Groups to buy guns from Santa Feans, turn them into garden tools - By Nash Jones, KUNM News
If you have an unwanted gun, the city of Santa Fe and its police department have partnered with a gun violence prevention group and car dealership to buy it off you this weekend and turn it into a gardening tool.
New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence is co-hosting the Guns to Gardens buyback program Saturday from 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. in the parking lot of Santa Fe’s Fiesta Nissan.
In a news release, the city called the program “a safe surrender event,” meaning the identities of participants won’t be collected.
Gift cards ranging from $100 to $250 for box stores, gas or groceries will be provided in exchange for functioning firearms, depending on their type, along with free gun locks.
The city says guns should be unloaded and kept in the trunks of those participating, who should remain in their vehicles. There’s no limit to the number of guns an individual can turn in.
The Santa Fe Police Department will run a check on each weapon to ensure it’s not stolen.
If it is, the city says the owner will be contacted. If it’s not, New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence plans to show people how to forge it into a gardening tool the next day at what they’re calling a “Peacemaker Ceremony.”
That event will be held from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Sunday, July 24, at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe.
The city says Mayor Allen Webber plans to attend the event to proclaim “Miranda Viscoli and Reverend Dr. Harry Eberts Peaceseekers Day,” after the co-presidents of NMPGV who recently won the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship’s 2021 Peaceseeker Award, according to the church.
Courts decide DNA test results gets Roswell man a new trial - Associated Press
The New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously affirmed a district court's decision granting a new trial for a Roswell man after DNA evidence raised questions about his 2013 conviction.
The state's high court outlined a process for judges to follow in deciding whether to grant a new trial or other relief based on DNA test results obtained after a person was convicted.
The opinion addressed legal issues that hadn't previously been decided by the court concerning a state law for postconviction consideration of DNA evidence.
The justices reversed the state Court of Appeals and reinstated the district court's order for a new trial for Gregory Marvin Hobbs, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for a 2012 fatal shooting.
Hobbs contended that DNA test results showed the victim touched the handgun, supporting his testimony that the shooting occurred during a struggle over the weapon.
The Supreme Court concluded the test results were exculpatory because they corroborated Hobbs' contention that he acted in self-defense.
NM legislators gear up to fight for federal wildfire reimbursement - By Megan Gleason, Source New Mexico
As the state continues fronting costs to fight and recover from the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, legislators are questioning whether the federal government will really pay it all back in full, and when exactly that will happen.
Deputy Secretary Kelly Hamilton with the N.M. Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management updated lawmakers on Tuesday about the biggest fires of 2022, prompting questions about the responsibility of the federal government to help New Mexico recover since the U.S. Forest Service was at fault for starting both the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires.
There isn’t yet a total estimate for how much rebuilding and recovery will cost the state, Hamilton said, but expenses are piling up. Last month, President Joe Biden came to New Mexico and personally promised that the federal government will pay the costs back 100% for the first 90 days from the his disaster declaration.
At a Legislative Finance Committee meeting, Sen. Nancy Rodriguez (D-Santa Fe) questioned whether there will really be no caveats and if the state will get every single penny back. Hamilton said it’s a valid point to raise, but he can’t guarantee full federal reimbursement.
Getting any money back could be a years long fight, Hamilton said, with both approvals and denials. “Every expense that we incur as a state, we are going to aggressively ask for back from the federal government,” he said.
LFC Vice Chair Sen. George Muñoz (D-Gallup) said New Mexico shouldn’t be asking for reimbursements but rather telling the federal government what is due. The executive may need to file a lawsuit against the feds for not complying, he said, which would pile on top of the personal lawsuits that have already been submitted.
“Unless we force somebody to do something at this point, they’re not going to do it,” Muñoz said.
Many legislators expressed frustration at the state’s hand in the slow process of recovery. “We’re still talking about planning after months of planning,” Muñoz said, “and we’re not getting people back to where they should be.”
Rep. Jack Chatfield (R-Mosquero) said it’s time for New Mexico to start definitively laying out how much recovery will cost, even if the state has to fight with the U.S. government to get those reimbursement funds.
“It’s going to be a fight, and I think we ought to start fighting now,” Chatfield said. “I think we need to push forward to restore this (Las Vegas) watershed, and I think we need to push forward for the federal government to keep their word to us as a state.”
There are still a lot of unknowns around state costs, Rep. Patricia Lundstrom (D-Gallup) pointed out.
