Montana Built a $107 Million Museum. Its Smallest Room Says a Lot About the Thought That Went Into Designing the Space

The Montana Heritage Center in Helena has a smudge room. It is open to the public and teaches non-Native visitors why a room dedicated to the burning of cleansing materials, a practice of many Indigenous cultures, is needed

Vanita Salisbury | Freelance travel writer

September 14, 2026 12:51 p.m.

Montana-Heritage-Center-Exterior-Helena_Credit-Sarah-Bolt,-Tempest-Technologies_35.jpg — The center opened in December 2025. Sarah Bolt/Tempest Technologies

You can take a few different paths upon entering the new Montana Heritage Center in Helena. Go left, and explore the life and works of prolific “cowboy artist” Charles M. Russell, creator of more than 2,000 paintings and sculptures of the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Straight ahead are views of the State Capitol. But before any of that, I’d urge you toward the right, to a small plaque marking a windowless room. This room—the smallest in the museum—might be the most important one in the whole place.

The plaque marks the smudge room. For members of Montana’s 13 sovereign tribal nations, some of the items in the museum’s galleries are living entities. “They embody layers of meaning and are deeply connected to the past, present and future of Indigenous communities,” says Nina Sanders, curator of Indigenous collections at the Heritage Center and a member of the Apsáalooke and Piikani Nations. Encountering them can surface joy or trauma in equal measure. To center themselves and enter that space safely, visitors smudge: burning materials like pine, sage, cedar and sweetgrass, then wafting the smoke over themselves as a form of blessing, cleansing and preparation. The museum also smudges to purify and protect the sacred items in its care. Many, though not all, Indigenous cultures practice smudging.

Smudging also happens on the way out of a space, even more often than on the way in, Sanders explains. “These things belong to people, and they’re not with us anymore,” she says. “We believe that a lot of those things still hold and contain that energy.” Many Native people believe that energy can follow a visitor out of the space; smudging on departure dispels it, keeping them protected.

Montana Built a $107 Million Museum. Its Smallest Room Says a Lot About the Thought That Went Into Designing the Space — Placed in plain view at the entrance, the smudge room becomes an opportunity to explain to non-Native visitors why such a room is necessary at all. Kevin Scott

Smudge rooms have long existed in tribal spaces like colleges and hospitals in the United States, and they are increasingly appearing in other places. Mayo Clinic converted a historic parlor into one in 2019, and Montana State University just built one into its new American Indian Hall. But this was the first one I’d seen incorporated prominently in a museum. It feels welcoming: Brightly lit and airy, the room itself is curved and built with natural materials. Stones embedded into the floor mimic the feeling of walking outdoors. Strips of wood on the wall are tactile, inviting touch. And, most important, it has high ceilings and a powerful HVAC system that makes burning safe indoors.

I’ve strolled through at least a dozen museums with strong Indigenous collections. So why, I thought, was this the first time I’d ever seen a smudge room?

The short answer is money. Museums often object to smudging over ventilation concerns that require expensive air-cleaning technology to ease. Montana finally found the budget with the Heritage Center’s $107 million renovation, which expanded the 95,000-square-foot building, home to the Montana Historical Society (a territorial agency dating to 1865) and exhibitions on Montana history, culture, people and art, by 70,000 square feet. The center opened in December 2025.

The longer answer is a person: architect Major Robinson, a Northern Cheyenne tribal member from Lame Deer, Montana, who was a consultant on the project and became the smudge room’s biggest champion.

Robinson spent years as a designer based in California, Florida and Japan, where he helped design theme park attractions for Sanrio, Disneyland and Universal Studios, before returning to Montana with his wife in 1999. “It was a process of me finding my way back to my culture,” he explains. “I was raised on the reservation, but I hadn’t really delved into who I am as a Northern Cheyenne. And so when I moved back to the reservation, it’s like, hey, I can design, I can build buildings, so why not translate that into our culture?”

He brought that philosophy to buildings like the Northern Cheyenne Youth Services Center, a tribal juvenile detention and care facility in Busby. There, even something as simple as adding more windows to connect with the outside environment is imbued with traditional beliefs. He was also working on the American Indian Hall at Montana State University when, in 2020, he was tapped by Cushing Terrell—architects of record for the Montana Heritage Center—as a cultural design liaison for the museum’s expansion. Twenty years in the making, the project consisted of renovating the original 1950s-era Veterans and Pioneers Memorial Building, home to the Montana Historical Society, and adding a 70,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility with space to display items from the Historical Society’s vast archives, along with the smudge room, the Central Commons space for art markets and dinners, a café, and an events center.

Robinson assumed the same role on the center’s exhibit design team. He provided cultural design direction through in-person and Zoom meetings, then moved on-site to advise once construction and exhibit fabrication began.

In practice, this meant grounding the project in Indigenous materials, traditions and values. “We would have a ground blessing, and not a groundbreaking,” Robinson says, eschewing conventional design language. “Groundbreaking is really a way for the Western world to build a building. But when we start buildings, we have a ground blessing, because we’re going to introduce this building with mother earth.” The building’s curved walkways echo natural forms, and its entrance takes the shape of a Sovereign Nations Arbor—the same structure used for a powwow dance circle. The smudge room’s placement matters, too: It sits on the building’s eastern side, “important to us with our lodges,” Robinson notes, since Plains tribes’ lodges traditionally face east to greet the sun.

