VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts from its vast ethnographic collection to Indigenous peoples from Canada, as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.

Edson Krenak, of the Krenak people and Brazil manager for Indigenous rights group Cultural Survival, said he has seen less participation from Indigenous people than he expected. He attributed that partly to the difficulty of finding space to stay in Belem, a small city that struggled to quickly expand lodging options for COP30.