“If we get millions of dollars from the feds, it’s still state land,” she said. “It’s still a state responsibility at some point.”
Rodriguez wondered if the Legislature will see funding requests in January for wildfire recovery efforts.
Hamilton didn’t have a definitive answer but said millions in federal mitigation funds will help with rebuilding projects. He suggested that this is an opportunity for the state to build infrastructure back even better.
But who will foot that bill? Rep. Gail Armstrong (R-Magdalena) volleyed. “We say build back better. Well, what is the cost of building that back?” she said.
Sen. Pete Campos (D-Las Vegas) said the state needs to work as a whole rather than through separate agencies to recover from the fire’s damage and pull down federal reimbursement.
“We still don’t have a state plan that is going to be, if you will, the charge from all of us,” Campos said, “not only to the federal government but also to our delegation, so that we’re in unity when it comes to what we’re finally going to be justly owed for the damage that has been done.”
Vatican says they're gifts; Indigenous groups want them back - By Nicole Winfield Associated Press
The Vatican Museums are home to some of the most magnificent artworks in the world, from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel to ancient Egyptian antiquities and a pavilion full of papal chariots. But one of the museum's least-visited collections is becoming its most contested before Pope Francis' trip to Canada.
The Vatican's Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the food court and right before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and art made by Indigenous peoples from around the world, much of it sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens.
The Vatican says the feathered headdresses, carved walrus tusks, masks and embroidered animal skins were gifts to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the Church's global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But Indigenous groups from Canada, who were shown a few items in the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet with Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else may be in storage after decades of not being on public display.
Some say they want them back.
"These pieces that belong to us should come home," said Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, who headed the Metis delegation that asked Francis to return the items.
Restitution of Indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of the many agenda items awaiting Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday.
The trip is aimed primarily at allowing the pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for abuses Indigenous people and their ancestors suffered at the hands of Catholic missionaries in notorious residential schools.
More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress Indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the 1885 Potlatch Ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony.
Government agents confiscated items used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some of them ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections.
It is possible Indigenous peoples gave their handiworks to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 expo or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the items could have been offered freely given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions and the government's policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called "cultural genocide."
"By the power structure of what was going on at that time, it would be very hard for me to accept that there wasn't some coercion going on in those communities to get these objects," said Michael Galban, a Washoe and Mono Lake Paiute who is director and curator of the Seneca Art & Culture Center in upstate New York.
Gloria Bell, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and assistant professor in McGill University's department of art history and communication studies, agreed.
"Using the term 'gift' just covers up the whole history," said Bell, who is of Metis ancestry and is completing a book about the 1925 expo. "We really need to question the context of how these cultural belongings got to the Vatican, and then also their relation to Indigenous communities today."
Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as spiritual adviser to the spring First Nations delegation, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be "rematriated," or brought back home to the motherland.
"You can sense that that's not where they belong and that's not where they want to be," she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
The Inuit delegation, meanwhile, inquired about an Inuit kayak in the collection.
The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
Opening the revamped Anima Mundi gallery space in 2019 with artifacts from Oceania as well as a temporary Amazon exhibit, Francis said the items were cared for "with the same passion reserved for the masterpieces of the Renaissance or the immortal Greek and Roman statues."
You might miss the Anima Mundi if you were to spend the day in the Vatican Museums. Official tours don't include it and the audio guide, which features descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it entirely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there because there is no explanatory signage on display cases or wall text panels.
Margo Neale, who helped curate the Vatican's 2010 Aboriginal exhibition at the Anima Mundi as head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges at the Australian National Museum, said it is unacceptable for Indigenous collections today to lack informational labels.
"They are not being given the respect they deserve by being named in any way," said Neale, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingirr nations. "They are beautifully displayed but are culturally diminished by the lack of acknowledgement of anything other than their 'exotic otherness.'"
In Victoria, British Columbia, Gregory Scofield has amassed a community collection of about 100 items of Metis beadwork, embroidery and other workmanship that he tracked down and acquired via online auctions and through travel and made available to Metis scholars and artists.
Scofield, a Metis poet and author of the forthcoming book "Our Grandmother's Hands: Repatriating Metis Material Art," said any discussion with the Vatican should focus on granting Indigenous scholars full access to the collection and, ultimately, bringing items home.
"These pieces hold our stories," he said. "These pieces hold our history. These pieces hold the energy of those ancestral grandmothers."
