“An Historic Day”: Concern and Celebration of the Vatican’s Repatriation of Indigenous Culture

By Andrew Nurse

On November 15, a media release announced that Pope Leo XIV, following an audience with members of the Canadian Roman Catholic hierarchy, “gifted sixty-two artefacts belonging to the ethnological collections of Vatican Museums.”  This meant that the Vatican would begin a process of repatriating some aspects of Indigenous culture currently held in its museums to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada.

The Vatican’s decision was, almost certainly, made following a great deal of hard work behind the scenes. I was not, and have not been, part of this work but it seems to me particularly important to note that repatriation doesn’t just happen. It follows work that takes place in a range of Indigenous communities on a daily basis. It takes place outside the immediate splash of a media release, and we need to credit the people doing that work.

I also think we need to ask questions about this particular process and its implications.

According to news stories that have followed the announcement, its objective, from the point of view of the Papacy and Roman Catholic Church, is to continue to work toward some measure of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples following Pope Francis’s apology and Papal repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery as a  “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

This repatriation – when it actually takes place – will become one of series of that have been undertaken on a national and international scale. The National Museum of Scotland, for instance, also recently returned Indigenous culture to Canada as has an Australian museum. There is a need to both celebrate repatriation as the fulfilment of a great deal of hard work on the part of Indigenous activists, educators, leaders, and knowledge keepers and also to be concerned about it.

What are the grounds of concern?

First, the process involves “gifting” Indigenous culture to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) so that it can work with Canadian heritage institutions and Indigenous peoples instead of establishing a mechanism to return Indigenous heritage to the peoples themselves.

This seems odd and intentionally so. It raises an important ethical question: can one “gift” someone else’s heritage and what does it mean to do so? What happens when at least some of the gifted heritage has sacred dimensions? Gift giving can be a complex cultural process but, in some way, it suggests something different than repatriation, which is about returning culture and heritage to its proper owners, caregivers, guardians or relations.

The language of gifting is used to avoid setting a precedent. By gifting Indigenous culture to the CCCB, which then works with Indigenous organizations in Canada and the Canadian Museum of History, the Papacy avoids a direct relationship with Indigenous peoples in Canada. The aim is to do precisely that: to avoid establishing the precedent of directly returning Indigenous culture to Indigenous peoples.

I am sure there are benefits to this for the Papacy, but what it says about an unwillingness to deal directly with Indigenous nations and leadership acting in areas that are almost certainly within the scope of their sovereignty is less clear. At the very least, it seems to me something other than “a concrete sign” or “dialogue” or “fraternity,” all of which seem to require a direct relationship.

It is also not clear that this is the start of a wider process, even though this is clearly what I suspect First Peoples hope. Pope Francis, whose apology is often referred to as the beginning of a new approach to First Peoples by the Papacy favoured repatriation but, as one news story said, on “case by case basis.” If that ends up being the case, repatriation is going to be a long, drawn-out process. Vatican Museums house a huge volume of Indigenous heritages from across the globe and likely thousands of objects from Canada alone. Returning these on a case-by-case basis could be the work of a generation. 

And it raises other questions: why a case-by-case basis and who exercises the authority to decide that this is the process? The decision seems to reinscribe the authority of the Church and its museums as the arbiter of the process and even determine what aspects of culture are returned.

What are the grounds to celebrate?

The first and most obvious is the act of repatriation. This process, and its importance, can be difficult to describe. What is – at least partly – evident is that museums in general are moving a good distance from their previous perspectives which seemed to reject repatriation out of hand.

Indigenous leaders, knowledge keepers, heritage workers, and educators have not been slow to describe the importance of repatriation. From what I can tell, in fact, repatriation adds to the importance of history and, for Indigenous peoples, helps to build new and stronger connections between the past and the present.

Federated Sovereign Indigenous Nations of Saskatchewan Chief Bobby Cameron has made this point directly. These are not just historical objects, in his view, but sacred items such as “sacred pipes, medicine bundles, [and] ceremonial regalia.” In the most extreme cases they also include human remains (although there is no mention that Vatican Museums hold remains). For Cameron, repatriation is not simply a cultural transfer but a necessary part of a healing process. Repatriated culture does not just represent history, but “holds” history.

One great advantage of repatriation is that it allows for a broader engagement with the implications of that idea and its implications for how we think about history.

Repatriation also provides a space for Indigenous peoples to honour their heritage in their own ways. It provides a mechanism through which proper ceremonies can be followed, organized by Indigenous peoples themselves.

A final broader advantage of repatriation is that it can recast narratives of Indigenous history in another way. As Gloria Bell notes in her work on this subject, the original relocation of Indigenous culture to the Vatican was not an accident. It was part of a broader historical process intended to highlight the importance of the Church’s missionary work and to illustrate a hierarchical relationship between the Church and Indigenous Peoples.

Many – although certainly not all – of the cultural objects housed in the Vatican Museums were sent to Rome for the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition.  This exhibition can be seen in its context as part of the wider cultural infrastructure of colonialism and forced conversion. The Indigenous cultures on display were supposedly gifts – perhaps something of a thank you? – from First Peoples to the Pope, as the leader of the Church.

This particular narrative is deeply disturbing. The idea of Indigenous people’s thanking a body that operated residential schools seems appalling. As a great deal of work on history of collection has illustrated, the story is – even if it were not so disconcerting – never that simple.

If repatriation means nothing else, I hope it means that that story is no longer told again.

Andrew Nurse is a Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University.