After the Vatican began the process of returning 62 artifacts from its ethnographic collection to indigenous communities in Canada last week, a scholar with indigenous heritage wrote an essay criticizing the move.
“The majority of indigenous people in Canada today identify as Christians, and nearly a third of them as Catholic,” Ashley Frawley wrote in her Nov. 18 article for Compact. “In the United States, proportions are similar. But when the Vatican returned 62 artifacts from its ethnographic collection on November 15, it framed the move as ‘part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.’ But is Catholicism not my culture?”
Frawley, a sociologist at the University of Kent with indigenous roots, argued that when the Vatican returned artifacts to indigenous Canadians, the wrong message went with it.
“The Vatican’s return of artifacts to their ‘rightful owners’ does more than acknowledge past wrongdoing; it implies a clean separation between ‘their’ religion and ‘our’ identity,” Frawley wrote. “In doing so, it affirms the broader cultural fantasy that indigenous people are never active players in history or universal humanity, only ever the victims of its imposition.”
Frawley said that, when people’s cultures are colonized, they are not merely victims. They are also brought into larger traditions, particularly in the case of Western colonization.
“Those artifacts are yours in the same way that Plato and Aristotle are mine,” she wrote.
The scholar criticized many attempts to assist Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, such as when governments provide money for mental health services but ignore poor material conditions.
“My relatives joke that you can’t throw a rock on a reserve without hitting a psychologist,” she wrote. “Yet dozens of communities still live under boil-water advisories.”
While she recognizes that colonialism caused damage, Frawley ultimately believes that the Catholic Church should recognize indigenous peoples as a part of the Church, as equals rather than as abused savages.
“But is not the Catholic Church my church, too?” she wrote. “The guiding assumption is often that Christianity is a ‘white man’s religion’ and if indigenous people are Christian, it must be because of brainwashing. But many indigenous people did embrace Catholicism, and continue to do so.”
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