian Trading Post). In the early 1950's, with the help of Eric L. Harvey, founder of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, construction of the current museum site was begun with expansions that occurred in 1955, 1957, and 1961, its completion year.

Following Mr. Luxton's death in 1962, the museum was operated under the Glenbow Alberta Institute until 1991, after which it was sold to the Buffalo Nations Cultural Society in March 1992. The Society is composed of members of Treaty 6 and 7, and the Metis. These Nations include the Cree, Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Peigan and Blood), Tsuu T'ina and the Stoney. The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum is a stand-alone division of the Buffalo Nations Cultural Society.

The Buffalo Nations Cultural Society began as an informal organization with the objective of establishing a cultural and educational facility near the mountains to promote understanding of aboriginal cultures, both within aboriginal communities and among visitors to the region.

Courtesy of Michael Robinson , Artist

The concept of the Buffalo Nations Cultural Society began over fifty years ago. Stoney Medicine Man Chief Walking Buffalo and a small group of Native Albertans through their world tour for peace and understanding urged intertribal cooperation and encouraged groups to establish cross-cultural links of understanding. With these goals in mind, and with the specific mission to promote understanding through cultural exchange and awareness, the Buffalo Nations Cultural Society was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 1989. The museum is owned and operated by the Buffalo Nations Cultural Society and run by a Board of Directors of the Luxton Museum Society, in the interests of the First Nations people of North American, for all peoples. The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum is dedicated to the appreciation, interpretation, demonstration and display of the cultures, traditions, and value of the First Nations people of North America and their trading partners. The museum seeks to show how the people of this land lived and adapted to their surroundings and each other prior to and after contact with European culture.

It is upon these principles that the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum was founded and continues to promote through interpretation, education, and display of cultural artifacts, visuals, and documentation.

The Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum provides a link between the past and the present by demonstrating that aboriginal arts and culture is alive and flourishing today!