Project History

The goals of the Sacred Land Film Project are to:

• deepen public understanding of indigenous peoples' struggles to protect sacred places,
• provide native people with an advocacy tool to use within their communities to save land,
• rekindle respect and reverence for the land within technological society, and
• help protect sacred sites and indigenous cultures.

The Sacred Land Film Project is sponsored by Earth Island Institute (EII), a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization. EII was founded in 1982 to develop innovative projects that counteract threats to biological and cultural diversity. Unique within the environmental community, EII incubates new initiatives and provides a support system for more than thirty projects. In 1984, The Sacred Land Film Project became one of the first projects at Earth Island.

In the Light of Reverence is a presentation of the Independent Television Service in association with Native American Public Telecommunications with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Film Background and Production Notes
by Christopher "Toby" McLeod, Producer/Director

From 1978 to 1983 I produced an hour-long documentary film on the cultural and ecological impacts of coal stripmining and uranium mining in Hopi and Navajo country, The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I spent hours listening to the concerns of elderly religious practitioners with deep personal and ancestral connections to specific places that were being destroyed. They spoke of these places as “sacred” and I could feel the profound importance of their stories in relation to everything from individual health and cultural survival to the wider environmental crisis. Their message: connection to land gives meaning to life; the values of respect and responsibility sprout from place; harming nature is a spiritually-rooted problem; and taking care of the natural world is the essence of being human.

When Four Corners was finished we toured the Southwest for six weeks, screening the film in chapter houses, trailer homes, Tribal Council chambers, schools and community centers. We then traveled with native elders to urban theaters where they spoke before and after the film in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Denver, Boulder, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York and Boston. The film then aired nationally on PBS in November, 1983. Attorney Steve Tullberg of the Indian Law Resource Center said of Four Corners, “Had this movie been available a decade earlier, the Indian public would have been much better armed to resist the damage that they have suffered.”

Four Corners hinted at the meaning of “sacred land” but our film was essentially about the history and hidden costs of industrial development in Indian country. We left an important story untold. In hundreds of meetings and personal conversations over twenty-five years in dozens of Indian communities, I have since come to understand that the highest priority for traditional native people is protection of sacred places, free access to ceremonial sites, and deeper understanding on the part of non-natives as to their needs for privacy, solitude and secrecy as they spiritually care for the earth. Threats to sacred lands include the relentless push for energy resources, timber, minerals, water, recreational opportunities, luxury homes, archaeological excavations and New Age ceremonies. Meanwhile, activists continue to seek basic First Amendment legal protection for religious practices that are inextricably linked to specific places in the American landscape.

In response to these needs and concerns we launched the Sacred Land Film Project of Earth Island Institute in 1984 and developed a film advisory board consisting of native people with whom I have worked for many years. Chris Peters (Pohlik-lah/Karuk), Executive Director of the Seventh Generation Fund, Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabeg) of Honor the Earth, the late Alfonso Ortiz (Tewa) and U.C.L.A. anthropologist Peter Nabokov are some of the advisors who have been particularly helpful in our struggle to tell the story of sacred lands under siege. Research for In the Light of Reverence began in 1990, and in 1993 I began meeting with members of the Wintu and Hopi tribes to discuss a film aimed at protecting sacred places. Raising production funding was exceptionally difficult and we survived through the generosity of 300 individual donors who care deeply about the issue and believe in our work. We worked slowly.

Because we were filming a sensitive, often secret subject, we provided copies of all interviews for community and family archives, donated copies of the finished film to each of the individuals and communities we are working with, and reviewed edited footage — both rough cut and fine cut—with participants to ensure accuracy. In over twenty-five years of working with media and indigenous peoples, I have often encountered distrust of my motives as a filmmaker and journalist—as much from non-Indians as Indians. I have often explained that I am drawn to this subject matter out of a desire to see it honestly addressed by a society that often ignores not only the values of the first Americans, but its own values of tolerance, free expression and equal justice.

The original concept for the film was to document threats to and struggles over sacred places around the world in places like Uluru (Ayers Rock), Borobadur, Ankor Wat, the Ganges, Mt. Kenya, Jerusalem, Chartres, Lourdes, Lascaux, Palenque, Tikal, Macchu Picchu, Mt. Fuji and Mt. Kailas. My work on Four Corners taught me that Native Americans do not appreciate being singled out as unusual, because the 500-plus distinct American Indian cultures are part of a global community of indigenous peoples working to protect sacred places. After a couple of years of research and fundraising it became clear that the cost of making a four-part, global series was too high, so we narrowed our focus and began working intensely with the communities closest to home with whom we have long-standing relationships, the Hopi in the Southwest and the Winnemem Wintu in northern California.

We began filming in 1994. In May 1997, Native American filmmaker Malinda Maynor (Lumbee) joined the project as co-producer, adding a valuable perspective to the project and making my long-standing collaboration with native peoples into a day-to-day exchange of ideas (see Malinda's comments below). In the summer of 1997, we journeyed to Devils Tower National Monument to document the conflict between rock climbers and Plains Indians, thereby adding a third story to round out the film. We started editing our footage in late 1998 to identify our final production needs, and received completion funding from the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT) in October, 1999. We completed production in late 1999, edited the film in 2000, and completed it in early 2001. The 72-minute film was broadcast nationally on PBS as part of the P.O.V. independent documentary series on August 14, 2001. Distribution funding from the Ford Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Grousbeck Family Fund enabled us to plan an extensive distribution campaign. In late 2002, we published a 48-page Teacher’s Guide and released a DVD version of the film with 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.

