A message posted on social media by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau urging Pope Francis to follow through on promises to return cultural objects from First Nations communities in Canada has reignited debate on repatriation issues.
After Trudeau had an audience with the Pope during the G7 meeting in Italy on 14 June, he posted on Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), writing: “I thanked His Holiness for taking up the work of Reconciliation, and I advocated for the next step—returning cultural artefacts from the Vatican to Indigenous Peoples in Canada.”
According to the Globe and Mail, the prime minister’s posts echoed the findings of an investigation published by the newspaper in March that found that, despite previous public commitments made by the Catholic Church regarding the return of cultural artefacts, minimal progress has occurred.
The extent of the Vatican’s collection of Indigenous items remains shrouded in mystery. During a brief exhibition for visiting Indigenous leaders in 2022 in the Vatican’s ethnological museum, items on display included a rare, century-old Inuvialuit kayak from the Western Arctic, embroidered Cree leather gloves and West Coast Salish carved face masks. During a press conference in the spring of 2023, the Pope said: “The restitution of Indigenous things: this is going on, with Canada, at least we were in agreement to do so.”
The Catholic Church ran most of the residential schools in Canada—part of what many activists have termed a “cultural genocide”—and the display prompted calls for repatriation by many Indigenous representatives as part of the larger reconciliation process.
“We don’t know if the Vatican has Haida objects because they never answered our queries,” says Jisgang Nika Collison, executive director and curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum (on Haida territory in Northern British Columbia) that has been seeking repatriation of cultural objects nationally and internationally. Collison adds that letters were written to the Vatican beginning in the 1990s and as recently as last year, with no response.
But the Vatican, she says, is only “one of 400 colonial institutions that may have acquired cultural objects under duress or through theft. Most acquisition of historical ancestral pieces in various Indigenous lands was during the height of genocide.”
Collison speculates that some of the objects may have been loaned or gifted to the Vatican by other museums. “Most colonial nation state museums, if they have an historic Indigenous collection, then the likelihood of those being removed under duress is more likely than not. We are very supportive of all colonial institutions stepping up and doing the right thing.”
But regardless of whether the Vatican returns items from its collection, Collison says the repatriation process within Canada is hampered by a lack of government funding.
“Unlike in the US, we don’t have a federal repatriation act, a plan or designated funding to support repatriation,” she says. “We need money to engage the community, to get direction from the community, to locate where belongings and ancestors are.” Research on provenance, she adds, is “immense and complicated and often related to poor record keeping at the time of collection or acquisition by a museum. Many objects are misattributed or mislabelled.”
While she supports Trudeau’s message to the Pope, she cautions that “museums in Canada hold physical evidence of genocide of people” and must also be held accountable.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, a Cowichan/Syilx First Nations contemporary artist based in Vancouver is a survivor of the infamous Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, which was opened in 1890 by the Catholic church, taken over by the federal government in 1969 and closed in 1978. Mass graves were discovered there in 2021, via ground-penetrating radar. The artist, whose work has depicted abuse of native children by priests, says repatriation of objects is not the most crucial issue facing First Nations in Canada.
“I would rather be emancipated from the Indian Act,” he says. Yuxweluptun, who has a piece from his 1997 work An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act on display at the newly re-opened Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, adds: “Getting rid of the Indian Act”—which made residential school mandatory in Canada and, critics say, perpetuates the idea of Indigenous individuals as wards of the state—“is more important than giving objects back.”
Repatriation of objects, he says, is “just colonial lip service”, an art world version of the “performative” land acknowledgements that have become de rigueur at most public gatherings in Canada.
“Trudeau’s father was in power when the Indian Act and residential schools were being reinforced. Nothing has changed since he’s come into power,” Yuxweluptun says. Returning cultural objects, “won’t make any difference in the lives of First Nations peoples”.
Representatives from the Holy See and Trudeau’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.