You may have heard that Sacred Land Film Project was at the BAVC Producers Institute, an intense new digital-media boot camp leading to a project presentation before a packed house at the The Center in San Francisco.

For 10 days our team was immersed in learning about emerging new media technologies, how to harness them for social and environmental justice, how to nurture and grow communities, and how to motivate positive action using these exciting new tools. Topics ranged from alternate, augmented, virtual and hybrid digital reality, web 3.0, the “intelligent web,” data visualization, interactive mapping, to twitter strategy and crowd sourcing. We were surprised to learn that we are no longer filmmakers, we are “screen content producers!”

The project we developed and then presented at The Center is a global application made for mobile devices, like a smart phone, that will take you on a tour of sacred sites that are now maintained as national parks or, in the case of urban tours, to discover where sacred sites have been paved over.

We partnered with Dorothy FireCloud, the Superintendent of Devils Tower National Monument, to create a tour prototype. With Dorothy’s guidance and the help of our amazing mentors, Anselm Hook, a leading augmented reality specialist, and Paige Saez, a designer and strategist, we created a working prototype and a long-term vision for a mobile phone application that could have a profound impact on our collective understanding of sacred lands.

The tour tells the story of indigenous culture through indigenous voices using video, audio, photos and augmented reality so that a hidden history is unveiled. Augmented reality is when an image is overlaid onto a physical environment, as you can see in the video below.

GPS data triggers your hand-held device to play stories relevant to your exact location. For example, in our Devils Tower prototype, you will be able to look through your smart phone and see an Indian village overlaid onto the modern-day physical environment, then raise the phone to the sky, where you can learn about Lakota star knowledge and see it through the phone.

We love the way this technology encourages people to get out and experience nature while learning a history that is buried, lost, hidden, erased or literally underground, and in doing so recapture what it means to be in connection with the land.

Note: The SLFP crew went to Papua New Guinea in April, 2010 to film a segment of Losing Sacred Ground. We are posting a few stories from that trip.

The woman selling bananas smiles at me, warmly, excited. I snap her picture, then, like so many times before, I spin my camera around so she can see herself in the camera’s LCD display. Onlookers gather round. They point at the photo and nod excitedly, give me the thumbs up, and go back to studying the screen. The banana woman reaches out to shake my hand. “Thank you.” She pushes a bunch of bananas into my hand.

Traveling through Papua New Guinea, this scene replays itself with construction workers, fishermen, betel-nut sellers, toddlers, teenage boys carrying machetes and wizened men wearing traditional wigs decorated with flowers. All reacted with wonder, curiosity, surprise and glee at seeing their own photos.

Especially in areas without electricity (or photo development labs, for that matter) possession of these photos was extremely valuable. My husband brought a small photo printer, and whenever it spit forth its diminutive image, the recipient would retreat without another word to study his or her likeness. Friends would gather and comment, point and laugh, and we would usually leave them still staring at the print as our boat pulled away.

Ownership and control of one’s own image is not a new issue for documentary filmmakers, but it’s especially important in places like Papua New Guinea, where most people have little or no access to cameras, video and other technology. Tellingly, in the places where we spent the most time, the thing people wanted most from us (after first aid) was copies of our photos and video.

“It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time,” the Huli men from our guest house told us. “Please send us our photos.”

Having just completed the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, we newly realized how many issues there are in this new era of filmmaking. YouTube and Vimeo make global distribution possible at the click of a button, and online tools make it possible for people separated by thousands of miles to share footage and collaboratively edit a film. In many ways that’s revolutionary — a plurality of voices, people telling their own stories, sharing and pooling resources to reach as wide an audience as possible.

But this “democratization” of the means of production also means that filmmakers can easily lose control over the images they create. And that could be a problem. Giving up your own likeness makes you vulnerable in surprising ways. The people who allowed us to take their images trusted that we would not misuse them. It would be negligent and unethical to share those images, especially the editing of them, in ways that the subjects haven’t agreed to.

In Papua New Guinea, that responsibility could easily be lost — since so many people so freely invited us to take their photos. In a country where Internet access is sparse and we saw no local television production, the need for media literacy and empowerment is taking a back seat to more urgent problems like health care, nutrition, schools, roads and violence.

