Pope returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of reckoning with colonial past

Pope Francis dons a headdress during a visit with Indigenous peoples at Maskwaci, the former Ermineskin Residential School, Monday, July 25, 2022, in Maskwacis, Alberta. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts from its vast ethnographic collection to Indigenous peoples from Canada, as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.

Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it would return the items to Indigenous communities “as soon as possible.” A joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church described the pieces as a “gift” and a “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

The artifacts are expected to land in Montreal on Dec. 6 and be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, which will arrange for them to be “reunited with their originating communities,” said Pomeline Martinoski, director of communications for the Canadian bishops conference.

For a century, the items were part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known today as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.

Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens. The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.

But historians, Indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether the items could really have been offered freely, given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government’s forced assimilation policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”

That policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the 1885 potlatch ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony. Those confiscated items ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections.

The Canadian Foreign Ministry welcomed the return of the items. “This is an important step that honours the diverse cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples and supports ongoing efforts toward truth, justice, and reconciliation,” Foreign Minister Anita Anand posted on social media.

Negotiations accelerate on returning items

Negotiations on returning the Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church’s role in running Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including the Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.

Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: “In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.”

The Vatican said Saturday the items were intentionally being given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition.

“This is an act of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church in Canada these artifacts, which bear witness to the history of the encounter between faith and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples,” said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.

The “church-to-church” model used to return the items was similar to one used by the Holy See in 2023, when it gave its Parthenon Marbles to the Orthodox Christian Church in Greece. The three fragments were described by the Vatican then as a “donation” to the Orthodox church, not a state-to-state repatriation to the Greek government.

Describing the restitution of the 62 Indigenous artifacts as a “gift” irked some historians, who have not only questioned how the items arrived in the Vatican but demanded a much fuller accounting of what remains in its museum vaults. By some estimates, the original 1925 exhibition included 100,000 items from Indigenous groups around the world, of which 40,000 remain.

Leo “should know and acknowledge that these Indigenous ancestors were not gifted and the papal narrative needs correction,” said Gloria Bell, associate professor of art history at McGill University who has conducted extensive research on the 1925 exhibit and concluded that the Indigenous items were hardly given over freely.

“We need to remember that thousands of Indigenous ancestors remain in the Vatican Museums that need to be returned home and brought back into Indigenous care and Indigenous hands,” said Bell, who is of Metis ancestry and wrote about the 1925 exhibit in “Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome.”

The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the region where the kayak originated, is arranging the transportation of the artifacts to Canada. If any are of uncertain origin, the Canadian Museum of History will hold them in trust while research led by Indigenous experts is conducted to establish their provenance, said Martinoski of the Canadian bishops conference.

The Canadian bishops said the return was an important milestone in their efforts at reconciliation. It “represents the church’s ongoing friendship with Indigenous as well as our desire to support Indigenous communities in accompanying younger generations in passing on and valuing their heritage,” the conference president, Bishop Pierre Goudreault, said in a statement.

A process of reckoning with abuses

As part of its broader reckoning with the Catholic Church’s colonial past, the Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands that form the basis of some property laws today.

The statement marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers, even though it didn’t address Indigenous demands that the Vatican formally rescind the papal bulls themselves.

The Vatican on Saturday cited the 2023 repudiation and said Leo’s return of the artifacts concludes the “journey” of dialogue initiated by Francis.

Associated Press writer Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed.

Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press