VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican Museums are home to some of the most magnificent artworks in the world, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to ancient Egyptian antiquities and a pavilion full of papal chariots. But one of the museum’s least-visited collections became its most contested one ahead of Pope Francis’ trip to Canada in late July.
The Vatican’s Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the food court and right before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and art created by Indigenous peoples from around the world, much of it sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens.
The Vatican says the feathered headdresses, carved walrus tusks, masks and embroidered animal skins 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 Indigenous groups from Canada, who were shown a few items in the collection when they traveled to the Vatican this past spring to meet with Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else may be in storage after decades of not being on public display.
Some say they want them back.
“These pieces that belong to us should come home,” said Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, who headed the Metis delegation that asked Francis to return the items.
Restitution of Indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, was one of the many agenda items that awaited Francis on his trip to Canada in July.
The trip was aimed primarily at allowing the pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for abuses Indigenous people and their ancestors suffered at the hands of Catholic missionaries in notorious residential schools.
Caron said returning the missionary collection items would help heal the intergenerational trauma and enable Indigenous peoples to tell their own story.
“For so long we had to hide who we were. We had to hide our culture and hide our traditions to keep our people safe,” she said. “Right now, in this time when we can publicly be proud to be Metis, we are reclaiming who we are. And these pieces, these historic pieces, they tell stories of who we were.”
More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress Indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the 1885 Potlatch Ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony.
Government agents confiscated items used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some of them ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections. The Vatican’s catalog of its Americas collection, for example, features a wooden painted mask from the Haida Gwaii islands of British Columbia that “is related to the Potlatch ceremony.”
There are international standards guiding the issue of returning Indigenous cultural property, as well as individual museum policies. The 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, asserts that nations should provide redress, including through restitution, of cultural, religious and spiritual property taken “without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.”
It is possible Indigenous peoples gave their handiworks to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 expo or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the items could have been offered freely given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions and the government’s policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”
The Holy See’s Indigenous collection began centuries ago, with some pre-Columbian items sent to Pope Innocent XII in 1692, and has been amplified over the years by gifts to popes, especially on foreign trips. Of the 100,000 items originally sent for the 1925 exhibit, the Vatican says it has kept 40,000.
It has repatriated some items. In 2021, Vatican News reported that the Anima Mundi had recently returned to Ecuador a shrunken head used in rituals by the Jivaroan peoples of the Amazon.
Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as spiritual adviser to the spring First Nations delegation, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be “rematriated,” or brought back home to the motherland.
“You can sense that that’s not where they belong and that’s not where they want to be,” she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
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