Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Artworks, including indigenous art, have vanished from a multi-million-dollar federal collection, Blacklock’s Reporter states. The most disconcerting part of this revelation from the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations is that jewelry disappeared from an unnamed regional office 30 years ago, only to be made public now. The department, in an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons, would not disclose the total value of items it says are deemed “unaccounted for.” An inventory of missing artworks was requested by a Conservative MP who asked, “For each unaccounted artwork, when was it last verified or inventoried and what was its last documented location?”.JÄGER: Canada's public transportation is a national embarrassment.The Inquiry would not even describe the jewelry or name the artists who created the items. They were among 5,174 works purchased by the department’s $14.4 million Indigenous Art Collection, the largest of its kind in Canada.Missing artworks included items purchased as early as 1968. Fourteen sculptures, paintings, and other works vanished from a vault at department headquarters. Another 23 sculptures and other art disappeared from office displays.One print went missing following a 2011 display on Parliament Hill. Dozens of other artworks were used to decorate regional offices over a 30-year period, only to subsequently disappear..Disclosure of the department’s mismanagement of its collection followed an internal audit made public on October 19. “132 art pieces were identified as ‘works not accounted for,’” said the Audit of the Indigenous Art Collection.The department has been collecting art since 1965. It has never sold any painting, sculpture, or photograph.The report revealed that millions of dollars in art were kept in Gatineau, Quebec, at an uninspected private facility and a federal building lacking security cameras. No reason was given for the poor security..WHISSELL: Why Candace Owens grieves more than a grieving widow.“Through inquiries with management, it was confirmed that an independent evaluation of the condition of the collection on an annual basis had not been performed, which was a stated requirement,” wrote auditors. This is a mind-boggling assertion, given that 10 employees were assigned to manage the collection.If any of these artworks are found, it would be no surprise if indigenous leaders and activists began claiming that they were stolen or otherwise inappropriately removed from their communities.And if this is artwork negligence and mismanagement, is it in any way representative of gross government mismanagement in a democratic country? .What does this say about the potential for neglect, poor security, abuse, destruction, vandalism, theft, and other property crimes when it comes to the indigenous artifacts recently returned to Canada by the Roman Catholic Church, their ultimate destination being unaccountable and crime-ridden Aboriginal communities whose leaders view their lands as sovereign “First Nations?”The promised return by the Holy See of a century-old Inuvialuit kayak once used for beluga and whale hunts, along with 60 other cultural objects from indigenous communities that have long been held, preserved, and protected in Vatican Museums vaults, is on its way to completion.The partially damaged century-old Inuvialuit kayak shown below is only one of scores of indigenous cultural items from Canada that were stored in those vaults. After three years of negotiations, 61 of them were gifted to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) by Pope Leo XIV on November 15..BORG: Canada Post is a bottomless pit of debt and wasted money.Before that occurs, these cultural items, including the rare kayak, one of only five such items in the world, which arrived at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, on December 6, have to be carefully studied, as per an agreement with all the involved parties. Expert curators are assessing their condition, confirming their age and origins, and working with a committee of indigenous representatives to determine where they should ultimately be placed.The Vatican has always considered these artifacts gifts to the Roman Catholic Church, which is why it also uses the term gifts to describe their return.The handoff is structured as a “church-to-church” donation, allowing the Vatican to avoid setting a precedent of returning what are disparagingly labelled as “culturally appropriated” objects directly to Indian Bands or other communities. Presumably, such a precedent might be taken to imply that the artifacts were improperly removed from their communities..Meanwhile, those arguing they were stolen or otherwise seized from their communities have not presented any detailed historical evidence supporting this claim. Still, none of these facts has prevented indigenous leaders from viewing the pending return as both symbolic and deeply personal.“Every single one of those artifacts are sacred items, crucial for the healing journey for many residential school survivors,” said Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Chief Bobby Cameron in an interview in May..BARBER: G20’s 1990s mindset meets a 2025 reality check.First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse-Nepinak hailed the return of the artifacts as an “important and emotional moment for many First Nations across the country” during a press conference on the day of their arrival.But she acknowledged that the long process of reconciliation continues.