But I believe that producing media and learning its power are also crucial elements in development. Of course, I’ll be a bit sad when my digital camera in a riverside village fails to elicit the simple, immediate thrill that it did this past April. But I would trade that for seeing kids using cameras to interview their elders, mothers telling their own stories, and people along the road taking pictures of the fascinating foreigners, instead of the other way around.

Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995, passed away April 6 in her home in Talequah, Okla. Mankiller was the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation and left behind a legacy of tribal revitalization and collective self-determination, including instituting community-development projects to improve infrastructure, building a hydroelectric facility and establishing tribal-owned businesses.

In 2002, the Sacred Land Film Project was honored by Mankiller’s support. Read more about the life of Wilma Mankiller in the New York Times.

We’ve been throwing around some new terms here in the SLFP office: New media. Interactive mobile technology. Geocasting. Augmented reality.

At first blush, it may seem incongruous for a group that’s focused on protecting traditional cultures and ancient sacred places, but the Sacred Land Film Project is about to join Web 3.0. (OK, I admit I had to google “web 3.0″ to make sure that is what we are doing … so you can see what level I’m at.) But with so many developments that have already proven effective in communication and mobilization — like text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter — we are hoping the next steps will be even better at building community and fostering educational experiences.

The best part of this new development? We’re getting a lot of help. Losing Sacred Ground has been accepted for participation in the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Producer’s Institute for New Media. The Institute is a 10-day workshop that partners documentary projects like ours with mentors in technology to help filmmakers develop projects that go far beyond theatrical screenings or television broadcast.

As BAVC describes it, “The intention of the Institute is to develop socially relevant media projects for emerging digital platforms … Producers may propose a range of delivery strategies, including cellphones, other hand-held devices, set-tops, Internet, portable software and more.”

Previous participants have designed online games, experiences in Second Life, interactive art exhibits, digital community spaces and marketplaces, and video-based educational platforms. You can check them out here.

Our team is hoping to use technology to encourage people to experience and appreciate the natural world. Our original idea was to combine documentary techniques with the concept of geocaching (a sort of treasure hunt using a handheld GPS) and audio guides/webcasting to create an experience we’re calling “geocasting.”

We envision an experience something like this: users can download an audio guide, with optional GPS coordinates, into their iPod, iPhone, GPS, or other mobile device. They can then travel to one of our sites — currently we’re hoping to start with the Shellmound in Emeryville and Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming.

The audio guide will lead the user through the site, describing the people and cultures that once inhabited the areas that the listener is seeing. The sound might also include native music, interviews with people indigenous to that area, and commentary on modern impacts — for example, the controversy surrounding the climbing of Devil’s Tower. After their trip, geocasters will be able to share their experiences, photos and thoughts online on a dedicated website.

In addition, BAVC is going to help us develop an augmented reality component of this project. We’re not sure what this is going to look like yet — and any description I make is likely to be wrong. Suffice it to say, this will be the really innovative part of our project and most likely beyond anything we’ve imagined thus far.

We’re hoping that this project will help people connect to the rich histories of environments that they might otherwise overlook. We also think it will be fun! So stay tuned for more details as the project gets under way.

As many of you know, the Losing Sacred Ground film series follows the story of Aboriginal communities seeking to reverse Australia’s rapid environmental degradation and prevent further losses of their revered sites. After a successful court battle to stop Xstrata zinc mine from expanding, the Northern Territory Parliament enacted legislation that overturned the legal decision and allowed the diversion of the river.

Over a year later, Xstrata has not fulfilled its promise to revegetate the area affected by the river diversion. The Northern Land Commission’s (NLC) chief executive, Kim Hill, says, “Flying over the mine site, it’s just a scar on mother earth.”

The McArthur river is a sacred part of the “dreaming” and song cycles of the aboriginal people. Barbara McCarthy (Yanyuwa), a member of the Northern Territory Parliament, says, “If you cut the McArthur River you are cutting the Rainbow Serpent, and there is a great sense of fear that comes from that — a spiritual sense of fear. It is a relationship with the river that indigenous people want so much for non-Aboriginal people to understand and respect. And that no amount of money can take the place of something that has been within the family for thousands and thousands of years.”

Xstrata is authorized to extract 43 million tons of the resource over the next 20 years.

We can still let Chief Minister of the Northern Territory of Australia Paul Henderson know that we are in support of the aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and ask to rescind permission for Xstrata to mine. Mr. Henderson can be contacted here: chiefminister.nt@nt.gov.au. You can view a sample letter on The Environment Centre Northern Territory’s website.