Fatally injured New Mexico helicopter crew member called 911 - Associated Press
One of the four first responders killed in last weekend's New Mexico helicopter crash managed to call 911 before succumbing to his injuries, according to emergency dispatch recordings.
It's not clear which crash victim made the call Saturday evening to San Miguel County dispatchers, according to the recordings that were made public on Tuesday. The call sparked a frantic search for the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office helicopter in the hills near the northern New Mexico community of Las Vegas.
An unidentified dispatcher said over emergency frequencies that the person who calling said they saw dust when the helicopter hit the ground but no smoke or flames. The person also reported that gas was leaking from the aircraft, which was full of fuel because the crew had refueled before taking off for the trip home.
Searchers took more than 30 minutes to find the wreckage, their work complicated by nightfall and increasing difficulties that the initial survivor had in communicating, the dispatch records indicated.
"Subject is in a lot of pain and disoriented," a dispatcher said at one point.
State police officers who arrived at the scene first initially reported there were two unresponsive patients and two who had died.
Authorities have said that the helicopter crew had wrapped up a firefighting mission and were returning home to Albuquerque when the crash happened. They had spent a few hours that afternoon dropping buckets of water on a wildfire burning on private land near Las Vegas.
The crew included Bernalillo County Undersheriff Larry Koren, Lt. Fred Beers, Deputy Michael Levison and Bernalillo County Fire Rescue Specialist Matthew King.
The National Transportation Safety Board said earlier this week that the helicopter came down at a high rate of speed, hitting the ground upright before toppling over. Aerial footage of the scene showed mangled wreckage among pinon and juniper trees.
Federal investigators are expected to release a preliminary report about the crash in the coming weeks and the full investigation could last a year or more.
NM Secretary of State testifies before Congress about threats against election officials - Andrew Beale, Source New Mexico
The threat to our elections, once directed by adversaries like Russia, is now coming from inside the country, according to testimony Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver gave to the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.
“For people who believe their government is corrupt and their leaders are not legitimate, threats of physical violence and acts of intimidation have, unfortunately, begun to seem like acceptable responses,” Toulouse Oliver told the committee. She said she has reported three threats against her to the FBI since the June primaries.
The hearing focused on threats against election officials around the country, largely motivated by conspiracy theories about 2020 results. The four witnesses who spoke before the committee — three former election officials including Toulouse Oliver and a senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice — agreed the threats have greatly increased since the 2020 election.
Federal officials have looked into over 1,000 reports of threats against election officials since last year, and a recent poll by the Brennan Center for Justice found one in six election officials have experienced threats related to their job, with 77% reporting those threats are on the rise.
THREATS AFTER OTERO COUNTY PRIMARY STRUGGLE
Toulouse Oliver said threats against her office spiked following June’s standoff over certification of the primary election results in Otero County.
“Especially since our June 2022 Primary Election, my office has experienced pointed threats serious enough to be referred to law enforcement,” Toulouse Oliver told the committee. “These threats came on the heels of my office’s effort to directly combat election misinformation through a new website, and shortly after a nationally publicized situation in Otero County, N.M., where the county commission — parroting much of the election misinformation we’re seeing across the country — initially refused to certify the Primary Election results.”
The Otero County Commission, acting on advice from far-right conspiracy theorists David and Erin Clements, voted 3-0 against certifying the election results in mid-June.
Following a request from Toulouse Oliver, the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered the commission to certify the results, and the commission reconvened days later, voting 2-1 to approve the results. The only no vote came from Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, a convicted Capitol rioter.
Alex Curtas, a spokesperson for Toulouse Oliver’s office, said the harassment initially spiked following a YouTube video from far-right provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, himself convicted of illegal campaign contributions and later pardoned by former President Donald Trump. Earlier this year, D’Souza released a discredited propaganda film called “2000 Mules,” which asserted widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
In May, the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office launched a website aimed at countering false information about the election system, including information spread by D’Souza’s movie.
“Dinesh D’Souza was using his YouTube channel to make direct refutations of our fact-check, so we definitely noticed some things coming in,” Curtas said. “But then what really I think generated it was the national coverage we were getting for the Otero County situation.”
Toulouse Oliver wasn’t the only person targeted. Other employees of the office, including Curtas personally, were also harassed, he said.
It’s a new phenomena. Election administrators didn’t used to face things like this, Curtas said.
