This&That The Da Vinci Craft


Rare kayak found below Holy See by Ryan Stuart


PEEL RIVER, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES, 1901.


Abureaucratic bigwig and a museum curator have begun a quest to have a rare western Arctic Inuit kayak—collecting dust beneath the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel for 80 years— returned to Canada. The Indiana Jones/Da Vinci Code escapade began last fall when Robert Fung, the head of Toronto’s Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, overheard a conversation in a restaurant about the kayak. After enlisting the help of Ken Lister, the curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, Fung eventually traced the kayak through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and then to the Vatican City in Rome.


Last November Lister and Fung were invit- ed to hunt through the Vatican’s 80,000 pieces of ethnographic objects for the elusive boat. "It's several floors below the Sistine Chapel," Mr. Fung said, recalling being led to a darkened floor below the Vatican’s tourist- trodden halls.


The sealskin-covered, wood frame kayak has a round-bottomed, multi-chine hull, with


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each end terminating in two vertical horns, says Lister. It was made by the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie River delta region and would have been used for hunting seals, caribou and beluga whales. “The Vatican was unaware of the kayak's origins but its design clearly identifies the kayak to be Inuvialuit,” says Lister. “These kayaks are particularly rare.” In fact, there were only four known kayaks


from the Mackenzie area in existence, accord- ing to David Zimmerly, a former Arctic anthropologist with the National Museum of Canada and Inuit kayak specialist. The kayak probably arrived in the Vatican in 1925 when Catholic dioceses from around the world sent artifacts to the country for an exhibition, says Lister. Cataloguing for the exhibition was poorly done and most objects were effectively lost within the archives. Through careful diplomacy, Fung and Lister are hoping to bring the kayak, and other Inuit objects in the Vatican’s collection, back to Canada for display.


Photo PROVINCIAL ARCHIVES OF ALBERTA


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