GATINEAU—They travelled nearly a century and half a world before returning to the lands where they were first stitched, carved and sung into being.
Inside the Canadian Museum of History last week, songs rose softly as crates were opened and 62 sacred belongings—once stored deep inside the Vatican Museums—were welcomed home by First Nations leaders, Elders and youth.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak described the moment not as the unveiling of museum pieces, but as a reunion.
“Our relatives are home,” she said. “For First Nations, many of these items are not simply ‘artifacts’—they are living, sacred parts of our cultures, to be treasured by communities and used in ceremony.”
The items include beaded moccasins, clothing, a cradle and a birch-bark sap collector—everyday objects shaped by skilled hands generations ago. Many were originally gathered by Catholic missionaries and sent to Rome for a massive 1925 Vatican exhibition showcasing cultures from around the world.
For decades they remained in the Vatican’s ethnographic collection, far from the territories where their makers once lived.
A complicated “return”
The path home has been anything but straightforward.
In late 2025, the Vatican announced it would return 62 Indigenous cultural items to Canada, but the objects were initially transferred not to Indigenous Nations, but to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, in what the Vatican described as a “gift” to the Church in Canada.
That structure—church to church—drew criticism from some scholars and observers who questioned whether items taken during a period of colonial power imbalance should be framed as a donation rather than restitution.
At the time, the Vatican and Canadian bishops said the artifacts would eventually be transferred to Indigenous organizations and communities of origin.
The ceremony in Gatineau marked the next step in that process: the first formal uncrating and ceremonial welcome led by First Nations themselves.
For National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak, the moment represents the shift many Indigenous leaders had been pressing for—from symbolic gestures to community-guided repatriation.
“It is an emotional day, a moment years in the making, and the culmination of decades of advocacy by First Nations leaders, Elders and Knowledge Keepers,” she said.
From Rome to ceremony
The repatriation effort traces back to 2022, when Indigenous leaders travelled to the Vatican and met with Pope Francis, pressing for the return of sacred items taken during the missionary era.
That visit followed the Pope’s apology in Canada for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential school system, where Indigenous languages and cultural practices were systematically suppressed.
In November 2025, the Vatican confirmed it would transfer the items—some nearly 100 years removed from their home territories.
When the crates arrived in Canada in December, leaders gathered on the airport tarmac in Montreal as the objects were unloaded from an Air Canada flight, marking the first time many of the items had touched Canadian soil in generations.
For those gathered in Gatineau, the ceremony carried both relief and unfinished business.
Thousands of Indigenous cultural belongings remain scattered across museum collections around the world—including many still held in Vatican archives.
Woodhouse Nepinak made it clear the work is far from finished.
“The journey home for these items has been a long one but it is not over,” she said. “Our goal is to truly repatriate the items, to see them returned to their communities of origin.”
For now, the belongings will remain under the care of the Canadian Museum of History while researchers and Knowledge Keepers work to identify the Nations and territories they came from.
Then, slowly—through ceremony, protocol and community decision—the long road home will continue.
Because for many gathered in that quiet museum hall, this story was never about artifacts.
It was about relatives. And relatives, sooner or later, find their way back.
