Earth Island Institute’s Sacred Land Film Project produces a variety of media and educational materials — films, videos, DVDs, articles, photographs, school curricula materials and web site content — to deepen public understanding of sacred places, indigenous cultures and environmental justice. Our mission is to use journalism, organizing and activism to rekindle reverence for land, increase respect for cultural diversity, stimulate dialogue about connections between nature and culture, and protect sacred lands and diverse spiritual practices.

In the Light of Reverence is produced and directed by Christopher (Toby) McLeod, who has made three other award-winning, hour-long documentary films that were broadcast on national television: The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? (1983), Downwind/Downstream (1988), and Poison in the Rockies (1990). Since 1984, McLeod has been the Project Director of Earth Island Institute's Sacred Land Film Project. In 1990, he produced Voices of the Land as a 20-minute preview of the Sacred Land Film Project's work-in-progress on sacred places. In 1997, he completed A Thousand Years of Ceremony, a 40-minute profile of Wintu healer Florence Jones and her efforts to protect Mt. Shasta as a sacred site for the Wintu (This film was made specifically as an archival film for the use of the Wintu community.). After ten years of work, he completed In the Light of Reverence (2001), which was broadcast on the acclaimed PBS documentary series P.O.V. (Point of View) and won the Council on Foundation’s prestigious Henry Hampton Award in 2005. His first film was the 9-minute short, The Cracking of Glen Canyon Damn - with Edward Abbey and Earth First! McLeod has a Masters Degree in Journalism from U.C. Berkeley and a B.A. in American history from Yale. He is a journalist who works in film, video, print, and still photography. In 1985, McLeod received a Guggenheim Fellowship for filmmaking, and his U.C. Berkeley masters thesis film Four Corners won a student Academy Award in 1983. Toby has been working with indigenous communities as a filmmaker, journalist and photographer for twenty-five years.

Co-producer Malinda M. Maynor is a Lumbee Indian from North Carolina, and her two previous films, Real Indian and Sounds of Faith, both concern Lumbee identity and culture. They have been shown nationwide in classrooms, at conferences, and at film festivals including the 1997 and 1998 Sundance Film Festival. She is also the recipient of a 2001 Rockefeller Film and Video Fellowship. Maynor has completed a web site and CD-ROM on Lumbee religious history, and was an adjunct professor in American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she is studying Native American and Southern history and coordinating the Lumbee River Fund, a project to preserve Lumbee history and culture. She has a Bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard University and a Master’s degree in documentary film from Stanford.

Associate Producer Ashley Tindall holds an M.A. in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University and an M.A. in Public Policy (International Development) from UCLA, where she completed a short video about a World Bank-funded project in Ecuador. Her short films include Feathers and Coins, about the impacts of a casino in a New Mexico community; Two at Bay, an exploration of the troubled lives of two former juvenile offenders in the Bay Area; Casting Hope which followed the experiences of an Iraqi-American family in the 2005 Iraqi national election; and Green Cross, a portrait of a car crash survivor who opened a doomed medicinal marijuana dispensary. Ashley completed her BA at the University of Chicago and also studied in France and Senegal, West Africa.

Production Coordinator/Office Manager Marlo Bodzick completed her Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, Australia where she directed several short films, including a 30-minute hybrid documentary exploring happiness in our consumer society. Before moving back to the USA she helped to launch a production company that trains disadvantaged youth, hands-on, in production and post-production settings. Marlo holds a B.A. in Telecommunications with a Digital Media Arts focus from Michigan State University. She has also studied language in France and Germany.

Program Coordinator Vicki Engel launched her career in feature film production in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1985. She worked as Associate Producer of Visual Effects for feature films at Industrial Light and Magic, serving there on the production staff for eleven years. In addition, she has done fundraising for independent documentary films and organizational work for film festivals. Vicki holds a B.A. in French and Psychology from the University of Michigan, is an Iyengar yoga instructor, and a B/W art photographer.

Writer Jessica Abbe co-produced Angle of Inspiration, a 2004 PBS documentary about the effect on the small town of Redding, California, of a startling new bridge by world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava. She wrote In the Light of Reverence, and has written and produced documentaries on AIDS and San Francisco history. She helped start Bay Area Backroads, the highest-rated local program during her tenure as producer, and worked for two years with director Francis Ford Coppola and author Diane Johnson on a screenplay about the search for a cure for AIDS. In 2004, she was elected to the board of the La Honda Pescadero Unified School District. Abbe holds a B.F.A. in Dramatic Arts from New York University, and a Masters Degree in Journalism from U.C. Berkeley.

