The Vatican will return several dozen cultural objects to Indigenous communities in Canada as part of a continued reckoning with the role the Catholic Church played in the oppression of Indigenous groups in the Americas.
The objects include an Inuit kayak and are housed in the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, which is known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has faced scrutiny in recent years from Indigenous advocates who say that cultural heritage stolen during colonial periods should be returned.
The Vatican opened a dialogue about restitution for the first time under Pope Francis, who in 2022 made a papal visit in 2022 to Canada. He called the visit a “penitential pilgrimage” and said it was intended as an apology for the Catholic Church’s involvement in the residential school system. During the visit, Indigenous leaders requested from Francis the return of several objects in the Vatican collection, including war clubs, masks, and wampum belts.
Francis later stated his support for restitution during a press conference onboard the papal plane. “The Seventh Commandment comes to mind: If you steal something you have to give it back,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
In his inaugural public address on the debate, he called the restitution “the right gesture” for institutions when possible. At the time, Francis had recently returned to Greece three fragments of the Parthenon sculptures that were housed in the Vatican Museums’ collection for two centuries, another first for the papacy.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement Wednesday it was in talks with Indigenous groups on returning the objects to their “originating communities.” The date of the return would be announced by the Vatican, the group added.
Vatican and Canadian authorities said to expect an announcement in the following weeks, and that the objects could be in Canada before the end of 2025. The return will reportedly follow the “church-to-church” model the Holy See used in 2023, when the Vatican relinquished three of its Parthenon fragments. The Vatican described the move as a “donation” from Francis to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian Archbishop of Athens and all of Greece, not as a state to state repatriation to the Greek government.
Accordingly, the Vatican is expected to hand over the objects to the Canadian bishops conference with the explicit understanding that their ultimate custodians will be the Indigenous communities, a Canadian official told PBS News Hour on Wednesday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity as the negotiations were still underway at the time of writing. The Assembly of First Nations said in a public statement that before the handover could happen, certain logistics must be finalized.
“For First Nations, these items are not artifacts. They are living, sacred pieces of our cultures and ceremonies and must be treated as the invaluable objects that they are,” Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told the Canadian Press.