After arriving on a snowy Montreal tarmac Saturday, several Inuit objects repatriated from the Vatican were revealed at the Canadian Museum of History on Tuesday. These items are part of 62 Indigenous pieces returned after being kept in Vatican museums for about 100 years. The push to bring them home grew stronger after Pope Francis’s visit to Canada in 2022.
The objects were originally sent to Rome in the 1920s for a huge world exhibition ordered by Pope Pius XI. Among the Inuit items is a rare Inuvialuit kayak made from driftwood, sealskin and sinew. Only five kayaks like it are known to exist. Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami president Natan Obed called it the “centrepiece” of the repatriation and said reconnecting with it could help revive traditional kayak-making.
Elders and experts will now study all 62 items to learn exactly where they came from and who they belonged to. The Canadian Museum of History will store them safely during this process. Obed noted that touching the kayak by hand may have seemed unusual to some museum staff, but for Inuit, physical connection is an important part of honouring cultural history.
Indigenous leaders say the return of these items is meaningful, but only one step in a much longer journey. “It’s far from the end,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak. Archbishop Richard Smith added that reconciliation requires “humility, perseverance and a willingness to listen.”
