Yukon researchers bring Indigenous history home from museums in Ottawa and the Vatican

Canadian Indigenous artifacts are well travelled.

They can be found on display in museums and galleries all over the world, or tucked away in filing cabinets and on dusty shelves in back rooms.

It's Nyla Klugie-Migwans' job to track them down.

She's a First Nations heritage advisor with the Yukon government. She manages the Searching For Our Heritage database, a compendium of items that were created by Yukon Indigenous people.

"For me, when I work on this project, my hope is that it's about cultural identity and cultural connection, cultural connection to family, to community," she said.

The database has been around for 37 years. Every year, researchers are hired to scour online collections and catalogues, looking for items that have a connection to Yukon First Nations. When an item is discovered, the researchers try to find out as much as they can about it, such as how the item came to be part of that particular collection and how it's displayed.

That information is all posted on the database, but it's up to individual First Nations to determine the next step.

"If there's First Nations that are interested in repatriation, it's up to the First Nation to further the research and try to get the item back to the community," said Klugie-Migwans. 

Teri-Lee Isaac is the heritage manager with the Selkirk First Nation in central Yukon. In 2014, she organized a trip to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa to examine a number of items that originated with her First Nation. Heritage officers and elders were shown dozens of items, including four black velvet dog blankets. The museum said the blankets had been found in an abandoned cabin, but the Selkirk First Nation delegation knew otherwise.

They could tell the blankets had been made by Frances Joe, a member of Selkirk First Nation, because of their distinctive beadwork. Joe had made the blankets many years earlier for trapper Johnson Edwards.

"We sent those pictures over to Johnson in Pelly while we were in Ottawa and Johnson said 'those are my dog blankets, where did you find them, someone stole them from me,'" said Isaac.

Edwards had left the blankets in one of his trapping cabins. Someone came along and found them and sent them to the museum, describing the cabin as "abandoned."

Those blankets were eventually brought back to Pelly Crossing and they're on display today at the Big Jonathan House Museum.

Bringing the items back home isn't the only goal of the database. In some cases, Klugie-Migwans says the First Nation wants to ensure their history is cared for and properly labelled. If the name of the person who created it is known, that should be displayed, along with the correct name of the First Nation.

Indigenous art in the Vatican

Earlier this year, a delegation of Canadian Indigenous people travelled to Rome to meet Pope Frances. They were there to convince him to come to Canada to apologize for the church's role in the residential school system. They toured the Vatican Museums and were surprised to see so many items relating to Canadian Indigenous peoples.

Most of those items originated with a 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition, created by the Vatican with the cooperation of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Gloria Bell knows that exhibit and those items well, and wasn't surprised by the negative reaction the showing generated.

"The current Vatican narrative is that all of the cultural belongings that were sent in for this pontifical missionary exhibition were given as gifts," she said.

Bell is an assistant professor of art history at McGill University and has been researching the Vatican's collection of Indigenous cultural belongings and artwork for nearly a decade. 

"In my research and in the archival record the belongings are talked about as trophies of the pope and they were showcasing the missionaries as heroes in the exhibition and Indigenous people as grateful converts and I think the whole narrative around gifts really needs to be challenged."

Connecting with the past

Elaine Alexie is an artist from Fort McPherson, N.W.T. and a member of the Teetl'it Gwich'in First Nation. She's a  PhD student at the University of Alberta, researching Gwich'in material culture. 

She has been given access to the Manitoba Museum's Hudson's Bay Collection, a trove of hundreds of items collected by company workers who ran the trading posts scattered across Canada.

Alexie said the creators of the items are rarely identified, because the people who originally collected them didn't care.

But she said spending time with these items allows her to connect with her past.

"When I'm visiting these items, it's such a really important time for me, to be in the presence of these things made by my ancestors," she said.

"That's the important thing about museum collection research, not only looking at the history, but creating space for a community to be inspired, to be able to reclaim knowledge and skill that are held in these spaces and take it back home."

Teri-Lee Isaac, the heritage manager with the Selkirk First Nation, said the trip to Ottawa in 2014 became a huge source of pride for her community.

"The things that were made here are from our elders who have passed on," said Issac. "And some of children whose parents left them who made those items, they may not have a copy of it, they may not have anything that their parents made and when they see those items, they were very emotional."

When I'm visiting these items, it's such a really important time for me, to be in the presence of these things made by my ancestors,- Elaine Alexie, artist from Fort McPherson, N.W.T.

Klugie-Migwans, the First Nations heritage advisor with the Yukon government, said there has been a shift in the way museums manage these collections. Museum staff are generally very willing to work with Indigenous people who want to see these items.

"I think the museums across the world are starting to change their perspective because of reconciliation," she said. "Reconciliation is part of education and understanding, so museums are starting to look at different ways of handling their collections.

"I think in the future you're going to see a lot more museums open the door to how they can bring these items back to the various First Nations across Canada."