In Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, Gloria Jane Bell considers Indigenous cultural belongings held in Vatican Museums collections. As she turns attention to the stories they tell—and the Vatican’s efforts to silence them—she locates these possessions within a long history of Indigenous travelers with creative ties to Rome. The book traces these ties through discussions of prominent Indigenous artists, stolen Indigenous artworks, and the mobile, tenacious sovereignty they have maintained in the face of papal dominance. Bridging multiple disciplines including art history, material studies, and archival studies, Eternal Sovereigns suggests a “new, entangled, and unsettling” way to read relationships between Indigeneity, Rome, and the Vatican (8). This thoroughly researched text raises absorbing questions for scholars invested in the possibilities of transatlantic Indigenous art history.

Bell builds out her research from the 1925 Vatican Missionary Exhibition (VME), where the Indigenous cultural belongings at the center of Eternal Sovereigns were first displayed in Rome. The VME, opened by Pope Pius XI, was a sprawling exhibition of global Indigenous art and artifacts intended to honor Catholic missionary work (4). Following papal bulls and conversion projects, the exhibition portrayed Indigenous people as naive, uncivilized, and in need of Christian redemption, altogether strengthening the Vatican’s efforts to render them voiceless. Bell notes Pius XI’s description of the artworks’ “silent eloquence” throughout Eternal Sovereigns, offering correctives in the form of archival speculation, reflections on Indigenous agency, and an understanding of Indigenous cultural belongings as “eternal sovereigns” (4,129). Despite occasionally losing track of conceptual threads (such as Indigenous “audacity” and Rome’s development into a modern city), Bell nonetheless deftly pulls together locations, disciplines, and historical moments (8). Furthermore, she reminds readers of her project’s stakes for Indigenous nations with keen commitment informed by her own heritage ties to the Métis people.

Bell intersperses the text with first-person accounts of her archival research, including altered photographs, and draws these personal experiences into her textual analysis. These contributions are conversational and pithy, pulling affective dimensions of her research into relief. “I wanted to throw a rock into the glass cases and shatter the exhibition,” she writes after viewing an outdated Missionary Ethnological Museum exhibition of Indigenous cultural belongings (4). She describes her personal writings as efforts to “tilt the hierarchy of value that exists within . . . European and American archival structures and modes of history writing,” expanding the art historical record (5). When Bell shapes her firsthand observations into fleshy analytic devices—as in her chapter four reading of a Passamaquoddy wooden sculpture of Christ on the cross, which links Christ’s represented suffering with the sensed suffering of trapped Indigenous cultural belongings—Eternal Sovereigns hits its stride.

Throughout the book, the personal writings illuminate Bell’s research process. Descriptions of a dismissive conservator suggesting that “Indigenous people need to get over genocide” and a surreptitious visit to the Vatican Fototeca underscore the need for Eternal Sovereigns’ correctives within cultural institutions holding Indigenous materials (12). Other writings suggest ambivalence, blending awed reactions to the Eternal City, “I would glance over the wall onto Saint Peter’s and feel the glory and power of being in Rome,” Bell writes of lunch breaks at Propaganda Fide College with bubbling anger toward Catholic authority, expressed in archival frustrations and the desire to free trapped cultural belongings (127). This ambivalence mirrors the tension between Vatican hegemony and Indigenous sovereignty Bell considers throughout the book, particularly in her first chapter on two 19th-century artists: Ferdinand Pettrich and Edmonia Wildfire Lewis.

In this chapter Bell places Pettrich, a German sculptor known for his busts of Indigenous diplomats, and Lewis, a Haitian and Anishinaabe sculptor who lived and worked in Rome, in conversation. While Pettrich showed work in the VME and Lewis did not—and there is no record of a relationship between them—Bell asks how “considering their efforts in tension” may provide insight into Indigenous presence and representational agency in Rome and the Vatican (19). She reflects on the artists’ shared Neoclassical influences, tracing the movement’s equation of 20th-century Indigenous people with a vanished Greco-Roman culture, and distinguishes Pettrich’s romantic representations of Indigenous subjects from Lewis’s layered, fluid ones. Memorably, she contemplates Indigenous creative agency in Lewis’s 1868 sculpture Minnehaha, which blends “European and Native American ideals,” materials, and references (45). Throughout these discussions she highlights gaps in the historical record, speculating on what may have been left out of Lewis’s archival story. The chapter’s focus on two artists offers an intimate view of art historical tensions which unfold on larger scales in the following chapters on the VME. Furthermore, its comparative, speculative approach primes readers to consider archival gaps and Indigenous agency within these analyses.

