"Indians' Bygone Past:" The Banff Indian Days, 1902-1945

• Main Author: Meijer Drees, Laurie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: History and Classics Graduate Students' Association, University of Alberta 1993
• Subjects: Tourist trade > Alberta > Banff > History; Alberta > Banff > History; Assiniboine > Alberta; Indigenous peoples > Prairie Provinces; Luxton; Norman Kennedy; Whites > Relations with Indigenous peoples > Canada; Canada; Indian; assiniboine
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10613/2916

Between 1902 and 1945, the Banff Indian Days and annual Indian Exhibition promoted by local Banff entrepreneur Norman Luxton, were a success both locally and internationally. Tourists came from around the world to attend the week-long festivities. The Banff Indian Days could be considered the Canadian equivalent of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. These Banff Indian Days form not only an undescribed part of Canada's popular culture history, but are also an important source of information on the nature of Indian-White relations in the province of Alberta between 1902 and 1945 - a period and region relatively little investigated by historians interested in Native history. In this paper the structure and function of the Banff Indian Days are investigated using traditional historical methods as well as theoretical concepts borrowed from the discipline of Anthropology. The article concludes that the Banff Indian Days constituted a form of public ritual through which participating Indians were able to invent, assert, and have sanctioned, their separate and unique identities. This is an electronic version of an article published as: Meijer Drees, L. (1993).""Indians’ bygone past:" The Banff Indian Days, 1902-1945". Past Imperfect, 2, 7-28. Past Imperfect is the journal of the History and Classics Graduate Students’ Association at the University of Alberta and is available online at: https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pi/index. This article is available at: https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pi/article/view/1356.