If I think about my grandma, the first memory that pours into my head is us sitting in her 1970s living room on the reserve with rosaries in one hand and tobacco in the other, kitschy mass-produced portraits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus staring down at us. Between the rising smoke of sage or some other sacred plant, I was sometimes sure I saw the face move. If I had told her that, she would have believed me. She believed in Jesus and Mary and God and also vision quests and that her cousins who died years before would sometimes come and take her to the spirit world. Like so many people around us, she was a lovely and sometimes terrifying ensemble of indigenous beliefs and Catholic piety.
The majority of indigenous people in Canada today identify as Christians, and nearly a third of them as Catholic. 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? 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. 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.
Leftish commenters warn against the danger of “othering,” but moves like this have exactly that effect. They portray the indigenous person as permanently foreign, eternally different, and forever “outside.” Our history is not your history and yours is not ours. We find ourselves cast as another species, a part of nature, the preservation of our culture akin to preserving wilderness. The implied ideal is the little Indian, sitting on a reservation following quaint old lifeways, so gawkers can point to something that has been lost and say, “Look what modernity has destroyed.” They pause to genuflect, conduct a land acknowledgement, and move on.
Years ago, I recall a piece of junk science floating around social media purporting to show that indigenous North Americans are the most genetically distant people on earth, uniquely separate from the human family tree. Illustrated in black and white with a stoic chief, it was shared by my indigenous friends and family, proudly showing our specialness. But one imagines nineteenth-century race scientists triumphantly sitting up in their graves to proclaim, “I told you so!” In reality, the genetic evidence shows nothing more exotic than the typical patterns of migration, periodic isolation, and interconnection that shape every human group on earth. But this fetish of absolute difference, however well-intentioned, carries a whiff of the old racist notion that we are fundamentally incompatible with the rest of humanity.
“Ojibwe legends and art ought not only be for the Ojibwe.”
The anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon wrote, “I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass.” Fanon was no assimilationist; his point was that the colonized have the right to the entire human inheritance, not just the fragments of it assigned to them. If it happened to humans, it is part of my story too. But it goes both ways. Those artifacts are yours in the same way that Plato and Aristotle are mine. Ojibwe legends and art ought not only be for the Ojibwe. The treasures of human culture are ours, and the cruelty of our past blots all of our souls.
The graveyard on my family’s reserve is speckled with the graves of my baby great aunts and uncles, victims of epidemic diseases that wiped out the poor and excluded. Much of the European conquest of the Americas was violent and devastating; Marx was not exaggerating when he wrote that the history of humanity’s expropriation is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” It wasn’t just the obviously colonized abroad that paid this price, but the “white” poor at home too.
But Marx also saw something else flickering in that blaze: a progressive kernel that tore down parochial walls and opened the possibility of a shared human world. Capitalism, for all its horrors, created what he called a “universal interdependence of nations.” In plainer terms, history does not only destroy; it also creates the universal. We can mourn what was lost, but as in chemistry, what is burned cannot be brought back from the ashes.
Yet today a whole industry is devoted to pretending that “giving indigenous people back their culture” can fix everything from addiction to suicide to poverty. Policymakers love this. Culture is cheap and provides ample photo ops for shedding a tear next to someone in a headdress. It proposes that the problems of indigenous communities stem not from material deprivation but from a colonial trauma safely buried far back in the distant past. Why build water systems, housing, roads, or job markets when you can fund another workshop by a “trauma-informed” well-being specialist? My relatives joke that you can’t throw a rock on a reserve without hitting a psychologist. Yet dozens of communities still live under boil-water advisories.
Celebrations of cultural difference may seem appealing. They involve not only fawning tributes to the beauty of indigenous culture but potential monetary rewards in the form of reparations. But when cultural solutions fail to address the problems of indigenous communities, the conclusion is rarely simply that the policy failed. Instead, it is that indigenous people are too damaged to thrive.
Some years ago, reports that some middle schools had been asked to write on the “positive outcomes” of residential schools caused widespread outrage. But if we are serious about the universal, then this subject cannot be reduced to a single moral note. Tomson Highway, a Cree playwright, novelist, and classical pianist, said of his years at a Catholic residential school: “Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent it at that school. I learned your language, for God’s sake. Have you learned my language? No, so who’s the privileged one and who is underprivileged?” It was there that he met Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven, all of whom he could play on the piano by 18. “How many white boys can get to do that?”
It seems safe to say that Highway’s recollections were the exception, and when his comments caused controversy, family members were quick to say they did not tell the “whole story.” Schools were often underfunded, and allegations of abuse are widespread and well-known. But the problem isn’t that schools tried to give indigenous children a liberal education; it’s that, more often than not, they didn’t.
The word “catholic” comes from the Greek word for “universal.” Whatever else can be said against it, the Church at least theoretically believed that no people were beyond the reach of salvation. Missionaries may have called my ancestors “savages,” but they also believed those savages had souls like theirs. Indigenous peoples’ belonging to the universal human family was never in question. Even Pius XI’s 1925 Missionary Exposition, a patronizing display intended to signal imperial might, nonetheless inadvertently proclaimed a common human story. An Inuit kayak, wampum belts, masks, and weapons held place among the art and relics of Europe and the rest of the world. The message was impossible to miss: All these far-flung cultures were now united under one Church.
“Repatriation sends a different message: These things are yours.”
Repatriation sends a different message: These things are yours. They’ve got nothing to do with us. Take your totem pole and your pipe and your kayak and go tell your own story. Or rather, go tell the story of tokenistic multicultural benevolence. Take them back to the land, to their blood and soil.
But is not the Catholic Church my church, too? 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. One Cree-Ojibwe priest is adamant in rejecting the notion that he or his relatives were brainwashed. He insists that his kokum (grandmother) freely chose her devout Christianity, and consciously chose to pass it down. Indigenous Catholics were often unsure of how to blend the old with the new—but like my grandma, they went to church anyway.
Even those who are not Catholic should be able to recognize in the church an aspiration for something greater than our parochial, “ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions.” Those artifacts lived in the Vatican for 100 years, part of the shared history of the Church that at least in principle belonged to all its members. As the Vatican now hands them back, we must ask: Are we not Catholics, too?