The Story Behind the Story

In March 1992, at the Peace and the Planet Symposium in Eugene, Oregon, Steven T. Newcomb walked up to a table where Oglala Lakota educator Birgil Kills Straight (1940–2019) sat alone and told him about an idea: a global campaign asking Pope John Paul II to formally revoke the Inter Caetera papal bull of May 4, 1493. Birgil’s Elders had sent him to Eugene, he said, to find “a man in the West who was going to assist the people.” That morning Newcomb proposed in his keynote that Indigenous representatives go to the Vatican, and the audience rose to its feet. Newcomb tells how that conversation led to the Indigenous Law Institute, later Original Nations Advocates, and to a sunrise ceremony at Wounded Knee on October 12, 1992.

Read the full post on Steven Newcomb’s Substack: https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/the-story-behind-the-story