ROME (ITALY)
CTV Television Network [Toronto, Canada]
March 29, 2022
By Michael Lee
As Indigenous representatives hold scheduled meetings in Rome with Pope Francis, part of a series of discussions with the Catholic Church on reconciliation, many hope efforts will be made to finally bring artifacts held at the Vatican back to Canada.
First Nations, Metis and Inuit delegates have met or will meet the Pope this week to share stories from survivors of Canada’s residential school system, most of which were run by the Catholic Church.
Metis and Inuit delegates met the Pope on Monday, with First Nations representatives scheduled to meet the pontiff on Thursday. The Pope is expected to hold a general audience with all of the delegates Friday.
Along with hopes for a papal apology on Canadian soil, top of mind for delegates is access the Vatican’s collection of Indigenous cultural items.
“What they now need to recognize is that they hold things of ours that tell our story, and these are our priceless cultural works and they do need to come home,” Metis National Council President Cassidy Caron told CTV News Channel on Tuesday.
Delegates received a private tour of the Vatican museums Tuesday including the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, known to contain masks, wampum belts, pipes, rugs and other items from Indigenous communities across North America.
For some of the delegates in Rome, the tour brought up mixed emotions.
“When I went through, I felt a lot of pain and I felt intergenerational trauma is still here and alive and well,” Pixie Wells, president of the Fraser Valley Metis Association, told CTV National News after the tour.
Some of the Vatican’s collection has not been seen publicly, and Indigenous curators and experts say they have been unable to gain access to it.
“One of the biggest problems that exists in regards to the Vatican collection is there’s a lot of secrecy about what items and extent of the items that exist in those collections,” said Cody Groat, a professor of history and Indigenous studies at Western University.
Although she did visit the Vatican’s ethnological museum, Caron says she was disappointed that she and the other delegates did not have a chance to tour the museum as they thought they would. She said there were only about two-dozen items on display, with much of the collection put away in preparation for a new exhibit.
“Knowing that there’s 100 that we weren’t able to see, it was frustrating,” said Mitch Case, a Metis Nation of Ontario regional councillor who toured the exhibit in Rome.
Caron said she is also waiting for a complete list of artifacts from the Vatican so the corresponding people from her communities can identify the items that belong to them.
“Honestly, being minutes back from that trip, my first reaction is that I am quite disappointed, and we did not make any progress there. But we are still here for three more days until the general audience on Friday and I have a number of meetings set up with church officials and different directors,” Caron said.
“Hopefully we can follow up with the director of the museum and actually start to carve out that pathway to identify our items, identify the people who are right to tell those stories and identify a pathway to bring those items home.”
In response to a question about the Caron’s hope for some of these items to be returned to the appropriate communities, Archbishop Donald Bolen of Regina told Evan Solomon during CTV’s Question Period on Tuesday that his understanding of the delegate’s position is different.
“I think that you’re putting words in the delegates’ mouths that I’m not hearing from the delegates. What I’m hearing from them is that they want to enter deeply into conversation,” Bolen said. “They want to hear what’s there, they want to hear the history of how it got there, and then they want to have a conversation and discernment about what to do.”
‘THESE ARE OUR STORIES’
Much of the Vatican’s collection of Indigenous items stems from a world exposition held in 1925 by former pope Pius XI. Missionaries were directed to send items, with more than 100,000 objects and works of art displayed at the time.
The Vatican says part of its collection includes gifts to former popes and the Catholic Church, something Bolen said the delegates want to learn more about.
“There is a spiritual dimension to gift-giving, and that can’t be lost,” he said. “So that’s a conversation underway.”
But Indigenous advocates and researchers in Canada say many were stolen.
“We can definitely say that these were not given voluntarily. There was a lot of coercion. There was a lot of abuses of power that often led to the removal of cultural items,” Groat said.
Ceremonial items were taken from Indigenous communities after the Canadian government outlawed cultural practices through the Indian Act of 1876.
“We must remember that in the late 19th century through about the mid-20th century, the colonial government of Canada and the Catholic Church were complicit in a program of systematic erasure, cultural erasure,” Gerald McMaster, Indigenous curator, artist and a Canada research chair at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday.
“And for over 70 years, Indigenous peoples were forced by law to give up virtually every aspect of their cultural practices.”
He says allowing Indigenous people to see the collection would be a good first step towards reconciliation.
But having the Pope make an apology, and possibly consider restitution, could help the public understand how critical this is to Indigenous communities in helping them rebuild “once again what has been erased from our culture,” McMaster said.
Angela White, executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society in Vancouver, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday that repatriating Indigenous cultural items “is about taking care of them and ensuring that that legacy continues in a good way.”
“These are our voices, these are our stories, they are our ancestors and we need to have them back in our communities,” she said.
With files from The Canadian Press.