“It used to be sort of a sleepy, bureaucratic thing. And now because of how political it’s gotten, we’ve seen that uptick,” he said.
These days, staffers have signed up for a service that scrubs employees’ personal information, including addresses and phone numbers from the internet, he said.
REPUBLICAN REPS. SPREAD CONSPIRACIES
Even as the committee heard from Toulouse Oliver and other witnesses about the increase in threats caused by conspiracy theories, some Republican members of the committee sought to use their platform to undermine confidence in the country’s elections, while blaming administrators themselves for voters’ lack of confidence.
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia) cited D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules” as evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
“I believe stronger election laws that restore confidence in our election process will reduce the threats of violence towards election officials,” Clyde said. “It’s no secret that my Democrat colleagues have exploited these threats to justify a federal takeover of elections.”
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) compared the threats against elections officials to peaceful protests of Supreme Court Justices following their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and posed a question to Toulouse Oliver.
“How does it make you feel to now see Supreme Court Justices being doxed, and groups encouraging people to go to restaurants and intimidate those individuals?” he challenged.
“Violence has no place in our democracy,” she responded.
Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, (R-New Jersey) called supposed security holes in Dominion Voting Systems machines — a frequent subject of conspiracy theories — “unacceptable,” and said “It’s no surprise that voters worry and wonder about the validity of voting.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) used Biblical language to cast doubt on election security, asserting that “We are failed and fallen since Adam and our elections are no exception to that.” He added “The real challenge right now is: how will our sovereign states present best models for dealing with the perception amongst the American citizenry that our elections lack integrity, that their votes won’t count… People are concerned. It was quite convenient, the pandemic, mail-in ballots.”
Some Republican members of the committee argued for restrictive voting standards, such as limitations on drop boxes and requiring voter ID for all voters. Since the 2020 election, Republican-led states have enacted 102 new laws imposing or increasing criminal penalties for voting-related activity. Those laws include a ban in Georgia on passing out food or water at polling locations, and a law in Arkansas that criminalizes the possession of more than four mail-in ballots.
Curtas, of Toulouse Oliver’s office, said it’s disingenuous for Republicans to point to lack of confidence in election systems as evidence of the need for change, when they themselves are causing the lack of confidence in election systems.
“This is what offends me so much when I hear conservative people say ‘Look at how much distrust there is in our elections,’” he said. “Yeah, they don’t trust our elections because they’ve been fed a steady diet of lies about our election systems for two years.”
In all, 10 out of 16 of the Republican members of the House Homeland Security Committee — including Clyde, Pfluger, Van Drew and Higgins — voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Two GOP primary losers in Colorado fail to pay for recounts - By Nicholas Riccardi And Colleen Slevin Associated Press
Colorado's secretary of state's office on Wednesday said it has told two candidates who lost their Republican primary races last month that it will not conduct a recount of those races because they failed to pay the required amount by the deadline.
The office informed Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who lost her race for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, and state Rep. Ron Hanks, who fell short in his bid for the party's U.S. Senate nomination, that it was moving forward finalizing the results of the primary. Neither candidate paid the $236,000 that was due by July 15 for the recount.
In letters sent to the office on Tuesday, both said they wanted a hand recount rather than one done by machine. A centerpiece of their election conspiracy theory has been mistrust of voting machines.
Peters and Hanks have promoted the false claim that President Joe Biden did not actually win his election against former President Donald Trump in 2020 and also claimed widespread fraud led to their losses in the state's June 28 GOP primary. They are part of a growing number of deniers of the outcome of the 2020 election also questioning their own primary losses.
The secretary of state's letters said a hand recount is not allowed under the office's regulations and dismissed the candidates' concerns about possible fraud. It said they have one last window to pay for a recount — until July 26.
"The Secretary of State's Office followed all statutes and rules regarding requests for recounts, and Mr. Hanks and Ms. Peters chose to not provide the certified funds as required under law," spokeswoman Annie Orloff said. "Coloradans made their voices heard and candidates should accept the results of a secure and fair election – not spread disinformation."
There was no response to a request for comment from an email set up for both candidates.
Meanwhile, a group representing Colorado's county clerks said Peters sent an email to clerks early Tuesday saying she would be requesting a hand recount of ballots in certain unspecified counties. Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said state law did not allow such requests to be made directly to individual counties and that he feared the "improper request" could trigger more attacks on county clerks and their election staff.
