Galt exhibit examines history of Fort Macleod hotel

By Lethbridge Herald on April 22, 2023.

Kristine Alexander, associate professor of history at the U of L, and curator Tyler Stewart talk in front of the American Hotel exhibit Friday at the Galt Museum. Herald photo by Alejandra Pulido-Guzman

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – apulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The Galt Museum and Archives has opened a new exhibit about the history of the American Hotel located in Fort Macleod, showcasing the work of a graduate student from the University of Lethbridge. 

Curator Tyler Stewart said this exhibition was developed by Ryley Gelinas, the museum’s guest curator as a masters’ project for her studies at the University of Lethbridge.  

“What I think is cool about this exhibition is that anyone who’s really spent anytime driving through southern Alberta has gone past the American Hotel in Fort Macleod. It’s definitely a landmark, but because it’s been closed for so long now it has this weird spectral – almost like it’s haunting the landscape in a way,” said Stewart. 

Through a combination of archival sources, newspaper articles, and oral history interviews, this exhibition portrays the American Hotel and its history as a contact zone over the course of the 1950s to the 1980s through different owners, exploring patron interactions and examining police surveillance.

“Riley has done a great job, I think, of turning to the community to find a number of perspectives on what the American Hotel means to the town of Fort Macleod and the greater southern Alberta and Blackfoot communities of the region,” said Stewart. 

He said the exhibit looks at how the American Hotel is, and was, a contact zone for Indigenous-settler relations.

“Within the Blackfoot communities of southern Alberta, the American Hotel was seen as somewhat of a safe place to hang out and to socialize, whereas there was a lot of racism and discrimination in other establishments in Fort Macleod and in much of southern Alberta,” said Stewart. 

He said the exhibit looks at how the American Hotel was a place where different types of interactions happened between both indigenous and settler peoples, but also between different tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy and what role the American Hotel played in how those interactions unfolded. 

Associate professor of History at the University of Lethbridge and Gelinas’ masters supervisor, Kristine Alexander said to her knowledge in her 10 years at the U of L, this is the first academic investigation done on the iconic building. 

“I didn’t grow up in southern Alberta, but when I moved here, every time I drove past it, I wondered what’s the history, why was it abandoned, and it’s just such an evocative structure. One of the things that I found working at the U of L is that there’s so many stories about the history of this place that still need to be examined,” said Alexander. 

She said Gelinas came up with the idea for the exhibit while she was still in undergraduate studies and she told her this was a graduate student level project at the time. 

“I think that this is just one of an enormous number of fascinating important human stories that are starting to be uncovered, and I think that this collaboration between the University of Lethbridge and the Galt Museum it’s just absolutely brilliant, in terms of the way that it is able to bring those stories to life and to bring academic kind of in-depth research to a broader public,” said Alexander. 

The American Hotel exhibit is on display now until Oct. 8.

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