Canadian indigenous leaders seeking an apology for the Catholic Church's role in the notorious residential schools where children where abused also want to start a dialogue on the return of native artefacts held in the Vatican Museums.
“My view is that we should sit down with church officials and begin discussions about repatriation,” Phil Fontaine of the Sagkeeng First Nation and former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations told Reuters.
Mr Fontaine was part of a delegation that spoke to the Pope privately for two hours on Thursday.
They want Pope Francis to travel to Canada to make an official apology there for the schools where indigenous children were abused and their culture erased.
Mr Fontaine and other participants said the return of artefacts also came up in three meetings with the Pope this week.
In 1925, Pope Pius IX held a world exposition of indigenous artefacts, displaying more than 100,000 objects, most sent to the Vatican by Catholic missionaries from around the world.
Nearly half of them later formed a new Missionary Ethnological Museum in Rome and were transferred to the Vatican Museums in the 1970s.
One item the delegates saw is a kayak made of wood and sealskin built by the Inuvialuit people of the Mackenzie Delat of the Western Arctic that is believed to be between 100 and 150 years old.
While one Inuvialuit leader last year demanded its immediate return to Canada, Mr Fontaine called for a calm, studied solution to repatriation.
“We have to decide where we want those to go and how they are going to be protected, what kind of environment they will be placed in,” Mr Fontaine told Reuters in St Peter's Square.
“There are museums all over the world with indigenous artefacts from Canada and so this has to be a very involved discussion with many different jurisdictions,” he said.
That would have to include determining if items were gifts or taken without permission, he said.
“It isn't unique to the Catholic Church but that does not prohibit the Catholic Church and its highest authorities from beginning discussions on what to do about these artefacts and their repatriation to Canada,” he said.
The Vatican Museums often lend items to other institutions and have said the kayak might go on tour after it is restored.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The biog
Hometown: Cairo
Age: 37
Favourite TV series: The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror
Favourite anime series: Death Note, One Piece and Hellsing
Favourite book: Designing Brand Identity, Fifth Edition
The years Ramadan fell in May
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
On Instagram: @WithHopeUAE
Although social media can be harmful to our mental health, paradoxically, one of the antidotes comes with the many social-media accounts devoted to normalising mental-health struggles. With Hope UAE is one of them.
The group, which has about 3,600 followers, was started three years ago by five Emirati women to address the stigma surrounding the subject. Via Instagram, the group recently began featuring personal accounts by Emiratis. The posts are written under the hashtag #mymindmatters, along with a black-and-white photo of the subject holding the group’s signature red balloon.
“Depression is ugly,” says one of the users, Amani. “It paints everything around me and everything in me.”
Saaed, meanwhile, faces the daunting task of caring for four family members with psychological disorders. “I’ve had no support and no resources here to help me,” he says. “It has been, and still is, a one-man battle against the demons of fractured minds.”
In addition to With Hope UAE’s frank social-media presence, the group holds talks and workshops in Dubai. “Change takes time,” Reem Al Ali, vice chairman and a founding member of With Hope UAE, told The National earlier this year. “It won’t happen overnight, and it will take persistent and passionate people to bring about this change.”
FIXTURES
Monday, January 28
Iran v Japan, Hazza bin Zayed Stadium (6pm)
Tuesday, January 29
UAEv Qatar, Mohamed Bin Zayed Stadium (6pm)
Friday, February 1
Final, Zayed Sports City Stadium (6pm)
