“A Window on the World” of Colonial Unknowing: Dioramas, Children's Games, and Missionary Perspectives at the Vatican Missionary Exposition

The third chapter, focuses on missionary viewpoints. Dioramas and games at the Vatican Missionary Exposition, created by missionaries, constitute the visual evidence of the exposition's attempt to present itself as a “window on the world.” However, as the chapter argues, the exposition was replete with colonial unknowing and actively denied Indigenous agency. The children's games had bright colors, stereotypical imagery of Indigenous peoples, and instructions to baptize and pray for “heathens.” They encouraged children and adults to understand Indigenous communities and their cultural practices as property of the Catholic Church. The Vatican exposition must be understood within a larger global network of institutions that were part of the settler colonial project to eradicate Indigenous lifeways. Residential schools are among the most notorious of these institutions, and the chapter connects how these schools “educated” Indigenous children to the “pope culture” of the Vatican exposition.