Canadian researcher challenges Vatican's claim that its Indigenous artifacts were gifts

A Canadian art expert is challenging the Vatican's official account of how it acquired tens of thousands of Indigenous artifacts from countries around the world — including Canada.

In the early 1920s, Pope Pius XI sent out a call to Catholic missions around the world to donate artifacts, including Indigenous cultural belongings, to a 1925 Vatican Mission Exposition.

"Basically, they were looking for anything and everything related to mission life and related to Indigenous life during that time period," said Gloria Bell, an assistant professor of art history at McGill University and a Terra Foundation fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds de recherche du Québec.

Catholic missions sent approximately 100,000 artifacts to the Vatican.

Most of those artifacts became part of the Vatican's permanent collection. That collection includes a human face mask from Haida Gwaii, a rare kayak from Inuvialuit in western Arctic, a pair of beaded skin moccasins, engraved etchings on birch bark and a model of a dog sled made of walrus ivory and sealskin.

The Vatican claims the artifacts were sent as gifts to the Pope. Bell's research suggests that assertion glosses over a contested history of Indigenous people working under duress to create these items — along with evidence that some of those cultural belongings may have been stolen from communities.

"My research is opening up this question," said Bell, who has Métis ancestry on her mother's side.

Bell said she studied catalogue records that describe cultural objects being taken during the potlatch ban of 1885 to 1951, when it was a criminal offence to participate in the traditional gift-giving feasts used by First Nations on the West Coast to mark community milestones.

"Those were seized by missionaries during the potlatch ban, so that's definitely stolen regalia and cultural belongings," Bell said.

She said she found copies of missionary bulletins, such as the Indian Sentinel, indicating residential school students in the United States made souvenirs for the 1925 Vatican exhibit.

"It wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for this to have happened and there is evidence that they did send in artifacts," Bell said. 

"It's an ongoing research question. I think there's a possibility that [materials from residential schools] were also from Canada as well."

Bell said she read newspaper clippings and a papal call to the missionaries that discussed sending Indigenous people themselves to participate in the exhibit, but hasn't found anything to confirm that actually happened.

"There is that colonial legacy of displaying humans and the colonial legacy of living zoos that did continue into the early 20th century," she said.