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

The items were part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known 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 that was a highlight of that year’s Holy Year.

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.”

Part of 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.

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 an 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 given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition where they were first exhibited in Rome.

“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.

It added that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy committed to ensuring that the artifacts are “properly safeguarded, respected and preserved." Officials had previously said the Canadian bishops would receive the artifacts with the explicit understanding that the ultimate keepers will be the Indigenous communities themselves.

The items are expected to be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. There, experts and Indigenous groups will try to identify where the items originated, down to the specific community, and what should be done with them, officials said previously.

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 of the Doctrine of Discovery in its statement, saying Leo's return of the artifacts concludes the “journey” initiated by Francis.

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