"Clearly, Peters' request is part of a larger effort to create chaos, disrupt, and cause doubt in our elections," he said in a statement.
He noted that her race was not close: Peters lost the GOP primary to a former local clerk, Pam Anderson, by about 88,500 votes.
The request came just ahead of Wednesday's deadline for counties to certify the election results after rechecking and auditing the vote count.
The normally routine verification of election results was subject to controversy in Nevada and New Mexico after critics raised concerns about voting machines and mail ballots.
But no problems have been reported in Colorado. All of the state's 64 counties say they have completed their certifications or expect to by the end of the day, said Jack Todd, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office.
The office has until Monday to review the certification reports before officially signing off on the election results.
Crowd protests relocation of abortion clinic to New Mexico
Anti-abortion activists from across the U.S. converged in southern New Mexico on Tuesday to protest relocation plans by the Mississippi clinic at the center of the court battle that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but New Mexico's governor vowed not to back down from her support for access to abortions.
Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is running for reelection, tweeted hours before the protest that access remains legal and safe in her state.
"New Mexicans understand the right to make personal decisions about one's own reproductive health care — and we won't go back," she wrote.
The crowd gathered in triple-digit temperatures in the southern city of Las Cruces, near the location where Jackson Women's Health Organization plans to open its new clinic next week.
Some held signs that read "Pray to End Abortion" and "Vote Your Values." They heard from the leader of a local Catholic parish, a university student group and activists from Texas and Mississippi who talked about their experiences shutting down abortion clinics elsewhere.
Terri Herring, president of Mississippi-based group Choose Life, told the crowd about more than two dozen pregnancy centers in her state that have helped mothers who were considering abortion but opted to have their babies instead.
"We need to make this a refuge for women and their children," she said of New Mexico, before organizers of the rally announced they would open a Guiding Star Project clinic next door to the planned abortion clinic. The facility will provide fertility care, pregnancy and childbirth support services as alternatives to the abortions planned for the former Mississippi clinic next door.
Leah Jacobson, founder and CEO of The Guiding Star Project, told the crowd that the root causes of what is driving women to abortion need to be addressed and that a culture shift is needed to counter what she described as a loss of "bodily autonomy through devices, pills, drugs and surgeries."
"If we love life, if we want to protect women and children, we need to understand that there is something fundamentally broken about how we are treating motherhood in our culture," she said, pointing to the lack of maternity leave or breastfeeding spaces, among other challenges. "How about we actually take the needs of women into consideration?"
New Mexico's Democratic-controlled Legislature supports access, and state lawmakers last year repealed a dormant 1969 law that outlawed most abortion procedures as felonies, ensuring access to abortion even after the Supreme Court rolled back the national guarantee.
Preparations are well underway for the new abortion clinic, with furniture and equipment from Jackson Women's Health Organization moved from Mississippi, and it is due to open soon.
"We're just trying to tie up loose ends," Diane Derzis, owner of Las Cruces Women's Health Organization, told The Associated Press on Monday.
Derzis said Tuesday's demonstration against the abortion clinic didn't bother her since protests have gone for years at other clinics she has owned in Mississippi and elsewhere.
"It's not a big deal," she said. "That's life at an abortion clinic."
New Mexico tax changes benefit lower-income residents - Associated Press
The tax burden for funding state government and public schools in New Mexico is shifting slightly toward wealthier residents as the state stops collecting taxes on most Social Security benefits.
The Legislature's budget and accountability office estimates that recent state tax reforms will reduce state income by about $94 million during the budget year that began July 1. New Mexico this month stopped collecting income taxes on social security benefits for individuals who make $100,000 or less, or joint tax filers who report $150,000 or less in annual income.
The estimates were published Tuesday as the Legislature's lead state budget-writing committee met in Silver City to discuss tax policy, wildfire recovery efforts and trends in crime and crime prevention.
New Mexico will ramp down income tax collections further through an exemption for military pensions, the creation of a child tax credit and an expansion of other tax credits aimed at low-income households.
As a result, state government will forgo an estimated $403 million in annual income for the fiscal year starting in July 2023.
The analysis indicates that tax changes will benefit lower income residents more than those in upper income brackets.
"The tax burden borne by the top 5% increased slightly, while the burden borne by the other 95% dropped significantly," the office of the legislative finance committee said in its July newsletter.
