Even the Artefacts That Were Given to the Vatican?

Gimme, gimme, gimme!:

Gerald McMaster has always wondered what mysteries and cultural objects are kept within the Vatican’s collection of Indigenous artifacts.

The renowned First Nations curator and artist says the artifacts are important to how Indigenous people see themselves and the world around them. Yet, he says, not many have ever laid their eyes on what’s in the vaults.

“What is being hidden? Why is it being hidden?” McMaster pondered in a recent interview with The Canadian Press.

 

To wit:

In 1924, Gabriel Joseph Élie Breynat, the French-born Roman Catholic bishop of the Mackenzie region of Arctic Canada, received an unusual request from his holy handlers at the Vatican: Send artifacts.

The pope at the time, Pius XI, an outward-looking Italian, was planning the church’s first world expo. Missionaries from Australia to Zambia were instructed to collect religious and non-religious objects made by Indigenous peoples and deliver them to Rome.

Bishop Breynat sent a rather bulky, but delicate, object: a sealskin kayak.

The kayak and some 200 other pieces of Indigenous artifacts from Canada were exhibited in 24 temporary pavilions in the Vatican along with 100,000 objects from the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. By the time the expo closed in January, 1926, it had attracted a million visitors. After that exhibition, the kayak’s trail gets murky. The records are not precise, but it appears the sleek nautical curiosity has not been on public display for at least two decades, maybe longer.

The Globe and Mail first reported on the kayak’s existence in 2005 but was never able to persuade the Vatican Museums to allow a reporter to see it. But on Nov. 22, the kayak was removed from the Vatican’s vaults and put on display for The Globe, along with a dozen other objects from Indigenous peoples in Canada, including a small Arctic sculpture of a beluga, or possibly a killer whale, that was given to Pope Paul VI by Pierre Trudeau when he was prime minister. The kayak and the other objects were placed in a walled-off, temporary restoration space only a few metres away from works by Raphael, Caravaggio and da Vinci, the star attractions of the Vatican Museums.

 

If anyone has ever been to the Vatican museum, one could see that it is filled with priceless and fragile artworks and artefacts. Many are not exhibited due to their fragility.

Should they all be removed and end up who knows where? That would certainly teach future generations about other cultures.