A handful of other museums do have smudge rooms. However, these spaces are typically reserved for tribal members. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has a ceremonial room—used for both smudging and conducting spiritual ceremonies—in its Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, which houses more than 825,000 Indigenous objects from the Western Hemisphere. The space is not open to the general public, according to Dennis Zotigh, a North American cultural specialist at the museum and a member of the Kiowa, Isanti Dakota and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo tribes, but it is made available to tribal members visiting these collections by appointment.

Before Montana Heritage Center’s smudge room was in the picture, holding smudging ceremonies meant improvising outside, or formally shutting down the building’s fire suppression system, giving advance notice to the proper state authorities. “It doesn’t feel great to have the sprinkler system shut down,” says Amanda Trum, the museum’s curatorial manager.

While many states have moved to include Indigenous history in their curricula, Montana remains the only U.S. state with a constitutional mandate requiring it be taught in all public schools. Now the smudge room carries that same educational spirit, serving as a prime example of how to design a culturally weighted space—one whose experiential quality is more shaped by the accumulated cultural, historical or social significance than by physical properties—for a general audience. Placed in plain view at the entrance, it becomes an opportunity to explain to non-Native visitors why such a room is necessary at all.

“They get an introduction to us right away,” says Robinson. “Not only is it for Indigenous people, it invites non-Natives to come in and learn about our practices.”

Though an unofficial term, some scholars refer to the period following European contact as the “Dark Ages of Native history,” defined by incredible demographic and cultural collapse, when Indians in what is now the U.S. were presumed to be vanishing as the population fell from an estimated 10 million to roughly 250,000 by the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century. Over 1,500 government-authorized wars, attacks and raids—more than against the Indigenous population of any other country—devastated the population, compounded by diseases like smallpox brought by Europeans and by boarding school and foster care practices that separated children from their tribes and families.

Federal policy hastened the decline by targeting different generations. The 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act broke up tribal lands and parceled them out to individuals, while Indian boarding schools forced assimilation on younger generations. “The Dawes Act placed lands in the hands of individual Native people, disrupting communal land ownership on the reservation, but it was really a corrupt vehicle to dispossess Native people of additional lands,” says Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 1883 to 1978, the U.S. also criminalized Native cultural and religious practice under the Code of Indian Offenses, suppressing traditional singing and dancing and making participation in Native religious ceremonies a crime.

Quick fact: The Occupation of Alcatraz

In November 1969, a group of Native American students, calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes, landed by boat at Alcatraz Island. LaNada Means, a student organizer, told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, “Here, in this white man’s prison, we have found freedom for the first time.” The activists occupied the island for 19 months before federal officials evicted them.

Anthropologists, believing Native peoples were doomed and without agency, urgently practiced what’s now known as “salvage anthropology.” “They believed that Native people were on the road to extinction,” Lonetree explains. “So [the late 19th and early 20th century] is the period of rapid collecting of all things Indian, from our languages to our cultural belongings and even to our ancestral remains. … They believed themselves to be in a race against time to collect and archive the last vestiges of a dying race.”

By the time it became clear Native Americans were not disappearing, sacred and cultural items had already been pillaged. Artifacts were defined through Western scientific categories of manufacture and use. “It was this idea that we were only what we created,” Lonetree says. “So you have cases overflowing with various forms of weaponry and things like that.” Museum displays then treated Native culture as static, reinforced by dioramas, a popular natural history museum technique that froze Native people in time. The approach also obscured the immense historical, cultural and linguistic diversity of Native nations into broad regional groupings, and it failed to connect the objects on view to the living descendants of the people who made them.

Indigenous activists pushed back throughout the 20th century, with the Red Power movement of the 1960s advocating for Native protection and autonomy against encroaching assimilation. The 1969-1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island, in which Native activists claimed the former federal prison under treaty rights to reclaim unused federal land, became one of the movement’s most visible protests. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act codified this pressure into law, requiring museums and federal agencies to return Native American human remains, funerary objects and sacred items to lineal descendants and tribes.

Lonetree’s work focuses on Native American activism in museums. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Native American museum movement protested stereotypical displays of Native history and culture and the collection and display of ancestral remains. It also brought Native people into the museum profession itself, as more Native professionals entered the field and began challenging Western museums’ authority to represent Native communities without including Native voices and perspectives—a shift closely tied to the broader repatriation movement pressuring for the return of cultural objects and ancestral remains.

Alongside this, the tribal museum movement empowered Native communities to control how their own cultures were represented. The development of cultural centers accelerated in the late 1970s, tied to Native economic development, and gained further momentum after the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which ensured that tribes were the primary beneficiaries of gaming revenue on reservations. Gaming profits help fund some, but not all, tribal museums. These museums matter beyond their own communities, Lonetree notes, because they pioneered community-collaborative curatorial methods that influenced the larger museum world.

