Indigenous leaders waited Saturday on the snow-covered tarmac of Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport for precious cargo to be offloaded from an Air Canada jet.
The box contained more than 60 valuable cultural artifacts, including a rare Inuit sealskin kayak. These kayaks were taken from First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities more than a century ago and have been housed in Vatican museums and archives ever since.
The emotional homecoming, shown in footage from CNN affiliate CBC News, represents the culmination of a vigorous three-year campaign by Indigenous leaders and follows Pope Francis’ historic apology for abuses at church-run boarding schools in Canada, championed during his lifetime.
Artifact returns also come as museums around the world increasingly return items in their collections to their countries of origin that may have been stolen or obtained unethically.
National First Nations Secretary Cindy Woodhouse-Nepinak hailed the return of the artifacts at a press conference Saturday as an “important and emotional moment for many Indigenous peoples across the country.”
But she acknowledged that the long project of reconciliation continues.
“We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”
There is no official inventory of the repatriated items, which represent a small portion of the thousands of colonial-era indigenous items in the Vatican.
However, the 62 artifacts also include an Inuvialuit sealskin kayak from the western Arctic that was the last to be removed from the plane in its own cargo box, CBC reported.
These artifacts were first brought to Rome for display at the Vatican Missionary Exhibition in 1925. The exposition, a 13-month exhibition promoting the Church’s influence around the world, attracted millions of visitors.
The Vatican has long maintained that the items were given to Pope Pius XI, who has led the church since 1922, a claim disputed by Canada’s First Nations.
The church’s collection of Indigenous artifacts was compiled at a time when Canada’s Indigenous identity was being erased by cultural practices and laws that prohibited forced attendance at church-run boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian in the child.”
Given the circumstances, “it is highly disputed that this was a ‘gift’ of a meaningful object,” Cody Groat, assistant professor of history and indigenous studies at Canada’s Western University, told CNN in an email on Monday.
Calls for the restitution of the artifacts began to gain momentum in 2022. It came as a delegation of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples traveled to Rome for long-awaited talks with Francis about historical abuses in residential schools. After this trip, Francis made a “penitent pilgrimage” to Canada, where he apologized for “the wrongs committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples.”
The late Pope promised to return the holy relics, but their fate will now be in the hands of his successor, Pope Leo.
The Holy See and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops announced for the first time last month that the items, along with their documents, would be “gifted” by Pope Leo to Indigenous communities, calling it “the conclusion of a journey begun by Pope Francis.”
“We hope that (Leo) will take meaningful actions like this early in his pontificate, and hopefully set the stage for a new relationship between the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples, both in Canada and around the world,” Grote said.
The artifacts will now be examined at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, near Ottawa, before Indigenous leaders find a new home, CBC reports.
“We look forward to unboxing the products in the coming days so that Inuit leaders and Inuit experts can understand exactly where these products come from in each community and share that knowledge not just with Inuit Canada, but with all of Canada,” Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said at a news conference.
The return of artifacts has deep meaning for many of Canada’s First Nations peoples, who view these artifacts as “cultural ancestors with a sense of their own and a life of their own,” Groat said.
“These cultural ancestors are now able to rejoin our communities and contribute to the continuation and revitalization of our cultural practices.”