Editor and Videographer Will Parrinello has made films for theatrical distribution, broadcast, cable, and home video. His recent PBS release is the Gold Hugo and Golden Gate award-winning Little Italy, which explores Italian-American culture. Parrinello was the director of photography for the Academy-Award nominated Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. He co-produced and edited the award-winning films Sumo Basho, Kerouac, and A Yen for Baseball. He directed two documentaries on environmental, grass roots activism for Italian television and Discovery International.

Sound Recordist and Cinematographer Andrew Black has worked with McLeod for fifteen years, recording sound for Poison in the Rockies and Downwind/Downstream. Black is an award-winning filmmaker and Director of Photography. He has been working on documentary, short and feature films for over eleven years. Andy’s work has been for broadcast (AMC, PBS, MTV, BBC, ARD, Channel 4, Discovery), as well as for distribution. His work has been screened at, among others, The Sundance Film Festival, The San Francisco and Berlin International film festivals and has garnered numerous awards. He has worked extensively abroad.

Cinematographer John Knoop has worked with McLeod for seventeen years, and shot Poison in the Rockies and Downwind/Downstream. His many other credits include Truth Under Siege, My Home/My Prison, Cafe Nica, Thanh’s War, Where the Heart Roams, Louie Bluie, The Highly Exalted, and Maria’s Story. Most recently he shot two segments of In Search of Law and Order.

Narrator Peter Coyote is a well-known Bay Area actor who has narrated all of McLeod's films, and starred in Erin Brockovich, The Basket, Patch Adams, Sphere, Jagged Edge, Outrageous Fortune, Bitter Moon, and E.T. He is the author of Sleeping Where I Fall, a memoir of life in the ’60s.

Narrator Tantoo Cardinal (Metis), an actress who lives in Toronto, Canada, has appeared in numerous films, including Smoke Signals, Grand Avenue, The Education of Little Tree and Legends of the Fall.

Development Director Ivy Gordon founded the visionary software company Datafaction in 1976 and is volunteering her services to help us with fundraising and development. Ivy recently received an M.S. in organization development from Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management, and founded Saddle Sojourns, Inc. which offers workshops on horseback and encourages participants to think about power, influence and leadership.

Researcher Amy Corbin splits her time between a variety of nonprofit projects and graduate study in film. She has worked on film programming at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, taught in a youth job-training program based in Oakland, CA, and written grants for several organizations. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Film Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research focuses on the way popular American cinema represents "place" as it intersects with racial/cultural identity and the position of the film spectator. Amy holds a B.A. in anthropology and literary & cultural studies from The College of Williams and Mary in Virginia.

Webmaster Kevin Rardin updates and maintains our web site. Kev has previously worked with Netscape, JavaSoft, Openwave (when it was Unwired Planet and then Phone.com), and at Apple Computer as a writer, interface and instructional designer.

Interactive maps, additional web pages and images were created by the Sonnett Dunstan Media Group, a Virginia-based production company specializing in educational and promotional web sites for documentary programs and media-based outreach programs.

Researcher/Writer Amberly Polidor reported on “Sacred Places Around the World” for our web site. A professional editor and writer for more than a decade, her experience includes content writing for consumer and nonprofit web sites, business news and medical editing, radio news production and travel writing. She holds a B.S. in communications from the University of Tennessee.

Project Advisors

Over the last fourteen years, our Advisory Board has been an essential part of the development, editing and distribution of In the Light of Reverence. Our Board includes Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Chris Peters of Seventh Generation Fund, Walter Echo-Hawk of Native American Rights Fund, Gerald Vizenor, professor of Native American Studies at U.C. Berkeley, José Lucero of Circle of the Four Directions, ethnobotanist Donna House, anthropologist Richard Clemmer of the University of Denver, anthropologist Peter Nabokov of U.C.L.A., journalist Ben Bagdikian, author and historian Ted Roszak, author Peter Matthiessen, anthropologist Joan Halifax, the late environmental leader David Brower of Earth Island Institute, and the late Tewa anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz.