10/12/2025
Finally …. 🙏
êkwa… this is more than news.
This is a spirit returning home.
When I saw the footage of those boxes coming off the plane — carried carefully, reverently, onto a snowy Montreal tarmac — I felt something in my chest loosen, like an old knot finally remembering how to breathe.
Because these are not “objects.”
Not to us.
Not to the People.
A sealskin kayak, drums, tools, carvings — these are living relatives. Cultural ancestors. Pieces of memory that were taken from our nations at the exact same time our children were taken from their families. When our ceremonies were banned. When our languages were punished. When the laws of this land tried to turn our people into shadows.
To have those relatives stolen, displayed, hidden in vaults, and labeled as “gifts”…
mâci-ôma — that was another kind of wound.
One more chapter in a long story of erasure.
But today… êkwa… we witnessed a different kind of medicine.
Indigenous leaders — Inuit, First Nations, Métis — standing in the cold, waiting like family at the airport for a relative returning from a long, painful journey.
Waiting for pieces of our spirit that had been held in foreign hands for a century.
And those boxes touched the ground the way something sacred touches the ground — quietly, without spectacle, but with the weight of generations.
Even the Vatican, after all these years, finally said:
These belong with their people.
These stories must go home.
Pope Francis opened that doorway with his apology…
And Pope Leo, so early in his papacy, chose to walk through it.
This does not fix history.
It does not erase the hurt.
It does not bring back the children who never came home.
But…
it is a beginning.
A breath.
A step toward môniyaw-kiskinohamâtowin — a shared learning, a shared responsibility.
A sign that the world is finally beginning to understand what our Nations have always known:
Our cultures are not relics.
Our stories are not museum pieces.
Our ancestors do not belong behind glass.
Now these relatives will be unboxed, awakened, held again by Inuit hands, Cree hands, Dene hands — recognized, identified, re-rooted in the communities that birthed them.
They will teach the young ones.
They will strengthen the old ones.
They will stand as evidence that no matter how far our ways were scattered, they never stopped searching for home.
As National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak said,
“We’ve come a long way, and we have a long way to go.”
But this…
this is one of those moments when the circle draws a little closer,
when the ancestors lean in,
when the land exhales:
“Yes. This is the direction.
Keep going.”
mîkwêc.
Kanipawit Maskwa
Standing Bear Network