Check out our webclips and sacred site report on the subject.

I traveled to Oahu, Molokai and the Big Island last week, continuing discussions with Native Hawaiians about our proposal to make the ongoing saga of Kahoʻolawe Island one of the eight stories in Losing Sacred Ground. This was my fourth research trip over two years to meet with members of Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana and the Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission, and I am very happy to report that we reached an “agreement in principle” to go forward.

Folks unfamiliar with this process might ask: what takes so long? When dozens of native people from five islands oppose the U.S. Navy for a decade and win, and then succeed in having the land returned to their sovereign control, and when that heavily bombed island is the only island in the Pacific Ocean bearing the name of the sea god Kanaloa, you start to get an idea of the sensitivity and concern that might arise when an outsider asks to partner to tell the story.

As I made my rounds this trip, meeting with long-time activists Emmett Aluli and Davianna McGregor on Molokai, with Craig and Luana Busby-Neff and Pualani Kanahele on the Big Island, and then with a Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana ad hoc communication committee of seven on Oahu, a visionary Cultural Use Plan was released by the Kaha’olawe Island Reserve Commission. I had heard about the plan for several years and read early drafts, but Emmett was generous enough to loan me an advance copy and I was able to read the 200-page document as I crisscrossed the islands. By the time I met with the Cultural Use Plan’s principle author, “Auntie Pua,” in Hilo, I had read the entire plan, and felt very humbled, as it makes painfully clear how little time most of us take to observe and participate in our natural environment.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in safeguarding sacred sites read this visionary document. It is a challenge to practitioners to intimately get to know the stars, the tides, the winds, the waters, the life cycles and the life forms, and to take care of them with passion and ceremony. The document “requires that you do the ceremonies as instructed in order to foster a relationship between yourself and the elements.” Though crafted for Hawaii’s unique culture, history and environment, it is a blueprint for a community of wise, committed individuals to heal and restore a sacred place.

A single English cucumber, wrapped in plastic, costs $3.69. Lettuce is upwards of $5 for three ounces. At one of the town’s three restaurants, a plate of French fries with melted cheese and gravy — yes, three great fats, together known as poutine — is about $8.

This is the reality of the cost of living in Fort Chipewyan, where we recently spent four days at the beginning of October on a research trip. In northern Alberta, Fort Chip is accessible only by plane or boat until freezing temperatures and hard-packed snow create the “ice road.” During the winter, large trucks can haul in the essentials needed throughout the year: gasoline, construction materials, furniture, dry goods. The distance and difficulty mean everything for sale costs 50 to 200 percent more than I’m used to paying in San Francisco.

Long before the advent of the plane and the ice road truckers, native people in the area — the Dene, the Mikisew Cree, the Meti — lived off the land. Elders still recall setting trap lines, drying fish and moose meat for the winter, and mothers sewing new moccasins every year for their children to run across the snow and ice. They crossed the lake on dog sleds in the winter, and traded furs for a few special staples like flour and lard.

All of that changed when the children were sent to residential school. In a policy that the government has since apologized and paid compensation for, native children were (often forcibly) taken from their parents, prohibited from speaking their own languages, and as much as the priests and magistrates could dictate, stripped of their culture. Many elders have bitter memories of nuns abusing the children, even being made to sleep in the “proper” position or risk an ear pulling by the sister in charge.

This forced adoption of the Western culture and lifestyle has had a profound impact on the residents of Fort Chipewyan. Although a handful of people still live on the land, everyone is now reliant on the infrastructure of the developed world. (No doubt this is also attributable to the spread of modernization as well, but the residential schools created a dramatic cultural rupture.) That reliance means needing cash to pay for gasoline and phone bills and packaged cheese. It means needing a job and very often moving to Fort McMurray to work in the oil sands industry. And for those left behind, it means relying on precious cargo holds of the Cessna flights, and on the ice roads.

The difficulty and expense to acquire anything — be it rain pants for the trip across the lake or turkey meat that wasn’t processed loaf meat product — made me much more aware of how easily and unconsciously I usually purchase, consume, and waste.

How much more precious is that bottle of water ($3.75 for half a liter) when it had to be airlifted to reach my lips. How daunting to imagine remodeling a home, say, when everything — the nails and faucets and windows and wood — have to be weighed, loaded onto a truck, and hauled at considerable expense.