“They are developing these exhibitions with and for Native people,” Lonetree says, “so tribal museums are very important when we think about that shifting relationship between Native people and museums.”

In time, mainstream museums have followed suit, shifting from top-down curation to collaborative models that hand decision-making power to Native communities through advisory boards and consultation. The Arizona State Museum, for example, has worked with the Southwest Native Nations Advisory Board since the 1980s; an influential model for other institutions, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. opened in 2004 after extensive consultation with American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiian communities on its exhibitions and architecture.

Robinson’s mandate went beyond just incorporating Indigenous design elements into the Montana Heritage Center; he was tasked with embedding the tribes themselves in the planning meetings. Montana has 13 sovereign nations, or self-governing bodies, on seven reservations (plus the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, federally recognized in 2019 but landless), and the museum wanted all of them at the table. As the cultural design liaison, Robinson first reached out to each tribe’s tribal historic preservation officer, a federally funded, tribally employed position responsible for safeguarding cultural history. “A lot of times as tribal people, we just kind of stand back,” he says. “But when you invite someone, you acknowledge their expertise and value it.” Each tribal council then approved its preservation officer, or named someone else, as a representative on the center’s Tribal Stakeholders Group. The group’s members selected artifacts for exhibition (in some cases repatriating them), reviewed and revised interpretive text, vetted imagery, identified tribal members for media components, and shaped how Indigenous perspectives were honored in the architecture itself. The hope is that the consulting group continues to shape the center’s programming.

The center has two semi-permanent galleries: the Charles M. Russell Gallery and the Homeland Gallery, which chronicles Montana history from the Ice Age to today. A temporary gallery and several large cases in the hallways rotate periodically. At any given time, several thousand artifacts are on display, out of more than 60,000 in the museum’s collection. That figure doesn’t even include thousands of items in the library and archives, a repository for everything from state prison receipts to administrative logs.

The clearest example of the stakeholder group’s authority came when the center reimagined its Homeland Gallery. Previously, the center had displayed stone and bone tools from the Anzick site—a roughly 13,000-year-old burial of an 18-month-old boy found in 1968 on private land just south of Wilsall, Montana. The artifacts from the only known Clovis burial in North America ended up divided among three private families who had lent them to the museum since the 1980s. The boy’s remains were reburied in 2014, and the display of the tools had always been a little contentious, says Trum—the objects were unambiguously sacred, part of a burial, even if they’d been on public view for decades.

Staff put the question to the stakeholders: Was it appropriate to keep displaying tools taken from a child’s grave? Most felt strongly that the items should be reinterred with the boy, that separating them from him violated the intent of the people who had buried him that way in the first place. But not everyone agreed at first. “There were some tribal member representatives that said, ‘No, we can still display them,’” Robinson says. It took roughly a year of back-and-forth to reach consensus: The artifacts came off display entirely. The exhibit instead features photos of the tools, and, in a video, contemporary Native leaders share Indigenous perspectives on the Anzick child.

Rather than relegating Native history to a single section, it’s woven through the exhibition space, primarily in the Homeland Gallery. Visitors enter through a multicultural round dance display, where shoes spanning every era and walk of life are arranged in a circle, with an impeccably preserved pair of 1890s Blackfeet moccasins alongside cowboy boots and combat gear. I’m drawn to an interactive station that lists the names of all sovereign nations in their own languages, pronouncing each at the press of a button. Here, visitors learn how tribal members refer to themselves in their own tongues, not just the names history gave them. Other displays explain why the buffalo was, and still is, central to Indigenous life. A replica mineshaft elevator rumbles visitors down into early Butte mining days.

Arranged like a timeline, the gallery doesn’t shy away from the hard parts. “We talk about genocide in this exhibition. We talk about things that are really uncomfortable for a lot of people, no matter what background they come from,” says Sanders. Visitors move from the prehistoric era into darker chapters: the eradication of Native people, the near extinction of the bison, forced removal onto reservations and boarding schools that tore apart Indigenous family structures. “These are super depressing topics,” says Sanders, which is part of why Native museumgoers are more likely to smudge at the end of a visit than at the beginning. After walking through that history, she says, smudging “essentially helps them to recenter.”

Finally, in the “Sovereign Nations” exhibit within the Homeland Gallery, the story turns to resistance, how tribal people pushed back against assimilation and how they live today. Each nation has its own dedicated artifact case, curated entirely by its stakeholders. One case holds a Crow war shield. “That comes from my community, and they’re precious because they’re so incredibly powerful,” Sanders says. “When we take them out, they change the weather. It rains. It snows. People are imbued with dreams, things like that. So it’s a sacred object.” A tepee doubles as a screening room, playing video of each tribe’s celebrations, songs and cultural leaders.

Visitors leave with a sense of tribal life as something vibrant, joyous and alive today. Robinson says students from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation have reacted with cries of recognition: “Oh, my God, there’s Auntie! There’s Grandma!” “They’re seeing themselves there,” he says.

He chokes up a bit. “This museum is not just of the past,” he says. “It’s who we are today, and you see us for who we are.”

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Montana Built a $107 Million Museum. Its Smallest Room Says a Lot About the Thought That Went Into Designing the Space

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