Pope returns dozens of Indigenous artefacts to Canada

By CathNews New Zealand

November 18th, 2025

Part of a wampum belt, from what is now Quebec, symbolising Indigenous people forming an alliance with French Catholic colonisers is seen in this 2008 file photo from the Vatican Museums' ethnological collection. (CNS photo/courtesy Vatican Museums)

Pope Leo XIV has returned artefacts from Canadian Indigenous communities that have been held by the Vatican Museums for more than 100 years. Source: Catholic News Service.

Pope Leo gave 62 artefacts to the leaders of the Canadian bishops’ conference on November 15, the Vatican and the bishops’ conference said in a joint statement. In doing so, Pope Leo fulfilled a promise made by the late Pope Francis in 2023.

The bishops “will proceed, as soon as possible, to transfer these artefacts to the National Indigenous Organizations”, which will ensure they are “reunited with their communities of origin”, said a separate statement from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Pope Leo “desires that this gift represent a concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity”, the joint statement said. “This is an act of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church in Canada these artefacts, which bear witness to the history of the encounter between faith and the cultures of the indigenous peoples.”

The artefacts, which came from different First Nation, Métis and Inuit communities, “are part of the patrimony received on the occasion of the Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925, encouraged by Pope Pius XI during the Holy Year, to bear witness to the faith and cultural richness of peoples”, the joint statement said.

“Sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries between 1923 and 1925,” it said, “these artefacts were subsequently combined with those of the Lateran Ethnologic Missionary Museum, which then became the ‘Anima Mundi’ Ethnological Museum of the Vatican Museums.”

Members of Canada’s Indigenous communities have been asking for years that the items be returned. In the spring of 2022, when community representatives visited the Vatican for meetings with Pope Francis before his trip to Canada, they visited the Vatican Museums and were given a private tour of the collection.

Joyce Napier, the Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, said the artefacts will go first to Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. There, the Indigenous communities, their experts and elders will try to identify them and their provenance and determine where they should be kept.

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Pope returns Indigenous items from Vatican Museums to Canada (By Cindy Wooden/CNS)