Consequently, there isn’t a lot for sale in Fort Chipewyan. No newsstands hawking the daily paper. No farmers markets offering locally grown produce. No Walgreens to pick up prescriptions and shoe inserts. No bookstores, fresh flowers, craft supplies, or boutiques selling cowboy boots and sparkly tights.

So it was a relief of sorts to return to the Bay Area, a consumer haven. I can have my sprouted wheat bread, my quick trip downtown for cuticle butter, the latest iPod accessory at the Apple store. I can have almost anything I want, for a lot cheaper.

Upon further reflection, though, it seems that feeling of scarcity is one that I should always have. The abundance that I enjoy in the Bay Area is an illusion. How much of the food and products I consume were shipped across the country or around the globe? How many times have I discarded something that could be salvaged? How many times have I bought something incredibly unnecessary on impulse?

I don’t need more in San Francisco than I needed in Fort Chipewyan, so why should I think about my consumption any differently?

An economist would argue that if I paid the true cost of my goods — the impact of the pollution created to produce, ship, and discard it — its price tag would be much higher. It’s not a new idea, to think of oneself as living on an island, living with thrift and valuing our possessions. But not until I visited Fort Chipewyan, where scarcity is a daily reality, did I truly understand what that experience should feel like.

I should think a lot harder about things that I buy. I should be careful not to let the precious fruits and veggies go bad. I should feel a pang when I fill up the car, knowing what it takes to extract and refine that fuel. It seems I will have to keep learning this lesson as I experience the consequences of our unconscious consumption.

In the Light of Reverence, Toby McLeod’s award-winning film exploring American culture’s relationship to nature in three places considered sacred by native peoples — the Colorado Plateau in the Southwest, Mount Shasta in California, and Devils Tower in Wyoming — will be screening as part of the Chico Green Film and Solution Series, at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 22 at 120 Ayers Auditorium in Chico, Calif.

Winnemem Wintu tribal leader Caleen Sisk-Franco and tribal member Marc Franco as well as filmmaker Toby McLeod will attend the screening and be there for Q&As after the film.

Newsreview.com recently posted an article about the history of the Winnemem Wintu struggle illustrated in In the Light of Reverence and quoted McLeod, “It’s meaningful that eight years later we’re collaborating on a screening in Chico where they’re going to continue to tell their story. It’s about having dialogue and opening people’s hearts and minds. Their perspective on the environmental crisis is critically important. They’re determined to prevail and endure.”

To learn more about the screening, visit SLFP’s screenings page.

In July, we traveled for the second time to Russia’s Altai Republic, this time to film a meeting of 25 sacred site guardians from all over Central Asia who gathered to discuss strategies for protecting cultural and biological diversity locally and globally. At the invitation of the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai (FSDA), delegations from Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia’s Lake Baikal area met at Uch Enmek Nature Park with Altaian colleagues for two days of discussion about how best to deal with tourism, mining, climate change, archaeologists and government bureaucrats. Altaian environmentalist Danil Mamyev, a key character in our film, observed, “By networking sacred site guardians you also connect the places — and the guardians and the sacred places are all strengthened.”

We learned when we arrived that our friend, shaman Maria Amanchina, had become very sick after we filmed her in the summer of 2007. When I saw Maria I apologized for any role our filming might have had in her illness and she said, “No, it wasn’t you or the equipment, but I should not have allowed filming inside my yurt.” Initially, we heard Maria would not permit filming on this trip and that she would not accompany the group on a pilgrimage after the conference. As the meeting went on, however, she changed her mind and allowed filming (“no tight shots please”) and agreed to come with the group on a long journey to the Ukok Plateau.

On the final day of the conference, the participants took a journey with Danil Mamyev, the founder of Uch Enmek Park, into the heart of the Karakol Valley, where Danil explained how the three communities within the park protect both the ecology and spirituality of the valley through traditional customary law that guides careful management of biodiversity and sacred sites. We stood in a carpet of wildflowers richer and more diverse than any I have ever seen.

