Photo credit: CNN
After three years of negotiations, 62 cultural items, previously held in the Vatican museums and vaults for a century, landed at Montreal-Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport on Saturday.
CBC News reports that the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, said, “Today is another important step, but it’s far from the end. It’s only the beginning, and we won’t rest until all our artifacts are home.”
The majority of the items are still unknown, but 14 items are of Inuit provenance, including an Inuvialuit kayak used to chase beluga whales, one is Metis, and the remaining belong to First Nations across Canada.
Last week, AFN sent a delegation of elders, knowledge keepers and residential school survivors to Rome to hold ceremonies while the items were being packed for transport. They left Vatican City by truck to Frankfurt, Germany, earlier this week before arriving in Montreal on Saturday.
“Now that we have taken these steps, and rescuing our ancestors from the Vatican, we are all looking forward to seeing our belongings feel the mountains, winds, the warmth of the sun and the cleansing energies of our lands and our waters,” said Katisha Paul, of the W JOLELP (Tsartlip First Nation) and Lil’wat Nation, who’s also a youth representative of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.
Paul, along with Peyal Laceese, Isaiah Bernard and Isaiah Anderson, were among a delegation of First Nations youth who accompanied the items on the flight.
Representatives from the AFN, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) and Metis National Council (MNC) welcomed their arrival. Elder Ka’nahsohon Kevin Deer, from Kahnawa:ke, and federal MP Steven Guilbeault, who represents the Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, were also in attendance.
The 62 items were among thousands of objects originally sent to Rome between 1923 and 1925 for a world exhibition organized by Pope Pius XI. The Pope invited Catholic missionaries to send materials from Indigenous Peoples around the world/
They were repatriated through a church-to-church transfer, through the Vatican to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), in November. Negotiations for the return were said to have begun in November 2022 and originally centred around the return of the kayak, but later grew to a partnership between the ITK, the AFN and the Metis National Council.
