VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican Museums are home to some of the most magnificent works of art in the world, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to ancient Egyptian antiquities and a pavilion filled with papal chariots. But one of the museum’s least-visited collections becomes the most controversial before Pope Francis’ trip to Canada.
Located near the food court and just in front of the main exit, the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum of the Vatican houses tens of thousands of artifacts and art made by indigenous peoples from around the world, much of which was 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 worldwide reach of the church, its missionaries and the lives of the indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But aboriginal groups from Canada, who were shown a few items from the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet Francis, wonder how some of the works were actually acquired, and wonder what else is in the collection. storage can be seen in public after decades of non-existence.
Some say they want them back.
“These pieces that belong to us should come home,” said Cassidy Caron, chairman of the Metis National Council, who led the Metis delegation that asked Francis to return the items.
Restitution of indigenous and colonial artifacts, an urgent debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of the many items on the agenda for Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday.
The trip is primarily intended to enable the Pope to apologize personally on Canadian soil for the abuses suffered by indigenous peoples and their ancestors at the hands of Catholic missionaries in infamous residential schools.
Caron said returning the items from the mission collection would help heal the intergenerational trauma and empower indigenous peoples to tell their own stories.
“We had to hide who we were for so long. We had to hide our culture and hide our traditions to keep our people safe,” she said. “Right now, in this time when we can be publicly proud to be Metis, we are reclaiming who we are. And these pieces, these historical pieces, they tell stories about who we were.”
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More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 1800s to the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The goal was to Christianize them and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments viewed as superior.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress Indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the 1885 Potlatch Ban banning the entire First Nations ceremony.
Government agents seized items used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some ended up in museums in Canada, the US and Europe, as well as private collections. The Vatican catalog of his America collection, for example, includes a wooden painted mask from British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii Islands 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. who said the head of the museum, the Rev. Nicola Mapelli, was open to discuss the return.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni did not rule out the possibility that Francis could repatriate some items during the upcoming trip, telling reporters: “We’ll see what happens in the coming days.”
There are international standards governing the issue of returning Indigenous cultural property, as well as individual museum policies. The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, states that nations should provide reparation, including through restitution, of cultural, religious and spiritual property seized “without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.”
It is possible that indigenous peoples gave their handicrafts to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 expo or that the missionaries bought it. But historians doubt the items could be freely offered given the power imbalance that plays a role in Catholic missions and the government’s policy of eliminating indigenous traditions, which the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”
“Because of the power structure of what was going on at the time, it would be very difficult for me to accept that there was no compulsion in those communities to get these objects,” said Michael Galban, a Washoe and Mono Lake Paiute , director and curator of the Seneca Art & Culture Center in New York State.
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 all of history,” says Bell, who is from Metis and is in the process of writing a book on the 1925 expo. “We really have to question the context of how these cultural assets have ended up in the Vatican, and so has their relationship with the indigenous communities of today.”
The Holy See’s indigenous collection began centuries ago, with some pre-Columbian artifacts sent to Pope Innocent XII in 1692, and has expanded over the years to include gifts to popes, especially during foreign travels. Of the 100,000 items originally shipped for the 1925 exhibit, the Vatican says it has preserved 40,000.
It has repatriated a number of items. In 2021, Vatican News reported that the Anima Mundi had recently returned to Ecuador with a shrunken head used in rituals by the Jivaroan peoples of the Amazon.
Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as a spiritual advisor to the First Nations delegation in the spring, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be “remarried” or returned to the motherland.
“You feel that’s not where they belong and that’s not where they want to be,” she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
The Vatican Museums have rejected repeated requests for an interview or comment.
But in its 2015 catalog of its American possessions, the museum said they demonstrated the Church’s deep appreciation for world cultures and its commitment to preserving their art and artifacts, as evidenced by the excellent condition of the pieces.
The catalog also said the museum welcomes dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and the museum has ceased its partnership with Aboriginal communities in Australia for an exhibition in 2010. The director of the collection, Mapelli, a missionary and collaborator, visited those communities, recorded video testimonials and traveled the world in search of more information about the museum’s collections.
Francis said the items were cared for “with the same passion reserved for the masterpieces of the Renaissance or the immortal Greek and Roman statues.”
He noted that some items had recently been loaned to China and said the collection “invites us to experience human brotherhood as opposed to the culture of rancor, racism and nationalism.”
Francis also praised the museum’s outspoken commitment to transparency, noting the glass walls that show the storage rooms above and the workstations of the restorers on the ground floor: “Transparency is an important value, especially in an ecclesiastical setting.”
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You might miss the Anima Mundi if you were spending the day at the Vatican Museums. Official tours don’t include it, and the audio guide, which includes descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it completely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there, as there are no explanatory signage on display cases or text panels on the walls.
Margo Neale, who, as head of the Center for Indigenous Knowledges at the Australian National Museum, helped put together the Vatican’s 2010 Aboriginal exhibit, said it’s unacceptable that Indigenous collections don’t have informational labels these days.
“They don’t get the respect they deserve by being called in any way,” said Neale, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingirr countries. “They are beautifully rendered, but are culturally diminished by the lack of recognition of anything other than their ‘exotic otherness’.”
It was not clear whether the current exhibition was a work in progress with labels that would eventually be added; at the entrance to the gallery, a text panel 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 are leading the debate over legal return of property, experts say. With a few exceptions, the trend is increasingly towards repatriation – agreements were recently announced in Germany and France to return pieces of the famous Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.
“In a number of European countries there is a growing willingness to return objects and archives and ancestral relics,” said Jos van Beurden, who runs a group mailing list and a Facebook group, Restitution Matters, which follows 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 collected, tracked and acquired a community collection of approximately 100 items of Metis beadwork, embroidery and other handicrafts from 1840 to 1910 through online auctions and through travel and made it available to Metis scholars and artists.
Scofield, a Metis poet and author of the forthcoming book “Our Grandmother’s Hands: Repatriating Metis Material Art,” said any discussion with the Vatican Museums should focus on giving native scholars full access to the collection and, eventually, taking items home.
“These pieces contain our stories,” he said. “These pieces contain our history. These pieces contain the energy of those ancestral grandmothers.”
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