Danil is racing to survey and map the entire Uch Enmek Nature Park by the end of December 2009 to prevent the Russian government from privatizing the land within the sacred valley, which would allow distant hotel operators to buy land and build tourism facilities. We filmed Danil working with two students from Moscow University doing GPS mapping near an offering site by a tranquil mountain lake. The mapping work will be used to manage tourism by re-routing roads and trails and building a visitor education center. Danil’s mapping work received a great boost this month with a National Science Foundation grant that should enable him to complete the survey work by the end of the year.

After the sacred site guardian meeting in the Karakol Valley ended, the participants journeyed to the Ukok Plateau, a World Heritage Site known even to the ancient Greeks as a hallowed burial ground. Before attempting to go over the pass to the plateau, Maria Amanchina led a sunrise ceremony with Danil and FSDA’s Chagat Almashev and Maya Erlenbaeva offering milk to the four directions. After the ritual the group made a circuit of 13 springs before heading off for the far reaches of the Ukok Plateau, where they hoped to make it to the Mongolia-China border and the burial site of the renowned Ukok Princess, a 2,500-year-old mummy unearthed in 1993 by Russian archaeologists.

After a six-hour ride in indestructible Russian-built vehicles known as Uazis, passing ancient standing stones, the group made it to the now-empty burial site. The young woman had been buried in permafrost and her skin was well preserved, still bearing intricate tattoos, her clothing in perfect shape. Altaians immediately protested the removal of their ancestor and demanded her return. A major earthquake rocked the region soon after, and the locals attributed the earth tremor to the disturbance of the dead. Maria and Danil conducted a solemn ritual at the site of the excavated kurgan and prayed for the return and re-burial of the Ukok Princess.

When the Ukok pilgrimage concluded, we traveled to sacred Mt. Belukha and met a group of Europeans making a spiritual journey with a Russian-born healer named Ahamkara. As the drumming shaman invoked the Altaian nature deity, Erlich, the wolf, two members of the group began growling and writhing on the ground as they transformed into wolves. Tourism is on the rise in the Altai and native shaman have voiced growing concern about outsiders conducting such rituals, which the traditionalists describe as a form of “spiritual pollution.”

Back now at our new home in Berkeley, I feel as if one of the mountains I watched all day lying quietly at the edge of the Ukok Plateau, Nairamdal, is still calling out to me. From half way around the world I can see its brightness hovering in my mind and I wonder: is it touching my soul? The Altaian mountains are potent and alive. When I close my eyes I see a series of softly rounded snow peaks stretching along the horizon under blue sky and puffy white clouds — a dazzling being whose name means “Friendship.” The mountain was my first view of Mongolia. In front of Nairamdal I can also still see the endless barbed wire fence running to infinity along Russia’s southern Siberian border.

The date — July 16 — has always had special resonance for me. In the 1970s, during extended wanderings in the Four Corners area, I was amazed that nuclear bombs were still being tested in Nevada, long after the first atomic explosion in history on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Scientific tests that scattered radioactive waste across America seemed a perverse and fitting metaphor for our culture. Big. Loud. Toxic.

In the summer of 1979, Glenn Switkes, Randy Hayes and I ventured to the Southwest from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, to document the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country. As an intern at Mother Jones magazine, I had received a thick envelope of documents from Peterson Zah, then director of DNA Peoples Legal Services (and later Chairman of the Navajo Nation). The Navajos were suing a string of federal agencies for decades of radioactive waste contamination at thousands of abandoned uranium mines, for tons of tailings scattered to the wind at deserted mill sites, and for a growing epidemic of lung cancer among former uranium miners. We went to see if there was a film there.

As we started our six-week journey, I drove our van late one night up a dirt road. I was trying to find the village of Crownpoint, where uranium exploration was booming, and I made a wrong turn in the dark and ended up at a giant, red, spot-lit sign that proclaimed: “STOP – RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS BEYOND THIS POINT!” We had stumbled into the Church Rock uranium mine and mill, north of Gallup. It was too dark to film the bizarre scene so we agreed to return later in our trip.

Six weeks later, as we circled to the west and started heading back to California, we drove up to the Church Rock site – on July 15, 1979. We filmed the red stop sign and dust blowing all over the place as Navajo men walked around with no masks to protect their lungs. The footage I shot was very shaky. The place scared me. As we turned our van around to leave we were stopped by a mesmerizing vision: a large stretch of water sparkling in the sunlight. In our weeks in the desert we had barely seen any water. I hopped out of the van and snapped a few still photos of what I later learned was a radioactive pond where an expanse of uranium mill waste called “tailings” lay covered with water to prevent the release of carcinogenic radon gas.

