Distribution Plans

Mount Shasta at dusk In the Light of Reverence will help provide the necessary public education that must accompany effective sacred site protection. With this in mind, we launched our distribution campaign in November 2000 and will continue active distribution through 2004. PHASE ONE entailed screenings in the three communities portrayed in the film—Lakota, Hopi and Wintu—as we began distribution at the grass roots. PHASE TWO expanded our audience to include government agencies and Congress. PHASE THREE initiated publicity and a national tour with the film, leading up to a public television broadcast as part of the PBS series POV (“Point of View”) on August 14, 2001. PHASE FOUR continues community screenings in order to deepen dialogue around the country. PHASE FIVE will stretch through 2004, with a focus on schools via a teacher's guide, Native American schools curriculum, and DVD of the film. PHASE SIX concentrates on education of public officials at the level of Congress and federal land managers. PHASE SEVEN will see us writing two books that reflect on the experiences and stories gained during the ten years of making In the Light of Reverence.

Funding for the distribution campaign is made possible through generous grants from the Ford Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Grousbeck Family Fund, the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, the Eastman Fund, and many individual donors.

The film and its distribution campaign will:

Portray conflicts over sacred landscapes in a way that allows native people to convey the meaning and importance of these places in their own words.
Clarify the unique qualities of land-based religions and characterize sacred land protection as a religious freedom issue.
Illustrate Native American worldviews in which a mountain, a spring or a grove is not an isolated “sacred site” but is part of a larger, dynamic, spiritual landscape.
Show how sacred places and associated ceremonies preserve larger ecosystems, and thereby link the urgent needs to protect both biological and cultural diversity.
Tell stories of land managers in federal agencies grappling with the question of how to manage sacred sites on public land, and how political reversals by the Bush Administration have undermined the progress made over the past decade.
Expose racism in American society and encourage dialogue to help heal century-old divisions.
Encourage activism in support of indigenous cultures and places.
Stimulate dialogue between outdoor recreationists (rock-climbers, skiers, etc.), New Age practitioners, environmentalists, academics, writers and native activists, tribal leaders, artists and traditional religious leaders. We feel strongly that this dialogue is key to moving ahead with environmental protection and social justice.
Lay the educational groundwork for legislation to guarantee religious freedom and protection of sacred places on public land while encouraging access to and protection of sites on private land.
Our distribution campaign is moving in conjunction with the formation of the Sacred Lands Protection Coalition, a partnership of tribal leaders, grassroots activists, and federal officials.

Partners in our ongoing distribution efforts are Seventh Generation Fund, Earth Island Institute, Native American Rights Fund (NARF), Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Independent Television Service (ITVS), Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), Television Race Initiative (TRI), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Black Mesa Trust, Indigenous Environmental Network, Indian Law Resource Center, Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Public Media Center, and others.

PHASE ONE:
Our first priority was screenings in the communities portrayed in the film. We held our first screening at the McConnell Foundation in Redding, CA, for 100 Wintu and other community leaders in December 2000. Our Hopi premiere was March 15 at Hopi High School, attended by 300 Hopi. We screened the fine cut in Lakota country in September 2000 at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center symposium on “Sacred Land,” and another Lakota community screening will be held in Laramie, WY in conjunction with the “Reinventing the Ecological Indian Conference” at the University of Wyoming. We had 8 other screenings during tours of northern California, the Northern Plains, and the Four Corners area of the Southwest before the broadcast. During our distribution tour throughout the country, Indians and non-Indians came together in town halls, chapter houses, tribal government chambers, university auditoriums, and private homes to view In the Light of Reverence, initiating a face-to-face dialogue on the issues covered in the film.

PHASE TWO:
The first set of community screenings culminated in a major event sponsored by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian on the mall in Washington, D.C., at the Hirshhorn Theater on March 23, 2001. During that same week, we also held screenings at the Department of the Interior and on Capitol Hill. This was the beginning of our efforts to bring native people, federal land managers, and legislators together to begin to talk about ongoing sacred land protection.

PHASE THREE:
This phase consisted of intense national publicity and more screenings, leading up to national PBS broadcast on August 14, 2001. In total, we had 29 screenings around the country before August 14th. The broadcast was the highest rated P.O.V. show of the summer season, with 3-4 million viewers. In preparation for the national spotlight, we improved our website, adding a map of currently threatened sites and suggestions for actions people could take. We also partnered with the Television Race Initiative to produce a facilitator's guide, designed for churches, community groups, and others who wanted to watch the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

PHASE FOUR:
We are still in Phase Four, with ongoing screenings at film festivals, community centers, and universities. Since the broadcast, we have organized dozens of additional screenings, with more being added all the time. Distribution to schools, universities and public interest groups continues to be handled by Bullfrog Films, in Oley, Pennsylvania, distributor of our previous documentaries.

