The Vatican Says They Are Gifts. Indigenous Groups Want Them Back

The Vatican’s Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the food court and just before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and works of art from indigenous peoples from around the world, many of them sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for an exhibition in 1925 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 indigenous peoples who were evangelized . But indigenous groups from Canada, who were shown some items from the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet with Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else might have been stored after decades of They did not exist. on public display. Some say they want them back. “These pieces that belong to us should come home,” said Cassidy Caron, president of the Métis National Council, who led the Métis delegation that asked Francisco to return the items. The restoration of indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of several agenda items awaiting Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday. The trip is primarily aimed at allowing the pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for abuses suffered by indigenous people and their ancestors at the hands of Catholic missionaries in notorious residential schools. Caron said the return of the mission collection items would help heal intergenerational trauma and allow indigenous peoples to tell their own story. “For so long we had to hide who we were. We had to hide our culture and traditions to keep our people safe,” he said. “Right now, right now that we can be publicly proud to be Metis, we’re reclaiming who we are. And these pieces, these historical pieces, tell stories about who we were.”

More than 150,000 indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend government-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an attempt to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The goal was their Christianization and assimilation 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 in the interior, including the 1885 Potlatch ban that banned 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 US and Europe, as well as in private collections. The Vatican’s catalog of its American collection, for example, includes a wooden painted mask from the Haida Gwaii Islands of British Columbia that is “related to the Potlatch ceremony.” During the spring visit, Natan Obed, who headed the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami delegation, raised the issue of an Inuit kayak in the collection featured in a 2021 report in The Globe and Mail newspaper. Obed was quoted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that he said the head of the museum, the Reverend Nicola Mapelli, was open to discussing his return. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni did not rule out that Francis might repatriate some items during the upcoming trip, telling reporters: “We will see what happens in the coming days.” There are international standards that guide the return of indigenous cultural property, as well as individual museum policies. The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, asserts that nations must provide redress, including through restoration, of cultural, religious and intellectual property that has been taken “without free, prior and informed consent them or in violation of their laws, traditions. and customs”. It is possible that the natives gave their works to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 exhibition or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the artifacts could have been freely offered because of power imbalances in Catholic missions and the government’s policy of eradicating indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.” “From the power structure of what was going on at the time, it would be very difficult for me to accept that there wasn’t some coercion on these communities to acquire these items,” said Michael Galban, a Washoe and Mono Lake resident. Paiute is director and curator of the Seneca Art & Culture Center in upstate New York. Gloria Bell, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and assistant professor in McGill University’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies, agreed. “The use of the term ‘gift’ just covers the whole story,” said Bell, who is of Métis descent and is completing a book on the 1925 exhibition. “We really have to question the context of how these cultural objects reached the Vatican, and then also their relationship with indigenous communities today.” The collection of the Natives of the Holy See began centuries ago, with some pre-Columbian objects sent to Pope Innocent XII in 1692, and has been strengthened over the years by gifts to popes, especially on trips abroad. Of the 100,000 objects originally sent for the 1925 exhibition, the Vatican says it has kept 40,000. Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as a spiritual advisor to the First Nations spring delegation, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be “repatriated,” or brought back home. “You can feel that it’s not where they belong and it’s not where they want to be,” she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she captured on her phone camera. The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment. However, in a 2015 catalog of its holdings in the Americas, the museum said they showed the church’s great appreciation for world cultures and its commitment to preserving their arts and artifacts, as evidenced by the pieces’ exceptional condition. The catalog also stated that the museum welcomes dialogue with indigenous peoples, and the museum continued its work with Aboriginal communities in Australia prior to an exhibition in 2010. The collection’s director, Mapelli, a missionary and a colleague visited these the communities, took video testimonies and traveled around the world in search of more information about the museum’s holdings. He noted that some objects had recently been loaned to China and said the collection “invites us to experience human brotherhood, contrasting the culture of grudge, racism and nationalism.” Francis also praised the museum’s stated commitment to transparency, noting the glass partitions that show the storage facilities upstairs and the restorers’ workstations on the main floor: “Transparency is an important value, above all in an ecclesiastical institution. ».

You might miss Anima Mundi if you spent the day in the Vatican Museums. Official tours don’t include it, and the audio guide, which includes descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it entirely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there because there is no explanatory signage in display cases or wall text panels. Margo Neal, who helped curate the Vatican’s Aboriginal exhibition in 2010 as head of the Indigenous Knowledge Center at the Australian National Museum, said it was unacceptable that Indigenous collections today lacked informative labels. “They are not given the respect they deserve by being named in any way,” said Neale, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingirr nations. “They are beautifully displayed, but culturally diminished by a lack of recognition of anything other than their ‘exotic otherness’.” It was unclear if the current exhibit was a work in progress with tags to be added eventually. at the entrance to the gallery, a text box asks for donations to fund the collection. Museums and governments across Europe — in places like Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium — are grappling with the issue of their colonial and post-colonial collections and leading the debate on legally transferring property back, experts say. With some exceptions, the trend is increasingly towards repatriation – agreements have recently been announced in Germany and France to return pieces of the famous Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. “There is a certain willingness to return objects and records and ancestral remains in many European countries,” said Jos van Beurden, who runs a group email list and Facebook group, Restitution Matters, which tracks developments in the field. In Canada, the Royal British Columbia Museum has gone so far as to produce a handbook that empowers indigenous communities to reclaim their cultural heritage. In Victoria, the city where the museum is located, Gregory Scofield has assembled a community collection of about 100 items of beadwork, embroidery and other Metis work dating from 1840 to 1910, located and acquired through online auctions and through…