Mitch Walking Elk and his students are unlikely Vatican visitors. But if all goes as planned, they will meet with Vatican officials in May with a plea: “Rescind the historic papal decrees that justified the domination of native peoples.”
These 500-year-old decrees are at the center of a surprising flurry of faith-based activism and interest in the Twin Cities, home to one of the nation’s largest urban American Indian populations. Critics charge they formed the basis of the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, which asserted that the people and wealth of non-Christian lands belonged to those who “discovered” them.