{"id":380819,"date":"2025-11-15T13:44:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T13:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/380819\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T13:44:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T13:44:11","slug":"vatican-returns-62-artifacts-to-indigenous-peoples-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/380819\/","title":{"rendered":"Vatican returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

VATICAN CITY (AP) \u2014 The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts<\/a> to Indigenous peoples from Canada, a historic restitution that is part of the Catholic Church\u2019s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.<\/p>\n

Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is expected to return them to individual Indigenous communities. A joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church described the pieces as a \u201cgift\u201d and a \u201cconcrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The items were part of the Vatican Museum\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens. The Vatican insists the items were \u201cgifts\u201d to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church\u2019s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s forced assimilation policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called \u201ccultural genocide.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Negotiations accelerate on returning items<\/p>\n

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<\/a> for the church\u2019s role in running Canada\u2019s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including the Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.<\/p>\n

Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items<\/a> and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: \u201cIn the case where you can return things, where it\u2019s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 as a highlight of that Jubilee.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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,\u201d said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.<\/p>\n

It added that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy committed to ensuring that the artifacts are \u201cproperly safeguarded, respected and preserved.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A process of reckoning with abuses<\/p>\n

The Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, Joyce Napier, said the return had been a key priority for the Canadian government, something the embassy has been working on for years with the Holy See, Canadian church and Indigenous communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is historic, something Indigenous communities have been asking for,\u201d she told The Associated Press. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement is a significant step towards reconciliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

As part of its broader reckoning with the Catholic Church\u2019s colonial past, the Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the \u201cDoctrine of Discovery,\u201d the theories backed by 15th-century \u201cpapal bulls\u201d that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands that form the basis of some property laws today.<\/p>\n

The statement marked a historic recognition of the Vatican\u2019s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers, even though it didn\u2019t address Indigenous demands that the Vatican formally rescind the papal bulls themselves.<\/p>\n

The Vatican on Saturday cited the 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery in its statement, saying Leo\u2019s return of the artifacts concludes the \u201cjourney\u201d initiated by Francis.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP\u2019s collaboration<\/a> with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VATICAN CITY (AP) \u2014 The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada, a historic…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":380820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2147,20496,57,20149,182469,50,20211,3417,365,22062,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-380819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-catholic-church","10":"tag-general-news","11":"tag-indigenous-people","12":"tag-joyce-napier","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-pope-francis","15":"tag-pope-leo-xiv","16":"tag-religion","17":"tag-vatican-city","18":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115554016688950169","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}