Pope returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of reckoning with colonial past

The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts from its vast ethnographic collection to Indigenous peoples from Canada, as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.

Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it would return the items to individual Indigenous communities “as soon as possible.” A joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church described the pieces as a “gift” and a “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

The items were part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broa