An Inuvialuit kayak more than a century old was unveiled Tuesday at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., along with a handful of other priceless Inuit items returned to Canada from the Vatican collection.

The kayak, elegantly hand-built from driftwood, sealskin and sinew, was one of the artifacts earmarked for repatriation by Inuit representatives who were given a private showing of the Vatican's holdings in the Amina Mundi exhibit during a trip to Rome in 2022.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Natan Obed was part of that delegation, which visited Rome to accept Pope Francis's apology for the Catholic Church's role in Canada's residential school system.

Obed said the late pope told him in conversation that "if items were taken forcibly or without consent," it amounted to theft.

Obed said it's not known how this kayak ended up in the Vatican but it would have been essential to the well-being of a community and used for beluga hunting.

Inuit leaders showed some of the returned items to a small group of Indigenous representatives and journalists Tuesday. Along with the kayak, the display included a handful of smaller Inuit items, including a soup ladle, needle casings and an ulu knife.

Obed said the items will not be on public display in the near term as a group of Inuit advisers works to trace each artifact back to its community of origin. The artifacts will be kept for now at the Canadian Museum of History in a secure facility with temperature controls.

The artifacts were put on open display Tuesday as Inuit leaders demonstrated for journalists how they were made and how they would have been used. Onlookers were allowed to touch the objects as Paul Irngaut, acting president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., explained their cultural significance.

"I'm sure that there were some people who are curators who might have been quite aghast at us touching the item, lifting it up, handling the paddle," Obed said.

"And I think this is also something that's part of reconciliation. The norms that you have for your institutions are not necessarily the norms that we have in our society, about how we respect our living history, our items of cultural significance.

"The ways in which we connect are often, very literally, to physically touch and to feel, to have that unbroken connection between something that was made 100 years ago to the practice that still exists today."

The Indigenous delegation met with Pope Francis in Rome a year after the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that potential unmarked graves had been found at the site of the former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. The news sparked global outrage and a national push for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

During the Rome visit, delegates were given a private viewing of some of the items held by the church — some which had not been seen in the public in decades.

Indigenous leaders were on hand in Montreal on Saturday to watch as the artifacts were removed from the belly of an Air Canada cargo jet in large crates.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 9, 2025.