The second chapter walks readers through the VME itself, describing the exhibition and its function as Vatican propaganda. Bell details a space as chaotic as it was totalizing, a disorienting blend of Catholic ritual procession and curiosity cabinet. As she critiques the Vatican’s collapsing of Indigenous culture, she points to “glitches in the system” where the exhibition’s internal logic breaks down (100). More attention to the philosophy underpinning this logic could have strengthened her arguments. While Bell continually gestures toward the VME’s ritual elements and, more significantly, the destabilizing potential of Indigenous art for Catholic viewers, she chooses not to read the VME through Catholic theology or anthropology as other scholars have done. While this move allows her to “[center] and [add] nuance to Indigenous American visual culture,” a clearer sense of how Catholic cosmology works could help readers understand why Indigenous cosmologies threaten its hegemony (and make glitchy moments—including a description of a bizarre missionary artwork made of fleas—more affecting) (6). Nonetheless, Bell’s reading raises a key divide between the VME’s focus on the visual, material aspects of Indigenous cultural belongings over their spiritual, intangible presence. By turning toward this presence in the next two chapters she finds gaps in the VME’s silencing regime, filling them with “ancestral art history lessons full of persuasive power and aesthetic brilliance” (131).

The third chapter focuses on idealized missionary perspectives at the VME. Bell reads a set of children’s board games based on missionary travels and conversion efforts, counterposing them with a discussion of residential schools’ horrific realities. Drawing on Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein’s concept of “colonial unknowing,” she returns to the VME’s gaps and silences (95). An ongoing pattern becomes clearer in this chapter: Bell raises an interesting entry point for analysis, such as museum cannibalism or “cringey!” as a personal response to VME dioramas—before racing forward or reiterating arguments about the Vatican fixing Indigenous culture in the past (109). These fleeting images, expanded and explored in visual-textual analysis, could help us better understand how the Vatican does so. Could a critical lens on museum cannibalism inform broader exhibition readings as well as object-specific ones? What might it look like to linger on “cringing” as an aesthetic response to colonial displays? While some readings could benefit from further reflection, the chapter as a whole is well-considered. Bell approaches disturbing connections between residential schools and the VME with care, noting that many artworks in the exhibition were made by residential school students otherwise barred from cultural engagement. She draws a haunting connection between the children and their extracted works in observing that “[residential school] missionaries kept children against their will during the most aggressive assimilationist period; so too were their cultural belongings kept as prisoners and displayed under glass at the VME” (117).

The fourth and final chapter returns to the VME cultural belongings held in the Vatican Museums collection today, seeking their agency and vocal “eloquence” (156). Here, Bell positions these cultural belongings as “eternal sovereigns,” embodiments of Indigenous cosmologies that “resonate beyond missionary anxiety” and Vatican space (21). She criticizes the Vatican Museums’ unwillingness to partner with their home nations (let alone support repatriation) and offers close, culturally-informed readings of five works: an Anishinaabe, Nipissing, and Kanien’kehá:ka wampum belt, a Passamaquoddy wooden sculpture, a Lakota Sun Dance drawing, Cree beaded moccasins, and a Kwakwaka’wakw ancestral sun mask. Her strongest readings are her most specific ones, including a discussion of the Lakota Sun Dance drawing written in consultation with multimedia Lakota artist Dana Claxton. This chapter is an impactful mirror to the first chapter’s discussion of Lewis; Bell opens and closes her argument with a focus on Indigenous creativity and its impact in Rome. Her epilogue brings in two additional, fascinating threads that place the VME in a more global context: Australian Aboriginal activist Anthony Martin Fernando’s protest at the exhibition, and the VME’s possible influence on the aesthetics of 20th-century Italian fascism.

Bell’s extensive footnotes, combined with her first-person accounts of archival research, reveal her breadth of knowledge and indefatigable commitment to her project. Her appendix letters to Pope Francis and Justin Trudeau—the former requesting VME collection access, and the latter linking her research to broader Indigenous political projects—underscore an already clear awareness of her work’s international stakes. Altogether, Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome is a thoughtful consideration of Indigenous presence and creativity in Rome. I am curious to see how Bell’s questions on archival gaps, sovereign relationships, and Indigenous influence will unfold in her future work and in research on transatlantic Indigenous art history at large.