Eternal Sovereigns and Ancestral Art

Abstract

The fourth chapter considers how cultural belongings made using Indigenous methods and hands resonate beyond the colonial space of the Vatican Museums. Although missionaries and pope Pius XI considered them as silent markers of missionary progress because of their removal from Indigenous communities, the chapter contends that they endure in the present as markers of Indigenous cosmologies and understandings. The chapter focuses on five works by unnamed but once known Indigenous artists that are now held by the Vatican Museums: a Haudenosaunee wampum belt, a Passamaquoddy cross, a Lakota Sun Dance drawing, Cree beaded moccasins, and a Kwakwaka'wakw ancestral sun mask. Indigenous cultural belongings matter; as teachers, ancient archives, and evidence of self-sustaining practices, they create ancestral art history lessons that disrupt both pope Pius XI's and pope Francis's logic of “silent eloquence” and the colonial views of missionaries and visitors. No belongings have been repatriated despite Indigenous communities' requests.