PHASE FIVE:
We continue our emphasis on education with several projects designed to take us through 2004. In late 2002 we published a 48-page Teacher's Guide, which 23 features lesson plans for different subjects and ages. The Teacher's Guide offers various approaches towards the complex issues in the film, helping students tackle debates such as freedom of religion and land rights. We are currently writing and editing a Sacred Land Reader, with essays written by UCLA anthropologist Peter Nabokov and renowned Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. Nabokov and Deloria are two of the most profound writers and thinkers on these issues, and the text is nearly complete. Photos and a comprehensive bibliography will enhance educational viewers’ understanding of these complex and sensitive issues, and give them a deeper historical and cultural context with which to ask important and urgent questions concerning our environmental, legal, and spiritual future. To round out the educational package, we are working to develop a curriculum for Native American schools to address this culturally specific audience. The Teacher's Guide and the Sacred Land Reader will be distributed free of charge to schools and libraries that have purchased the film, while 100 Native American schools will receive all these materials plus the native curriculum.

Our Web site remains a source of information for activists, students, and members of the press who are interested in this issue, and we continue enhancing its capabilities as an organizing and informational tool. The educational resources we are developing will be published on the Web, as we attempt to use new technologies to reach the largest possible audience.

With 120+ hours of footage we have a lot of excellent material that did not make it into the 72-minute documentary. We were funded by the Ford Foundation to produce a DVD for educational settings, which we completed in December 2002, which includes seven additional scenes, an extended interview with Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., a short film update on newly threatened sacred places like Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico and Quechan Indian Pass in California, and two interviews with the filmmakers. The DVD provides local activists with a tool they can use in their campaigns, and teachers with a version of In the Light of Reverence that is both up to date and also enhanced by extra information for interested students .

PHASE SIX:
We are currently working with partner Native American organizations throgh the Sacred Lands Protection Coaltion to call attention to the need for Congressional oversight hearings and legislation in order to protect sacred lands. A two-day conference in Colorado in October 2001 brought some of the initial partners together, along with federal land managers. The group expanded headed to Washington in March of 2002. Together with the Seventh Generation Fund, the National Congress of American Indians, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Native American Rights Fund, and individual tribal leaders and cultural preservation officers, we organized a series of panel discussions, film screenings, and meetings with federal officials. Please see the agenda for a full schedule.

In the absence of legal protection for American Indian sacred sites, a native directed coalition is needed to insure an effective native voice in decisions affecting those natural places that America’s indigenous peoples traditionally consider holy. The goals of this coalition are:

public education regarding the meaning, importance and history of sacred sites; and
legislation to protect sacred sites.

The Sacred Land Film Project continues to support the growth of a Sacred Lands Protection Coalition, and continues to use In the Light of Reverence to support the educational component of this campaign.

PHASE SEVEN:
To expand the reach of our public education efforts, we will publish two books which grow out of the research materials and experiences gathered while making In the Light of Reverence.

The first is a children's book depicting a journey Florence Jones (Wintu) made through the wilderness south of Mt. Shasta as a 10-year old girl, entitled The River Journey of Florence Jones. Florence Jones is the last fluent native speaker of the Winnemem language. Many of the traditional stories she learned during her shaman’s apprenticeship have been written down in English by Mark Franco, the husband of Mrs. Jones’ great-niece and successor, Caleen Sisk-Franco. The couple has also preserved stories of the journey down the river. These are the basis for the children’s book, to be written by Jessica Abbe and Mark Franco. The book will report Mrs. Jones’s memories of the journey, supported by research into the natural and cultural histories of the era (written by Abbe), and interspersed with traditional teaching stories told to Wintu children (written by Franco). The book will have value to future generations of Wintu as a cultural remembrance, and a broad appeal to children of any ethnicity as an inspirational true story of a young girl’s heroic journey.

The second is Canyon Journal-An Exploration of Sacred Land, which will tell stories of the making of the film and the response to it in communities across America by producer/director Christopher McLeod. While working on In the Light of Reverence, McLeod recorded scores of experiences and stories from the twenty-five years collaboration with native people in their sacred landscapes. Woven through those stories will be reporting on new threats and local struggles, analysis of what has worked and what is needed to protect sacred places, research materials gathered during the filmmaking process that did not make it into the film or the expanded DVD, and photographs taken along the way. At the heart of the book will be accounts of the process of collaboration between filmmakers, native communities, environmentalists, academics and funders in search of reconciliation—and a new way of living on and sharing the land.

A Call for Action—Protecting America’s Sacred Lands

Sacred places are vital to traditional religious practices, the integrity of cultures, and the survival of native peoples, which in turn is crucial to the dialogue that is beginning between indigenous peoples, scientists and others on matters of survival for the human race and the integrity of the Earth’s ecological systems. Native wisdom and environmental practices have only recently been recognized as important contemporary resources. Thus, preserving Native American sacred lands is not only a religious freedom issue, an environmental justice issue, and a cultural diversity issue, but a crucial survival need for the contemporary world.

By educating the public about the relevance of land-based religion, native (as well as non-native) communities are ensured of their rights to practice their religions and perpetuate their cultures. By encouraging respect for land-based religions we help preserve both cultural and biological diversity for future generations.

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