Inside Vatican City, the home of Pope Leo, lies a vast collection of Indigenous artifacts that some people say shouldn’t be there.
The collection includes thousands dozens of colonial-era objects, including a rare Inuvialuit sealskin kayak from the western Arctic, a pair of embroidered Cree leather gloves, a 200-year-old wampum belt, a baby belt from the Gwich’in people and a beluga tooth necklace.
They are relics of a time of cultural destruction, critics say, taken by the Roman Catholic Church a century ago as trophies of missionaries in far-off lands.
Pope Francis promised to return the artifacts to communities in Canada as part of what he called a “penitential pilgrimage” for abuses against Indigenous people by the Church. But several years on, they remain in the Vatican’s museums and storage vaults.
Indigenous leaders are now urging Pope Leo to finish what Francis started and give the artifacts back.
“When things were taken that weren’t somebody else’s to take, it’s time to return them,” said Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
Calls to repatriate the artifacts began gaining steam in 2022, when a group of First Nations, Inuit and Métis delegates visited Rome for long-awaited talks with Pope Francis about historical abuses at Canada’s church-run residential schools.
While there, the delegates were given a tour of some of the Vatican’s collection and were astonished to see treasured relics stored thousands of miles away from the communities who once used them.
“It was quite an emotional experience to see all of these artifacts – whether they be Métis, First Nations of Inuit artifacts – so far away,” said Victoria Pruden, President of the Métis National Council, which represents the Métis Indigenous people of northwestern Canada.
Following that visit – and Francis’s subsequent trip to Canada, where he apologized for the Church’s role in residential schools – the late pontiff pledged to return the relics.
An expo of Indigenous objects
How the artifacts came to be in the pope’s possession requires a trip back to the era of Pope Pius XI, who led the Catholic Church from 1922.
Pius was known for promoting the work of missionaries, and in 1923 sent a call out to orders worldwide to gather evidence of the church’s vast reach.
“He said: Send in everything related to Indigenous life. Send in sacred belongings. Send in language materials. Send in Indigenous people, if you can manage it,” said Gloria Bell, an assistant professor of art history at McGill University.
“There were thousands of belongings stolen from Indigenous communities to please the greed of Pope Pius XI,” said Bell, who documented the exhibition in her book “Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome.”
The church’s collection of Indigenous artifacts was compiled at a time when the cultural identity of Canada’s Indigenous people was being erased.
The Canadian government had made it compulsory for Indigenous children to attend residential schools – boarding schools largely run by the Catholic Church designed by law to “kill the Indian in the child” and assimilate them into White Christian society.
In these schools, Indigenous children were not allowed to speak their language or practice their culture and were harshly punished for doing so. Thousands of children died from abuse or neglect, with mass graves still being found decades after the last residential school closed in 1998.
Even as this injustice unfolded, their cultural belongings and artifacts were being displayed in the 1925 Vatican Mission Exposition, a 13-month long exhibit promoting the Church’s influence around the world, which drew millions of visitors.
The Vatican has claimed the artifacts were gifts to the Pope. But Bell says that’s a “false narrative” which doesn’t consider the context in which the objects were acquired.
“This acquisition period was a really assimilative period in Canadian colonial history,” Bell said.
The artifacts were never returned. A century later, many of the cultural objects and artwork remain at the Vatican, either in storage or on display at the Vatican’s Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum.
A papal apology
Laurie McDonald, an elder from Enoch Cree Nation who grew up on an Indigenous reserve in Maskêkosihk, Alberta in the 1950s and 1960s, knows what it’s like to have your culture taken from you.
“We were forbidden as a nation to use our cultural regalia, our cultural tools, or our medicines, and if we were caught, we were reported to the Indian agent,” said McDonald, referring to the Canadian government official responsible for assimilation policy.
McDonald was just 11 years old when he was forcibly taken from the home he shared with his grandmother and sent to Ermineskin Indian Residential School, one of Canada’s largest residential schools. Two weeks in, he tried to escape, but became caught on a barbed wire fence and a staff member ripped him off, leaving scars.
In 2022, McDonald returned to the site of his former school to witness Pope Francis’s historic apology on behalf of the Catholic Church.
“I am deeply sorry,” Francis said, looking out over the land of four First Nations. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.”
Pope Francis’s apology on behalf of the Catholic Church was deeply meaningful for many Indigenous peoples in Canada. But reconciliation is a long process, and Indigenous leaders say they hope Leo will continue what Francis started – first and foremost, by returning the artifacts.
McDonald said the objects represent stories and legacies which should have been passed down generations.
“Those may have been simple stuff to you, but to us, they were very, very important,” he said.
‘Thou shall not steal’
During his visit to Canada in 2022, Francis said local Catholic communities were committed to promoting Indigenous culture, customs, language and education processes “in the spirit of” The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, according to CBC.
Article 12 of UNDRIP says Indigenous peoples have the right to use and control their ceremonial objects, and states shall endeavor to return them.
Asked again in 2023 about repatriating the Indigenous artifacts, Francis told reporters aboard his plane, “This is going on, with Canada, at least we were in agreement to do so.” He invoked the seventh commandment – “thou shall not steal” – in expressing his support for restitution.
In recent years, museums around the world have increasingly returned items in their collections that were stolen or potentially acquired unethically to their countries of origin.
Last year, new regulations came into effect in the US requiring museums and federal agencies to consult or obtain informed consent from descendants, tribes or Native Hawaiian Organizations before displaying human remains or cultural items.
In 2022, Pope Francis returned three fragments of the Parthenon sculptures to Greece in a move he described as a “gesture of friendship,” according to the BBC.
However, a 2024 investigation by Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail found that the Vatican had not returned a single Indigenous-made item to Canada in recent years, except for a 200-year-old wampum belt which was loaned to a museum in Montreal for just 51 days in 2023.
Pruden, of the Métis National Council, said Francis “really moved things forward by embracing (UNDRIP).” She and other Indigenous leaders hope to soon see the artifacts returned.
“What a beautiful homecoming it would be to welcome these gifts that were made by our grandmothers and our grandfathers,” Pruden said, calling the objects “very important historical pieces that have a story to tell.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney discussed the return of the artifacts in a meeting with Canadian Catholic Cardinals in Rome this month ahead of Leo’s first mass, Jaime Battiste, a member of parliament who was also at the meeting, told the Canadian Press.
Woodhouse Nepinak said it’s “an uncomfortable and tough issue, but it has to be done.”
“You want to right the wrongs of the past. That’s what we want to do for our survivors, for their families, for the history of what happened here and to make sure that the story never dies out.”