Eric Reguly European bureau chief Rome Published 16 minutes ago

This Inuvialuit kayak will return to Canada from the Vatican.

Last week, in a storage vault in the Vatican Museums, a logistics team adept in the transportation of valuable, delicate objects was eased a Western Arctic sealskin boat that has been called the “Pope’s kayak” into a case suitable for air transportation.

The Inuvialuit kayak was finally going home. It, along with 61 other artifacts made by Indigenous communities across Canada a century or more ago and put on display at the Vatican, is to arrive Saturday in Montreal on an Air Canada plane and then be transferred to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa.

The remarkable journey caps a 20-year, often-secret, on-and-off effort by Canadian museums and Indige

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