Father Nicola Mapelli, Director of Anima Mundi, the Vatican's ethnological museum, inspects an Inuit kayak with art restorers Catherine Riviere and Martina Brunori in November, 2021.Chris Warde-Jones/The Globe and Mail
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.
In 2022, a Canadian Indigenous delegation went to Rome to ask Pope Francis to apologize for residential schools. When members of the group saw their belongings in the Vatican archives, they asked for them back.
‘Not a simple journey’: a rare Inuvialuit kayak has come home from the Vatican Museums
Pope Francis did apologize in 2023 during his visit to Canada, and he also signalled a new openness to restitution, noting that the Seventh Commandment forbids theft and demands the return of stolen items. Now, Pope Leo XIV is ‘gifting’ these items to Canadian bishops on the understanding that they will return them to their communities of origin.
This could mark an important step for the Catholic Church, which ran most of Canada’s residential schools. For several decades, the country has been reckoning with the terrible legacy of these brutal institutions, including through formal apologies, several multi-billion-dollar reparations programs, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the Catholic Church has long stood out for its reluctance to either apologize or pay its share of reparations. So alongside the 2023 papal apology, the Vatican restitution may mark an important turning point.
This restitution is also part of a broader shift. Until recently, restitution demands were usually met with the claim that the items were purchased or were gifts (indeed, many of the Indigenous belongings in the Vatican archives were said to have been gifted). Claimants then had to try to disprove these assertions, such as by showing evidence of theft or duress. Given that this had to be done item by item for events that were decades or even centuries old, it is not surprising that almost everything stayed put.
But this traditional approach to restitution, as the Vatican return shows, is giving way to a newer variant that has special significance for colonial collections.
Witness the Benin Bronzes. Looted from the historic Kingdom of Benin (in what is now southern Nigeria) by the British in 1897, these treasures were scattered among the world’s most important collections. But developments in Holocaust restitution and a changing attitude toward colonialism started to have spillover effects. In a 2017 speech in Burkina Faso, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged that France would prioritize the return of its holdings of African cultural heritage items. The report he commissioned on the subject was published in 2018, sending shockwaves through the world of restitution. That same year, a German official stated that not all of his country’s Benin Bronzes had been stolen. The furor that resulted was a sign of increasing skepticism toward traditional defences that colonial-era items might have been donated or purchased by museums. A new approach toward restitution was emerging.
Plaques that form part of the Benin Bronzes are displayed at The British Museum in London in November, 2018.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Further signs of this new approach came in 2021, when both Cambridge and Aberdeen Universities spurned the traditional approach and returned their Bronzes, even though they had been purchased or donated. In 2022, Germany solidified the emerging wholesale approach to colonial restitution when they transferred legal ownership of all of their Benin Bronzes, and began the process of physical return. Others, including the Smithsonian and the U.K.’s Horniman Museum, followed suit. In February, 2025, the Netherlands announced the unconditional return of all 119 Bronzes from the Dutch state collections – the largest single return to date. They said that the Bronzes were originally looted and never should have ended up in their collections. Despite the controversy about their fate in Nigeria, pressure is mounting on the British Museum, which not only holds the world’s largest collection of Bronzes, but is also in the uncomfortable position of having “unclean” hands, since British troops were responsible for the original looting.
The rise of this new approach to restitution makes colonial collections vulnerable – they can no longer be confidently defended simply by pointing to sales or donations. Greater awareness has undermined the idea that colonized peoples routinely and freely parted with their cultural belongings. In the colonial context, free consent seems much more likely to be the exception, not the rule.
That is why this new restitution variant presumes non-consent for most colonial takings. The result is that communities of origin are less likely to be called upon to prove non-consent item by item. Instead, it is now the institutions trying to retain colonial-era items that are more likely to be called upon to prove that there was genuine consent to the original acquisition. This reversal in the burden of persuasion is why restitution is now more likely for colonial-era collections, except, for example, where the institution can show that the original acquisition was truly consensual. This is also why larger, wholesale restitutions, like those involving the Benin Bronzes and the Indigenous belongings in the Vatican, are quickly replacing the old and slow piecemeal approach.
Pope Francis apologized for residential schools on historic Canadian visit
This is not unprecedented, as the roots of this new variant can be traced back to the Holocaust. In 1947, the United States introduced Military Law 59 to respond to the massive theft that accompanied the Nazi regime’s violence and oppression. ML 59 aimed to return looted property as quickly as possible, although the results fell far short, partly because of shifting postwar politics.
Still, ML 59 created an alternative model of restitution specifically crafted for a context of massive dispossession, oppression and violence. It reversed normal legal assumptions and presumed that property transfers by persecuted groups were confiscations, even if there was some payment or if they were framed as gifts. And although its broad presumption of restitution – crafted in response to the horrors of the Holocaust – was a singular failure in that context, it can now be felt at work in not only in the much-belated efforts to address Holocaust returns, but also in colonial contexts.
In its resurrected form, as the Vatican return and the Benin Bronzes suggest, this new variant of restitution shows all of the signs of being far more powerful than it was in its original incarnation.