The Vatican’s return of Indigenous belongings is a powerful win for restitution – The Globe and Mail
December 5, 2025
Mayo Moran is the Irving and Rosalie Abella Chair in Justice and Equality at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. Her upcoming book is Making Amends for Historic Wrongs: Reparative Justice and the Problem of the Past.
A century after taking Canadian Indigenous belongings to Rome for an exhibit in 1925, the Vatican has decided to return dozens of them from its Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum. The 62-item restitution is the Vatican’s largest to date, and a step toward making amends for the Catholic Church’s outsized role in Canada’s destructive residential schools. But the change of heart also signals a shift in the concept of restitution itself, one with dramatic consequences for museum collections around the world, and with surprising roots in the Holocaust.