At the same time, the state's direct financial reliance on the energy industry — dominated by fossil fuels — is expected to increase.
New Mexico, the nation's No. 2 producer of crude oil behind Texas, is experiencing a windfall in state government income tied to oil and natural gas production through a variety of taxes, royalties and lease sales as energy prices surge.
Much of the income surge from fossil fuel production is being stockpiled in trusts to benefit public schools and early childhood education programs.
At the same time, New Mexico's Democratic-led Legislature and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham have approved roughly $1.1 billion in rebate-style payments to residents since 2021, including a series of payments this year in June, July and August as inflation hits a 40-year high.
Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, is seeking reelection in November.
The Republican nominee for governor, former television meteorologist Mark Ronchetti, is advocating for automatic future payments to residents out of surplus income from oil and natural production.
The November ballot includes a statewide referendum on whether to increase withdrawals from the state's $26 billion land grant permanent fund to increase spending on public schools and early childhood education.
Vatican says they're gifts; Indigenous groups want them back -0 By Nicole Winfield Associated Press
The Vatican Museums are home to some of the most magnificent artworks in the world, from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel to ancient Egyptian antiquities and a pavilion full of papal chariots. But one of the museum's least-visited collections is becoming its most contested before Pope Francis' trip to Canada.
The Vatican's Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the food court and right before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and art made by Indigenous peoples from around the world, much of it sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens.
The Vatican says the feathered headdresses, carved walrus tusks, masks and embroidered animal skins were gifts to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the Church's global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But Indigenous groups from Canada, who were shown a few items in the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet with Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else may be in storage after decades of not being on public display.
Some say they want them back.
"These pieces that belong to us should come home," said Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, who headed the Metis delegation that asked Francis to return the items.
Restitution of Indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of the many agenda items awaiting Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday.
The trip is aimed primarily at allowing the pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for abuses Indigenous people and their ancestors suffered at the hands of Catholic missionaries in notorious residential schools.
More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress Indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the 1885 Potlatch Ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony.
Government agents confiscated items used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some of them ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections.
It is possible Indigenous peoples gave their handiworks to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 expo or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the items could have been offered freely given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions and the government's policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called "cultural genocide."
"By the power structure of what was going on at that time, it would be very hard for me to accept that there wasn't some coercion going on in those communities to get these objects," said Michael Galban, a Washoe and Mono Lake Paiute who is director and curator of the Seneca Art & Culture Center in upstate New York.
Gloria Bell, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and assistant professor in McGill University's department of art history and communication studies, agreed.
"Using the term 'gift' just covers up the whole history," said Bell, who is of Metis ancestry and is completing a book about the 1925 expo. "We really need to question the context of how these cultural belongings got to the Vatican, and then also their relation to Indigenous communities today."
Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as spiritual adviser to the spring First Nations delegation, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be "rematriated," or brought back home to the motherland.
"You can sense that that's not where they belong and that's not where they want to be," she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
The Inuit delegation, meanwhile, inquired about an Inuit kayak in the collection.
The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
Opening the revamped Anima Mundi gallery space in 2019 with artifacts from Oceania as well as a temporary Amazon exhibit, Francis said the items were cared for "with the same passion reserved for the masterpieces of the Renaissance or the immortal Greek and Roman statues."
You might miss the Anima Mundi if you were to spend the day in the Vatican Museums. Official tours don't include it and the audio guide, which features descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it entirely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there because there is no explanatory signage on display cases or wall text panels.
Margo Neale, who helped curate the Vatican's 2010 Aboriginal exhibition at the Anima Mundi as head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges at the Australian National Museum, said it is unacceptable for Indigenous collections today to lack informational labels.
"They are not being given the respect they deserve by being named in any way," said Neale, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingirr nations. "They are beautifully displayed but are culturally diminished by the lack of acknowledgement of anything other than their 'exotic otherness.'"
In Victoria, British Columbia, Gregory Scofield has amassed a community collection of about 100 items of Metis beadwork, embroidery and other workmanship that he tracked down and acquired via online auctions and through travel and made available to Metis scholars and artists.
Scofield, a Metis poet and author of the forthcoming book "Our Grandmother's Hands: Repatriating Metis Material Art," said any discussion with the Vatican should focus on granting Indigenous scholars full access to the collection and, ultimately, bringing items home.
"These pieces hold our stories," he said. "These pieces hold our history. These pieces hold the energy of those ancestral grandmothers."