Pope returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of reckoning with colonial past
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Vatican City on Saturday 62 works were returned To Indigenous peoples in Canada as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping to suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.
Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts and supporting documents, including an iconic Inuit canoe, to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According to a joint statement from the Vatican and the Canadian church, the pieces were a gift and “a tangible sign of dialogue, respect and brotherhood.”
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 a broader museum debate over the return of cultural items taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial times.
Many of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for an exhibition held in the Vatican gardens in 1925, one of the highlights of that year’s Holy Year.
The Vatican said these items were donated to Pope Benedict XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries, and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized. He insists that it is a “gift” to Pius.
But historians, indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether these items could truly be offered for free, given the power imbalances in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to implement the Canadian Government’s policy of forced assimilation to eliminate Indigenous traditions, called for by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “cultural genocide.”
Part of this policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the potlatch ban in 1885, which outlawed the First Nations ceremony. These confiscated items took their place in private collections as well as museums in Canada, the USA and Europe.
Negotiations on the return of products are accelerating
Negotiations regarding the return of Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis met with Indigenous leaders traveling to the Vatican in 2022. get your apology For the church’s role in operating Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, such as an Inuit canoe, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and requested their return.
Francis later said that it was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection say on a case-by-case basis: “In the case where you can return the items, it is better to do so in cases where a gesture is necessary.”
The Vatican said on Saturday that the items were returned during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition when they were first displayed in Rome.
“This is an act of religious sharing in which the Successor of Peter entrusted to the Church in Canada these works that testify to the history of encounter between faith and the cultures of Indigenous peoples,” said a joint statement from the Vatican and the Canadian church.
He added that Canada’s Catholic hierarchy is committed to ensuring that the works are “appropriately protected, respected and preserved.” Officials have previously said Canadian bishops would receive the works with the clear understanding that the ultimate custodians would be the Indigenous communities themselves.
The items are expected to be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Experts and Indigenous groups there will try to determine where the items came from and what should be done with them, down to the specific community, officials said previously.
The process of coming to terms with abuses
As part of a broader reckoning with the Catholic Church’s colonial past, the Vatican in 2023 officially rejected the “Doctrine of Discovery,” theories supported by 15th-century “popish orders” that legitimized colonial seizures of Indigenous lands that underpin some property laws today.
While the statement did not respond to Native demands that the Vatican formally revoke papal decrees, it marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s complicity in colonial-era abuses by European powers.
Leo’s return of the artifacts completes the “journey” begun by Francis, the Vatican said on Saturday, referring to the 2023 rejection of the Doctrine of Discovery.
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