This undated photo by Gregory Scofield shows a pair of gloves he made in the late 19th century native Canadian traditional Cree-Metif style. Gregory Scofield/Associated Press
The Vatican Museums are home to some of the world’s most magnificent works of art, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to ancient Egyptian antiquities and a pavilion full of papal chariots. But one of the museum’s least-visited collections is becoming the most contested ahead of Pope Francis’ trip to Canada.
The Vatican’s Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the dining hall and just before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and works of art made by indigenous peoples from around the world, much of which was sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for display in 1925 Vatican Gardens.
The Vatican says the feathered hats, carved walrus tusks, masks and embroidered animal skins were gifts for Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the Church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But local groups from Canada, who were shown several items from the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else might be in store after decades of non-existence on public display.
Some say they want them back.
“These pieces that belong to us need to come home,” said Cassidy Caron, president of the Métis National Council, who led the Métis delegation that demanded Francis return the items.
The restitution of indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of many agenda items awaiting Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday.
The trip is primarily intended to allow the Pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for the abuses indigenous people and their ancestors suffered at the hands of Catholic missionaries in the notorious dormitories.
More than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century to the 1970s in an attempt to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The goal is to be Christianized and assimilated into mainstream society.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the Potlatch Ban of 1885, which banned the integral First Nations ceremony.
Government agents confiscated objects used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some of them ended up in museums in Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as in private collections.
It is possible that the local peoples gave their works to the Catholic missionaries for the 1925 exhibition, or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the items could have been freely offered given the power imbalance in Catholic missions and the government’s policy of eliminating indigenous traditions, which the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide.”
“By virtue of the structure of what was going on at the time, it would be very difficult for me to accept that there wasn’t some compulsion in these communities to acquire these items,” said Michael Galban, Washoe and Mono Lake Paiute , who 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.
“Using the term ‘gift’ just obscures the whole story,” said Bell, who is of Métis descent and is completing a book on the 1925 exhibition. and then their relationship with local communities today.”
Katzionni Fox, a Mohican director who served as a spiritual advisor to the First Nations spring delegation, said she has seen items that belong to her people and need to be “rematred,” or returned home to the homeland.
“You could sense that it wasn’t where they belonged and it wasn’t where they wanted to be,” she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
Meanwhile, the Inuit delegation inquired about an Inuit kayak in the collection.
The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
Inaugurating the revamped Anima Mundi gallery space in 2019 with artefacts from Oceania as well as a temporary Amazon exhibition, Francis said the objects had been cared for “with the same passion reserved for Renaissance masterpieces or immortal Greek and Roman statues”.
You might miss Anima Mundi if you spend the day at the Vatican Museums. Official tours don’t include it, and the audio guide, which contains descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it entirely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there because there are no explanatory signs on the shop windows or wall text panels.
Margot Neill, who helped curate the Vatican’s 2010 Aboriginal exhibition at Anima Mundi as head of the Indigenous Knowledge Center at the Australian National Museum, said it was unacceptable for Indigenous collections today to lack information labels.
“They are not given the respect they deserve by being named in any way,” said Neal, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingir nations. “They are beautifully displayed, but are culturally belittled by the lack of recognition of anything other than their ‘exotic difference’.”
In Victoria, British Columbia, Gregory Scofield has amassed a community collection of about 100 items of Métis beads, embroidery, and other works that he has tracked down and acquired through online auctions and through travel and made available to Métis scholars and artists.
Scofield, a Métis poet and author of the forthcoming book Our Grandmother’s Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art, said any discussion with the Vatican should focus on giving local scholars full access to the collection and, ultimately , bringing items home.
“These parts contain our stories,” he said. “These pieces keep our history. These pieces contain the energy of those ancestral grandmothers.”
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