Indigenous artifacts at Vatican Museums heading back to Canada after repatriation campaign

A rare Western Arctic kayak and other cultural objects in the Vatican Museums sent from Canada a century ago are finally going home after a long repatriation campaign by Indigenous groups and the federal government.

The objects will likely arrive by Christmas and will be stored by the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, two sources in Rome and Canada said. Representatives of Indigenous groups, with the help of the museum’s curators, will examine and catalogue them before they are sent to Indigenous communities for display.

The groups have been seeking their repatriation for many years as part of the residential schools reconciliation process. The schools, most of them run by the Catholic Church in Canada, were part of a decades-long effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples by systematically eradicating their languages and traditions.

The objects are changing hands in a church-to-church arrangement, one of the sources involved in the repatriation said. They will be gifts from the Vatican, and the official receiving party will be the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB). A direct museum-to-museum transfer would have been politically difficult, they said, because the Vatican does not want to set a precedent and have to entertain demands from museums around the world.

The Vatican Secretary of State, not the Vatican Museums, would make the official announcement of the repatriation, another source said.

The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.

In Canada, the Métis National Council and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami declined to comment on the repatriations.

Jean Vézina, secretary-general of the CCCB, told The Globe that “the CCCB supports the desire to reunite artifacts with their originating communities and would welcome this as another step in the ongoing journey of healing, reconciliation and hope. Any official announcement regarding next steps will be led by the Holy See at the appropriate time.”

The Assembly of First Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

Reached directly Monday by The Globe, Vatican Museums director Barbara Jatta said only: “No comment.”

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The Indigenous collection is largely held in the storage vaults of the Vatican Museums’ ethnological section, known as Anima Mundi.

The highest-profile artifact is the “Pope’s Kayak,” as it has come to be known. The sealskin Inuvialuit boat, which is 4.4 metres long, is at least a century old. The Vatican Museums removed the kayak from the vaults in late 2021 specifically so it could be seen by The Globe.

It and other Indigenous objects were seen in March, 2022, by visiting Inuit, Métis and First Nations delegates who had travelled to Rome to meet with Pope Francis to deliver a message about the devastating effects of residential schools.

The kayak is one of only six Mackenzie Delta kayaks – that is, from the Western Arctic – known to exist. (The larger, seagoing Baffin Island kayaks of the Eastern Arctic are more common.)

It and some 200 other Indigenous objects have rarely been seen since they first appeared at the Vatican’s first world expo in 1925. Pope Pius XI asked missionaries from Australia to Zambia to collect religious and non-religious artifacts made by Indigenous peoples and send them to Rome. More than 100,000 pieces arrived.

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Another high-profile artifact is a 229-centimetre-long wampum belt, which Vatican Museums catalogues say was “donated” to Pope Gregory XVI in 1831. The almost-200-year-old beaded belt, made from shells, is from Kanesatake, Que., and made a brief appearance at a Montreal museum in 2023 before being returned to the Vatican.

The return of the kayak and an unknown number of other objects marks a long-delayed victory for the Métis, Inuit and First Nations associations. While the Vatican has always been open about the collection from Canada, the Indigenous groups appeared largely unaware of it until the publication of a 2021 Globe article. Since then, they have put a lot of pressure on the Vatican, and Pope Francis before he died in April, for the artifacts’ return.

In 2023, the year after Francis visited Canada on a tour to apologize for the church’s role in residential schools, he expressed agreement on the importance of the objects’ return. “The restitution of Indigenous things. This is going on, with Canada, at least we are in agreement to do so,” he told reporters who were traveling with him on a papal visit.

A year later, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau met with Francis during the G7 meeting in Italy and urged him to follow through with his vow to return objects from First Nations. On social media, Mr. Trudeau said: “I thanked His Holiness for taking up the work of Reconciliation, and I advocated for the next step – returning cultural artifacts from the Vatican to Indigenous Peoples in Canada.”

Former foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly, now Industry Minister, also lobbied for the artifacts’ return when she met with Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin in April, 2024.

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Each of the sources contacted by The Globe said the negotiations to repatriate the objects have been difficult and fraught with nuance in terms of legalities, timing, logistics, restoration plans and final homes across Canada.

The kayak, for example, is extremely delicate. While its frame, probably made from driftwood, is unbroken, the sealskin cover is ripped in the bow and the stern. The boat was used for hunting beluga whales and was delivered to the Vatican with a double-bladed paddle, which was not put on display during its brief outings in 2021 and 2022.

One of the Vatican catalogues describes the condition of the wampum belt as “mediocre.” Other Indigenous objects from Canada in the museum include embroidered leather gloves of Cree origin and a colourful Gwich’in baby belt, both of which were put on display along with the kayak by Anima Mundi in 2022.

The kayak’s return to Canada caps a remarkable odyssey that began more than 20 years ago, when Robert Fung, then chairman of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., heard about the Indigenous collections at the Vatican and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. He made inquiries and received an invitation from the Vatican to see the artifacts.

Realizing he knew nothing about Arctic kayaks, he invited Kenneth Lister, a long-time student of Arctic skin boats, who was then the Royal Ontario Museum’s assistant curator of anthropology.

In an interview in 2021, Mr. Lister said he thinks the kayak was sent to Rome in 1925 partly because it was no longer needed – there is no evidence it was stolen. By the 1920s, Inuvialuit hunters were using bigger, safer wooden boats, probably supplied by whaling crews or the Hudson’s Bay Company, because they were low-maintenance and would not be eaten by dogs.

“Dogs would devour the skin kayaks,” Mr. Lister said. “That’s why they had to be stored up high, where the dogs couldn’t reach them.”

The kayak was sent by steamship to Edmonton in 1924. From there, it travelled by Canadian Pacific Railway to Montreal, where it was put on a ship to Genoa, the main port in northwestern Italy. From there, it was shipped to Rome. The Vatican Museums’ records describe the boat as “a work of great value.”

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