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Vatican returned 62 artefacts to indigenous people on Saturday Canada As a part of the Catholic Church’s role in helping to suppress indigenous culture of America,
Pope Leo XIV gives artifacts and supporting documents to a delegation from 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 “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”
These objects are part of the Vatican Museums’ 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 objects taken from indigenous people during the colonial period.
Most of the objects in the Vatican collection were sent to the Vatican Rome For the 1925 exhibition by Catholic missionaries in the Vatican Gardens which was the highlight of that Holy Year.
The Vatican says the objects were a “gift” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the global reach of the church, its missionaries and the lives of the indigenous people they evangelized.
But historians, indigenous groups, and experts have long questioned whether the objects could actually have been offered for free, given the ongoing power imbalance in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping implement the Canadian government’s forced assimilation policy of eradicating Indigenous traditions, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called “cultural genocide.”
Part of that policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the 1885 potlatch ban that prohibited integral First Nations ceremonies. The confiscated objects ended up in museums in Canada, the US and Europe, as well as private collections.
After this, talks intensified on returning Vatican items Pope Francis 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who went to the Vatican to apologize for the church’s role in running Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During his visit, he was shown some of the items in the collection, including an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs, and masks, and was asked to return them.
Francis later said he was in favor of returning objects and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, adding: “In a case where you can return things, pointing out where it is necessary, it is better to do so.”
The Vatican said Saturday that the objects were given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition where they were first displayed in Rome.
“It is an act of ecclesial sharing with which the Successors of Peter entrust to the Church in Canada these artefacts, which testify to the history of encounter between the faith and the cultures of Indigenous peoples,” said a joint statement from the Vatican and the Canadian Church.
It states that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy is committed to ensuring that the artifacts are “appropriately preserved, respected and protected.” Officials had previously said that Canadian bishops would receive the artifacts with the express understanding that the ultimate keepers would be the indigenous communities themselves.
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