VATICAN CITY – The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts from its vast ethnographic collection to Indigenous peoples in Canada, part of the Catholic Church's reckoning with its role in suppressing Indigenous culture in the Americas.
Pope Francis gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, 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 will arrive in Montreal on Dec. 6 and go first to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, which will arrange for them to be "reunited with their originating communities," said Pomeline Martinoski, communications director for the Canadian bishops conference.
For a century, the items were part of the Vatican Museum's ethnographic collection, now called the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been controversial amid a broader debate over returning cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.
Most of the items 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 were freely given, citing power imbalances in Catholic missions at the time. Catholic religious orders then helped enforce the Canadian government's forced assimilation policy, 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. "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 accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church's role in Canada's residential schools. During their visit, they saw 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 favored 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 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.
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 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 questioned how the items arrived in the Vatican and demanded a fuller accounting of what remains in its museum vaults. By some estimates, the original 1925 exhibition included 100,000 items from Indigenous groups worldwide, 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 researched the 1925 exhibit and concluded the Indigenous items were hardly given 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 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 establishes their provenance, said Martinoski.
The Canadian bishops said the return was an important milestone in reconciliation efforts. 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," conference president Bishop Pierre Goudreault said in a statement.
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 and form the basis of some property laws today.
The statement marked a historic recognition of the Vatican's 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.
