OETA to host “Standing Bear’s Footsteps” screening at Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

OETA-The Oklahoma Network is slated to host a free advance screening of the upcoming PBS documentary “Standing Bear’s Footsteps” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9 at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

The screening is free and open to the public and includes free admission to the museum’s galleries beginning at 5:30 p.m.. The Southwest Visions collection of Native American art is among the galleries available for viewing, according to a news release.

For more information, call (405) 841-9212 or visit www.oeta.tv.

“Standing Bear’s Footsteps” airs  at 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 15 on OETA.

Details on the film, provided by the network, are as follows:

The documentary, produced by Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), weaves interviews, re-creations and present day scenes to the story of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, with much of the story based in Oklahoma.

In 1877, the Ponca people were exiled from their Nebraska homeland to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. To honor his dying son’s last wish to be buried in his homeland, Chief Standing Bear set off on a grueling, six-hundred-mile journey home. Captured en-route, Standing Bear sued a famous U.S. army general for his freedom–choosing to fight injustice not with weapons, but with words. The Chief stood before the court to prove that an Indian was a person under the law. The story quickly made newspaper headlines – attracting powerful allies, as well as enemies. Chief Standing Bear’s story is one of human rights and resonates powerfully in the present. “I am a man,” Chief Standing Bear said at his trial. “The same God made us both.”

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