Dozens of Inuit artefacts, repatriated by the Vatican, are set for display at the Canadian Museum of History this Tuesday, following years of calls from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders for their return.
The collection, including a traditional Inuit kayak, was given by Pope Leo XIV to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, who pledged their swift return.
Indigenous leaders welcomed the 62 items at Montreal’s airport on Saturday.
After their Gatineau museum display, the artifacts will return to ancestral communities, part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in suppressing Indigenous culture.
For a century, these items were held in the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, now the Anima Mundi museum.
This collection has long been controversial, central to wider debates over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.
Most artifacts were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition.
The Vatican maintains they were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, celebrating the church’s global reach. However, historians and Indigenous groups question whether items were freely offered, given the power imbalances inherent in Catholic missions at the time.
Earlier this year, a different group of Indigenous people in the Yup’ik community experienced widespread devastation after remnants of Typhoon Halong consumed dozens of feet of shoreline near the edge of the Bering Sea, a culturally significant archaeological site, washing away possibly thousands of unearthed artifacts.
About 1,000 pieces – wooden spoons, toys, a fishing lure, a fragment of a mask that was preserved for hundreds of years in permafrost – were recovered in the low tide in the western Alaska community of Quinhagak.
But many more pieces — perhaps up to 100,000 — were left scattered, said Rick Knecht, an archaeologist who has worked on the Nunalleq, or old village, project for 17 years. That’s roughly the number of pieces previously recovered from the archaeological site.
