Molly Kruckenberg, executive director of the Montana Historical Society, instructs a group of reporters to huddle into the replica of a mine shaft elevator. Video on floor to ceiling screens shows the walls crawling downward.
“On this red floor that you’re standing on, there’s some rumbles that will feel as if you’re descending into the mine shaft.”
When the video stops at an open cavity, archival footage that’s been digitized and colorized shows real Butte miners at work in a copper mine. The exhibit isn’t fully functional yet, but real audio of the miners will play in the background.
“It’s meant to make people feel as if they’re in that mine shaft interacting with people from our past, from 100 years ago, with the idea of understanding what it meant to be a miner in Butte, but also more importantly, to create conversations about the past,” Kruckenberg explains.
The interactive display is one of many in the Homeland Gallery of the Montana Heritage Center, the state’s new history museum.
The original Montana Historical Society museum closed in 2020 for construction. The expansion added 70,000 square feet. Crews were still putting the final touches on the building during the preview tour.
The Historical Society had been asking for the renovation for two decades with little success. Requests for bonds failed at the state Legislature several times. In 2017, one lawmaker proposed selling pieces from the state’s art collection to fund the expansion, but the historical society opposed that idea.
A breakthrough came in 2019. The state Legislature agreed to increase the state’s lodging tax to help fund the project. The state’s contribution totaled about $40 million.
The Historical Society had always planned to raise additional private funds, but that need grew as the COVID-19 pandemic suppressed tourism tax revenue and inflated building costs. The Historical Society ended up raising $60 million privately.
Kruckenberg says donors did not have a say in the museum’s exhibits. Those were designed by curators, like Amanda Trum. She says the state’s topography is the museum’s throughline.
“That’s the main theme of the entire homeland gallery – people’s connection to the land and what that means. How the land has affected us, how it has changed us, and how we have also changed the land.”
The main exhibit hall leads visitors through the history of the land and people of what’s now Montana. It starts with the last Ice Age and the land’s First Peoples.
Trum says the museum includes triumphant stories and some of the state’s darkest moments.
“Offering lots of different voices and perspectives has helped with that, and keeping it balanced and well-rounded.”
The Historical Society established a Tribal Stakeholders Group to help guide telling Indigenous history. Michael Black Wolf, the Tribal Preservation Officer for Fort Belknap Indian Community, was a member of the group. He says it was a hands-on experience.
“And so, we’d go in and revisit and reword. Or, you know, even essentially redesign in certain cases, certain circumstances.”
Black Wolf says he knows people have varied perspectives on historical events, but he says the museum sticks to the facts.
“I think we need to tell things the way it happened, whether it’s good, bad, indifferent. Or whether it’s skipping through a field of flowers, or if it makes us squirm in our chair.”
The new building includes a specially constructed smudging room where Native American visitors can take part in the sacred practice used to cleanse negative energy, a person or a space.
The museum will open to the public with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Dec. 2 at 3 p.m. It’ll be open seven days per week, except for Christmas and Thanksgiving day, and admission is free.
