Frank Royal cradled a delicate wooden pipe in his hands while recounting how, after 135 years, the sacred item belonging to Chief Whitecap has returned home to Whitecap Dakota First Nation.
Chief Whitecap himself gave the pipe to a Saskatoon doctor, Royal said during a recent interview.
“The Riel Rebellion was on and Chief Whitecap was arrested and charged with treason and he was put on trial and Gerald Willoughby from Saskatoon testified on his behalf,” Royal said.
The chief was acquitted, “and so to pay [Willoughby] back on his deathbed in 1889, he asked Willoughby to come see him and gave him this pipe … Nobody knew where it went and nobody knew where the family lived until last year,” he said.
The Willoughby family still had the pipe. After seeing a news story about repatriation of Indigenous items, the doctor’s descendants started the process of returning it to the First Nation.
“We met with the family and did our repatriation ceremony in Ottawa and brought the pipe home,” said Royal, a Whitecap Dakota First Nation councillor. “It’ll be kept in a safe place for our community members to see.”
More Indigenous communities across Canada are seeing the return of items taken or given away generations ago. The Vatican and the Canadian Catholic Church are reportedly working on an agreement to return about 100,000 Indigenous items Catholic missions sent to Rome in the 1920s.
It’s not known how many — if any — items in the Vatican museum originate from Whitecap Dakota First Nation or other Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan.
Repatriating items helps teach youth about their traditions and connect them to culture, said Roberta Bear, principal of Charles Red Hawk Elementary School.
“These were the gifts that our elders used to pray for this generation that’s here today,” Bear said in a recent interview.
“These are the tools that we need in our community for our children to understand and learn about what helped our people. Why are we still here? It’s because of ceremony. It’s because of our language, our culture and beautiful artifacts that connect us to our past.”
Whitecap Dakota First Nation has repatriated two other ceremonial pipes in recent years, and recently welcomed the return of a large collection of turn-of-the-century items held by a Saskatoon family.
The collection includes regalia, beadwork and other artwork collected by brothers Harry and Theodore Charmbury, who ran a photography studio in Saskatoon after moving from Prince Albert.
Many of the items are in near pristine condition, a rare thing for items so old, said Canadian Museums Association community engagement manager Stephanie Danyluk.
“It’s totally invaluable,” Danyluk said. “This particular instance is really extraordinary. It’s not often that somebody has a large private collection that they just want to give back to the community.”
After Theodore’s wife died, the Charmbury family reached out to the association to return the collection to Whitecap Dakota First Nation, which happened in June.
“Sometimes things were given as gifts or sold as some type of economic driver,” Danyluk said. “But often things were removed illegally or against the will of a lot of communities. Returning [items] is a recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples to protect and maintain their culture in the ways that they determine.”
A reunion 135 years in the making: Ceremonial pipe returned to Whitecap Dakota First Nation
Royal said other Indigenous communities potentially facing the repatriation of items from the Vatican can tap local museums to help process and store items, like Whitecap Dakota First Nation did with the Western Development Museum. His other advice is straightforward.
“Follow a protocol for ceremonies and make sure there’s a good place to store the artifacts,” Royal said.
