Le Musée de St. Boniface Museum

The fur trade: model of a Mon­treal canoe.

The Saint-Boniface Museum’s col­lec­tions doc­u­ment the evo­lu­tion of the Fran­coph­one com­mu­nity since it estab­lished itself in the Cana­dian West, par­tic­u­larly as it devel­oped in Man­i­toba. There are some 30,000 arti­facts in the Museum.

The col­lec­tions may be divided into four main categories:

• his­toric
• eth­no­log­i­cal
• fine arts
• archival

Por­trait of Joseph-Philippe Guay, mayor of the City of St. Boni­face in the 1960s, painted by Pauline Boutal.

The his­toric col­lec­tion includes, for exam­ple, the fol­low­ing: French-Canadian and Métis fur­ni­ture (the Proulx loom, the Malo chest-on-chest, a Que­bec armoire, the Moïse Richard table and arm­chair); craftsmen’s tools (black­smith, car­pen­ter, tin­smith) and pro­fes­sional equip­ment (Doc­tor Collin’s sur­gi­cal instru­ments); objects typ­i­cal of pio­neer liv­ing (but­ter churn, oil lamp) and of agri­cul­ture (scythe, sickle, plough); and objects linked to reli­gious obser­vance (litur­gi­cal vest­ments, cru­ci­fix, can­dle­sticks). Objects related to leisure time and enter­tain­ment include toys and home made stat­uettes, and musi­cal instru­ments such as vio­lins that belonged to Claude Ayotte and Andy De Jarlis.

The col­lec­tion of eth­no­log­i­cal arti­facts from the First Nations of the Prairies includes bead­work (gloves, a coat, moc­casins), a pes­tle used for pound­ing pem­mi­can, a “tikinagan”or baby car­rier, and archae­o­log­i­cal spec­i­mens that include arrow­heads, spear­heads and stone tools.

The fine arts col­lec­tion con­tains paint­ings, sculp­tures, water­colours, and draw­ings cre­ated by Franco-Manitoban and Métis artists such as Réal Bérard, Jules Des­jar­lais, Hubert Gar­nier and Miguel Joyal; por­traits of the may­ors of St. Boni­face painted by Vic­tor A. Long; sev­eral of Pauline Boutal’s works, includ­ing a paint­ing of the old Grey Nuns’ con­vent. Part of the Museum’s archival col­lec­tion is stored in the Cen­tre du pat­ri­moine (Her­itage Cen­tre), which is man­aged by the Société his­torique de Saint-Boniface. There, more than 1,300 pho­tographs and hun­dreds of doc­u­ments are made avail­able to researchers who are inter­ested in Franco-Manitoban and Métis his­tory. More­over, the Museum holds some 1,800 rare and older books in this collection.

Exhibit Themes

Louis Riel: Son of Red River and Father of Man­i­toba exhibit

The themes that the Museum inter­prets shape its col­lec­tions and influ­ence the way exhi­bi­tions are devel­oped. The themes are:

• the fur trade (Hudson’s Bay Com­pany trade gun, voyageur sash, model of a Mon­treal canoe, small box);
• the ori­gins and devel­op­ment of the Métis nation (tea ket­tle, Red River cart, snow­shoes, bead­work [leg­gings and cush­ion], fur­ni­ture, tools, arti­facts from the Union nationale métisse Saint-Joseph du Manitoba);
• the Red River Colony; · the arrival of the mis­sion­ar­ies and the Grey Nuns
• Louis Riel (moc­casins, tuque, hairs from his beard, part of his sus­penders, his revolver) and the cre­ation of Man­i­toba (gun seized at Upper Fort Garry);
• the City of St. Boni­face (the mayor’s chair, a councillor’s cap, publications);
• the evo­lu­tion of the French-speaking pop­u­la­tion in var­i­ous fields after the sec­ond wave of French and French-Canadian immi­gra­tion – socio-economically (arti­facts from busi­nesses), edu­ca­tion­ally (school sup­plies and col­lec­tions of books), and lin­guis­ti­cally and cul­tur­ally (Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day medal).