The Manitoba Museum's origins are wonderfully humble. In the early 1890s, naturalist E. Thompson Seton wrote about a museum reportedly housed in the basement of Winnipeg's City Hall. By 1900 there was still no public museum in the city, only significant private collectors whose materials were exhibited in the Winnipeg Industrial Bureau building on Main Street. The Manitoba Museum Association formed in 1932, and the museum officially opened on December 15 of that year inside the Winnipeg Civic Auditorium alongside the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Volunteer honorary curators ran the operation for decades. It was not until the excitement surrounding Canada's 1967 Centennial that the museum received the funding and mandate for a purpose-built facility. Architect Herbert Henry Gatenby Moody designed the new building in 1965, and the original construction cost came to CA$3.5 million -- a sum that would eventually grow to CA$5.3 million, funded entirely by federal, provincial, and Winnipeg Foundation contributions.

The museum's centerpiece is impossible to miss. The Nonsuch Gallery houses a full-size replica of the ketch that sailed from England to Hudson Bay in 1668, and the surrounding gallery recreates a scene at a Deptford wharf in 1669, where the ship has supposedly just docked after her historic voyage. The gallery was updated and enhanced in 2018, timed to coincide with the 350th anniversary of that original sailing. In 1994, the Hudson's Bay Company donated its three-centuries-old corporate collection to the museum, along with supporting funds -- the largest corporate donation the museum had ever received. Half of that collection originated in First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities, acquired through trade, purchase, ceremonial gift exchange, and donations from fur traders and their families. The HBC considered it a legacy for all Canadians -- a gift to the nation.

With more than 2.9 million artifacts and specimens, the Manitoba Museum spans the province's story from its Arctic coast to its southern grasslands through nine interpretive galleries. The Earth History Gallery, opened in 1973, anchors the deep-time end of the narrative. The Ancient Seas exhibit includes a virtual underwater observatory showing the Hudson Bay region during the Ordovician period -- the museum was the first in Canada to recreate marine life from 450 million years ago. The Prairies Gallery, opened on April 8, 2021, was created with guidance from the Museum Indigenous Advisory Circle and a Community Engagement Team of newcomers to Manitoba. The Parklands/Mixed-Woods Gallery completed the grand design in September 2003. Together, the galleries chart a sweep from geological prehistory through Indigenous homeland, fur trade era, settlement boom, and the modern city that grew up around it all.

The museum's planetarium became the first in Canada to install Digistar 5 all-dome digital projection technology in 2012, capable of showing the sky as seen from anywhere on Earth -- or the galaxy -- at any point in history or the future. The original projector, affectionately nicknamed Marvin, remains a beloved fixture of the planetarium theatre even though it is no longer in use. The Science Gallery offers hands-on experiential learning, including a million-dollar Lake Winnipeg: Shared Solutions exhibit that opened in 2014, featuring a computer simulation of the entire Lake Winnipeg watershed where visitors act as stewards deciding which environmental problems to solve. The $20.5 million Bringing Our Stories Forward renewal project, completed in April 2021, refreshed the Nonsuch Gallery, created the new Winnipeg Gallery, and renewed the Boreal Forest Corridor and Welcome Gallery.