OP-ED: Is indigenous artifact repatriation ‘Indian giving’?

"Growing demands for repatriating artifacts not shown to be obtained through property crimes suggest indigenous notions of criminality rely on an ancient presumption of guilt unless proven innocent."

Author: Hymie Rubenstein

Contemporary notions of criminal behaviour in countries like Canada are based on the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty in a court of law. This notion also applies to property crimes like stealing, fraud, burglary, robbery, and shoplifting.

Given the growing demands for the repatriation of historical and prehistorical artifacts that have not been shown to have been obtained through property crimes, suggests that indigenous notions of criminality are based on the ancient presumption of guilt unless proven innocent.

This is my take on the promised return of a century-old Inuvialuit kayak once used for beluga and whale hunts, along with 60 other cultural objects from indigenous communities, that have long been held and protected in Vatican Museums vaults.

The partially damaged century-old Inuvialuit kayak shown below is only one of scores of indigenous cultural items from Canada that are stored in those vaults. After three years of negotiations, 61 of them were gifted on November 15 by Pope Leo XIV to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB).

A source not authorized to officially speak on the matter said the Vatican will gift the artifacts to the Canadian Bishops with the explicit understanding that they will then gift them to their relevant indigenous communities.

Before that occurs, these cultural items, including the rare kayak, one of only five such items in the world, will first go to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, on December 6. There expert curators will assess their condition, confirm their age and origins, and work with a committee of indigenous representatives to determine where they should ultimately be placed.

A source told CBC the handoff is structured as a “church-to-church” donation, allowing the Vatican to avoid setting a precedent of returning what are disparagingly labelled as “cultural appropriated” objects directly to Indian bands or other communities. Presumably, such a precedent might be taken to imply that the artifacts were improperly removed from their communities.

This now accelerated attempt to repatriate these gifts goes back three years. According to a statement from the CCCB, “At the conclusion of the journey initiated by former Pope Francis that included his apostolic journey to Canada in 2022, various audiences with Indigenous communities and the publication of the Declaration on the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV desires that this gift represent a concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

The statement also said the Pope gave the objects to the CCCB because their members “are committed to ensuring that these artifacts are properly safeguarded, respected and preserved.”

The kayak and other items were originally sent to Rome in 1925 for a world exhibition organized by Pope Pius XI, who had invited Catholic missionaries across the globe to ship “examples of Indigenous life” from the regions where they worked.

Some 100,000 objects arrived in Rome. According to the CBC, “many of them [were] taken from Indigenous communities during a time of forced conversion, cultural suppression and in Canada, the residential school system. Most became part of the Vatican’s permanent collection.”

While it is true that from 1885 to 1951 the federal government banned the potlatch ceremony – a traditional gift-giving feast celebrated on the West Coast – as part of its assimilation efforts. During that ban, ceremonial items such as masks were destroyed, or confiscated and sold.

There is no evidence that the Catholic Church engaged in that destruction, confiscation, or sale.

Nor was the Catholic Church responsible for the creation of the boarding schools. Instead, its missionaries were charged with making the students literate in English or French, the central mission of all public schools in Canada, regardless of the ethnicity of their students.

As part of that learning effort, there is no evidence that indigenous people were forced to convert to Catholicism or that the Indian Residential Schools, institutions built by the government of Canada, not the Roman Catholic Church, succeeded in obliterating indigenous cultures. In fact, they were voluntarily and lackadaisically attended by only one-third of eligible indigenous children for an average of 4.5 years, hardly enough time for total assimilation – spuriously called “cultural genocide” by indigenous activists and their supporters – to have occurred.

More important still, it was carefully ensured that students entered schools based on which Christian denomination they belonged to.

As for the artifacts, the Holy See has always considered them as having been gifts to the Roman Catholic Church, why it also uses the term gifts to describe their return.

Meanwhile, those arguing they were stolen or otherwise seized from their communities have not presented any detailed historical evidence supporting this claim.

Still, none of these facts have prevented indigenous leaders from viewing the pending return as both symbolic and deeply personal.

“Every single one of those artifacts are sacred items, crucial for the healing journey for many residential school survivors,” said Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Chief Bobby Cameron in an interview with CBC in May.

This does not deny that there are many unknowns about this return of allegedly sacred artifacts, except that it is routine these days for indigenous leaders and “knowledge keepers” to grant sacred status to all of nature and most traditional products of everyday life.

Moreover, beginning in the 16th century, European glass beads and other decorative materials were introduced to indigenous cultures in what became Canada through negotiated trade, thereby replacing traditional materials like bone and shell. These beads and other items became integral to indigenous beadwork, jewelry, and clothing, blending European styles with indigenous artistic traditions. Yet, these syncretized items are now regarded as “traditional” objects with sacred status.

In addition, many of the artifacts in the Vatican’s possession were meant not only to be handled and used, but were even allowed to decay. Some totem poles, for example, are supposed to disintegrate and return to the earth, said Cody Groat, assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at Western University.

“The preservation mentality that we have for those in the museum realm doesn’t reflect that,” said Groat, who is Mohawk and a band member of Six Nations of the Grand River. “It’s kind of artificially extending its life, which might not be the intent of that item in the first place.”

Equally important, demands for the return of these artifacts gives credence to the thoroughly racist notion of “Indian giver,” an offensive phrase that refers to a person who gives something and then takes it back or expects something equivalent in return. It originated from a misunderstanding between European settlers, who viewed gift-giving as a one-time, one-way transaction, and indigenous people, for whom gift-giving was often an ongoing reciprocal practice in a barter-based system. Because the practice is considered offensive and rooted in colonial-era misunderstandings, the phrase is no longer appropriate to use, regardless of how much it is still being practised, the repatriation of the 61 artifacts being the most recent example.

Those long calling for the return of these allegedly sacred artifacts – including “sacred” everyday moccasins and other ordinary objects – ignore the fact that most of them, including the often referred to kayak, would have been long destroyed through constant use or been sold to private art dealers, save for the gifts and purchases by the Catholic Church and by the efforts of salvage archeologists whose mandate is to find, protect, and preserve items that their original creators or owners would never have considered worth retaining for posterity.

At the time they were manufactured and used, most were simply viewed as everyday manufactured items with no special supernatural or permanent significance. The best proof of this is that most salvage archeology around the world meant to recover the remains of these objects takes place in garbage dumps and long abandoned living sites.

Unfortunately, if countless examples from Africa and the Middle East teach us anything, the most likely outcome of the return of these artifacts is that 100 years from now all will have long disappeared through careless maintenance, theft, deliberate destruction, and greedy sale to commercial collectors.

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.