We hope In the Light of Reverence will long be useful as an educational tool within native communities and also for the education of the wider public, so hungry for direct experience of a sense of place and deeper understanding of spiritual connection to nature.

There is still a blind spot in western law, the Constitution, American history books and the public consciousness with regard to places of spiritual significance in the landscape. Indigenous peoples’ perspectives on our shared past and future have not been adequately considered. Moreover, Americans’ concerns about our spiritual direction have not been articulated in relation to land use. Few Americans are aware of the profound impact these issues have on how our environmental public policy is implemented, how our “sacred” First Amendment rights are protected (or ignored), or how the multiple communities and cultures that comprise our nation relate to one another. This film addresses the complex questions that arise when cultural worldviews collide.

Though four million people saw In the Light of Reverence on PBS, we still have millions of people to reach. Our target audience includes Americans whose lives have been touched by encounters with spirituality and the natural world, and those who are concerned with environmental and cultural preservation, social justice and the use and enjoyment of public lands. This includes National Park tourists, public land managers, property owners, indigenous people working to protect sacred places, members of Congress, scholars, environmentalists, outdoor enthusiasts, and students of Native American issues, land use conflicts and American history. Viewers see and hear things they have never witnessed, and emerge discussing ancient concepts in a new way, with a new emphasis. This is an important story, and by telling it carefully and shaping provocative discussions after screenings we have a valuable opportunity to stimulate public dialogue about the relationships of land and culture, of spirit and place, of Indian and non-Indian.

A Little More Background
by Malinda Maynor, Co-Producer

I began working in film as a way to tell Lumbee Indian stories to a wide audience. I’ve often encountered resistance to the notion that Native Americans still exist; people sometimes respond with confused stares or impertinent questions when I tell them I am a Lumbee Indian, that I come from the swamps and streets of North Carolina, that English is my first (and practically only) language, that my uncle is a preacher and grandmother was a healer, that I am Ivy-league educated. To me, none of this is surprising or unusual; all the Indians I grew up with and all the ones I know now have such diverse backgrounds. Those who stare and question have heard very few stories that give accurate representations of Indian histories, cultures, religions, or politics.

I can see the impact of these omissions on the children in my home community; their identity and culture is actively invalidated by the media that they inhale, and that invalidation is reflected in the problems of drug addiction, suicide, and school dropouts that we face. When I've shown my own films to Lumbee children, they smile and start actively talking (not listening to the film at all!), pointing out people and places they recognize. Just seeing someone like them-not just the same skin color or the same culture, but the same Nikes, or nail polish, or Pepsi can-has a demonstrable effect on their feelings of inclusion, the feeling that they, too, have a place in society. Unfortunately, I have yet to see this perspective consistently included in television programming. While it is unarguable that there are more representations of Native peoples and their contemporary concerns in the media, how much has the American public learned?

In my teaching experience, many students have consistently refused to let go of their noble savage, casino-bankrolled, crying-Indian stereotypes. The false reality that television and film have put forth about Indians is difficult to shatter; even when students are faced with a “real” Indian—me—they try to qualify my identity by arguing it away: “well, if your tribe doesn't have a language, how can you have a culture?” and “what do you mean your tribe goes to church? That's not Indian.” Since we’ve finished In the Light of Reverence, I have a much more powerful tool to use in the classroom. Students can look at people they have always perceived as “real Indians”—the Lakota, or the Hopi, for example—and see them confronting contemporary problems. Furthermore, the problems are ones that the students themselves may have a hand in both creating and solving, if, for example, they enjoy rock climbing, or they have investigated New Age spirituality.

I was drawn to this film, and to working with Toby, because this is a story that actually reveals something true about the realities of indigenous people. This film could easily fall into the predictable category of clichéd flute music with hapless and irrelevant Indians (and that is, unfortunately, the film that many funders wanted us to make), but it doesn't. In the Light of Reverence counterbalances those stereotypes with the voices of people who define themselves in a complex relationship to a place, a place that lives in their food, their songs, their art, their science, their laughter, their arguments, and their prayers. This film provides the public with a window into what makes me, personally, a Lumbee Indian—my relationship to my home. I started making films when I couldn't find an honest and critical representation of indigenous experiences on television; I have worked on this project because it provides that representation. With this film, we can begin a real dialogue about the place of indigenous peoples in this country, and about the history and place we all share. My students will leave their one-dimensional stereotypes behind and begin to see their reciprocal relationships with sacred places and with Native peoples.

Future Plans

After we tour with the completed film, launch the activist campaign to help protect sacred sites, and accomplish national public television broadcast, we will turn our attention back to filmmaking and the production of a four-part series on sacred places around the world. This was our original intention and vision when we launched the current project in 1991 but we decided to complete a solid film on our home region before attempting the more ambitious and expensive global series. Indigenous communities from Australia to Africa honor sacred sites and struggle to protect and care for them, while organized, institutional religions and nation states recognize- and often fight over - sacred sites from the Ganges to Jerusalem. These are the stories we will turn to in the years ahead.

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