“We’ve come a long way, and we have a long way to go,” were her words..Translation: Given the current state of Crown-Indigenous reconciliation, the demand for artifacts, land, and financial reparations will continue to grow.This does not deny that there are many unknowns about this return of allegedly sacred artifacts; it merely means that it is routine these days for indigenous leaders and “knowledge keepers” to grant sacred status to all of nature and most traditional products of everyday life. This is an extravagant claim when made about items like indigenous beadwork. Beginning in the 16th century, European glass beads and other decorative materials were introduced to indigenous cultures in what became Canada through negotiated trade, thereby replacing traditional materials like bone and shell. These beads and other items became integral to indigenous beadwork, jewelry, and clothing, blending European styles with indigenous artistic traditions. As well, for centuries now, only European tools have been used to manufacture these items, including totem poles. Still, these wholly European or syncretized items are routinely regarded as “traditional” objects with sacred status..FLETCHER: Warning lights flashing on BC’s electric vehicle plan.In addition, many of the artifacts in the Vatican’s possession were meant not only to be handled and used, but also to decay. Some totem poles, for example, are supposed to disintegrate and return to the earth, said Cody Groat, Assistant Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at Western University.“The preservation mentality that we have for those in the museum realm doesn’t reflect that,” said Groat, who is Mohawk and a band member of Six Nations of the Grand River. “It’s kind of artificially extending its life, which might not be the intent of that item in the first place.”Equally important, demands for the return of these artifacts lend credence to the notion of “Indian giver,” an offensive term referring to a person who gives something and then takes it back, or expects something equivalent in return. It originated in a misunderstanding between European settlers, who viewed gift-giving as a one-time, one-way transaction, and indigenous people, for whom gift-giving was often an ongoing, reciprocal practice within a barter-based economic system. Because the practice is considered offensive and rooted in colonial-era misunderstandings, the phrase is now regarded as inappropriate, despite its continued widespread practice, as evidenced by the most recent example: this repatriation of 61 artifacts..Those long calling for the return of these allegedly sacred artifacts — including “sacred” everyday moccasins and other ordinary objects — ignore the fact that most of them, including the often-referred-to kayak, would have been long destroyed through constant use or been sold to private art dealers, save for the gifts and purchases by the Catholic Church and by the efforts of salvage archaeologists whose mandate is to find, protect, and preserve items that their original creators or owners would never have considered worth retaining for posterity. Unless everything indigenous people see or use is considered sacred, which would render such holiness a mile wide and an inch thick, most traditional items were viewed as ordinary items with no special supernatural or permanent significance. The best proof of this is that most salvage archaeology worldwide aimed at recovering the remains of these objects has always taken place in garbage dumps and long-abandoned living sites.Moreover, if artworks can so easily be “missing” from federal government collections, how much more likely will this happen when old-style artworks and artifacts are returned to their ancestral homes, where their never-gifted counterparts disappeared generations ago?.JOHNSON: US-Canada national security breakdown — why Americans are walking away.Professor Groat said the return of the artifacts is deeply meaningful for many indigenous peoples in Canada, who view the objects as “cultural ancestors with a sentience or life of their own. These cultural ancestors are now able to rejoin our communities and help with the continuity and revitalization of our cultural practices.”This “community rejoining” is destined to be accompanied by rapacious demands from the Catholic Church and federal government by the Indian Industry for hundreds of millions of dollars for the storage, preservation, protection, and display of artifacts in lavish reserve museums that no indigenous people ever reported as missing, yet another reason to compare them to the missing government art. Still, like the “sacred” artifacts that never left their communities, this will not prevent the repatriated ones from being long gone and forgotten in a short period of time.What the missing Canadian government art scandal and countless examples from Africa and the Middle East teach us is the following: the most likely fate for these artifacts is that a few decades from now, they will have disappeared through careless maintenance, theft, deliberate destruction, and their greedy sale to commercial collectors.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
