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

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican connected Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada arsenic portion of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its relation successful helping suppress Indigenous civilization successful the Americas.

Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According to a associated connection from the Vatican and Canadian church, the pieces were a acquisition and a “concrete motion of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

The items were portion of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known arsenic the Anima Mundi museum. The postulation has been a root of contention for the Vatican amid the broader depository statement implicit the restitution of taste goods taken from Indigenous peoples during assemblage periods.

Most of the items successful the Vatican postulation were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 accumulation successful the Vatican gardens that was a item of that year’s Holy Year.

The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to observe the church’s planetary reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.

But historians, Indigenous groups and experts person agelong questioned whether the items could truly person been offered freely, fixed the powerfulness imbalances astatine play successful Catholic missions astatine the time. In those years, Catholic spiritual orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government’s forced assimilation argumentation of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”

Part of that argumentation included confiscating items utilized successful Indigenous spiritual and accepted rituals, specified arsenic the 1885 potlatch prohibition that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony. Those confiscated items ended up successful museums successful Canada, the U.S. and Europe, arsenic good arsenic backstage collections.

Negotiations connected returning the Vatican items accelerated aft Pope Francis successful 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church’s relation successful moving Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown immoderate objects successful the collection, including an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, warfare clubs and masks, and asked for them to beryllium returned.

Francis aboriginal said helium was in favour of returning the items and others successful the Vatican postulation connected a case-by-case basis, saying: “In the lawsuit wherever you tin instrumentality things, wherever it’s indispensable to marque a gesture, amended to bash it.”

The Vatican said Saturday the items were fixed backmost during the Holy Year, precisely 100 years aft the 1925 accumulation wherever they were archetypal exhibited successful Rome.

“This is an enactment of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church successful Canada these artifacts, which carnivore witnesser to the past of the brushwood betwixt religion and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples,” said the associated connection 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 antecedently said the Canadian bishops would person the artifacts with the explicit knowing that the eventual keepers volition beryllium the Indigenous communities themselves.

The items are expected to beryllium taken archetypal to the Canadian Museum of History successful Gatineau, Quebec. There, experts and Indigenous groups volition effort to place wherever the items originated, down to the circumstantial community, and what should beryllium done with them, officials said previously.

As portion of its broader reckoning with the Catholic Church’s assemblage past, the Vatican successful 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 signifier the ground of immoderate spot laws today.

The connection marked a historical designation of the Vatican’s ain complicity successful colonial-era abuses committed by European powers, adjacent though it didn't code Indigenous demands that the Vatican formally rescind the papal bulls themselves.

The Vatican connected Saturday cited the 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery successful its statement, saying Leo's instrumentality of the artifacts concludes the “journey” initiated by Francis.

___

Associated Press religion sum receives enactment done the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with backing from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely liable for this content.