That night we stopped in the Hopi village of Kykotsmovi on our way home and had dinner with White Bear Fredericks, a Hopi elder who had been Frank Waters’ chief informant for Book of the Hopi. This was the era of American hostages in Iran, long gas lines and a looming energy crisis. The anti-nuclear movement was in full swing after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. White Bear turned on the television and we watched President Jimmy Carter give a nationally televised address promising an “Energy Mobilization Board” to fast-track new coal and synthetic fuels development in the West. Fittingly, Carter never mentioned nuclear power. It was a powerful omen for the film we had just started shooting on the legacy and the threat of energy development in Indian Country.

After he turned off the TV, White Bear went on a tirade, invoking Hopi prophecy and promising that the banks would soon fail and the economic system collapse. As the Hopi had long been warning, White Bear said, the Earth simply cannot sustain the insults that Western culture relentlessly continues to impose on her.

At about that same moment, back east a couple hundred miles, in total darkness, the pond of water that blanketed the radioactive tailings at the Church Rock mill pierced a small, inadequate earthen dam, and millions of gallons of poisonous sludge flowed out onto the Navajo Nation and down the Rio Puerco.

A couple days later, back home in California, I sifted through a stack of San Francisco Chronicles that had piled up while I was away. A one-paragraph article in the back of the paper caught my eye. Dateline: Church Rock, New Mexico. “Tiny Crack Blamed” said the little 12-point headline. “United Nuclear officials attributed a waste spill here to a tiny crack in their tailings dam.”

I called the editor of the Gallup Independent and asked about the spill. He said, “Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive waste escaped. It was the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history — bigger than Three Mile Island — and you are the first person to call.”

I had never published anything before, but I called Sandy Close at the Pacific News Service and told her about the accident. She asked me to write about it, and my piece ended up in the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. I wrote a grant proposal to the Arizona Humanities Council and mailed it in as Time and Newsweek cover stories predicted “The Rape of the West.” A month later we received a $35,000 grant from the Arizona Humanities Council, and work began in earnest on the film that would be The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?

And it all started thirty years ago today, on July 16, 1979.

After 30 years of working out of my bedroom, my basement, a garage converted office, the cabin out back, and the house next door, the Sacred Land Film Project has moved into the wonderful, new, green David Brower Center in Berkeley. When gasoline hit $4 per gallon I knew it was just going to get harder and harder to ask creative, young people to drive to La Honda, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, to work with me on documentaries — no matter how compelling and important the content.

I now look out of my new office window and see a giant redwood grove on Strawberry Creek at the southwest corner of the U.C. Berkeley campus. Just upstream, 27 years ago, Glenn Switkes and I edited The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?, our masters thesis film at the Graduate School of Journalism. So, I feel like I have come home.

With the invaluable help of Jessica Abbe, Marlo McKenzie, Vicki Engel and Quinn Costello, we moved the film project into the Brower Center on April 13, as sheetrock dust swirled and workers hustled to put the finishing touches on a remarkable work of art. We were the first tenants to move into the building and have watched it come to life as our colleagues from Earth Island Institute moved in, then International Rivers, then the Center for Ecoliteracy… Though some offices are still awaiting their tenants, the building is 100% leased, and will soon receive a coveted and well-earned Platinum LEED rating — the first in the city of Berkeley.

Over the last year, as the building went up and we designed our new space, our architect, Hope Mitnick, urged me to appreciate the huge concrete wall in my office-to-be (the back of the elevator shaft). Concrete is in, Hope assured me, it’s beautiful. I have since learned that the concrete in the Brower Center is 50% slag from steel smelters in China, waste that would have been left to pollute land and water but was instead shipped across the Pacific on a barge. This brilliant, novel, recycled substitute ingredient reduced the building’s carbon footprint by 40%. I love my concrete wall!

The Brower Center is composed of 53% recycled materials. Light streams into giant windows. Sunrays are captured by solar panels that provide one third of the building’s electricity and heat water flowing through floors and ceilings to warm our offices. Rainwater falling on the roof is captured and stored in a 5,600-gallon cistern in the basement and used to flush toilets and irrigate plants. Local artists crafted a rock garden in the courtyard, painted a wall with soil in the reception area, and converted brass artillery shells (found on eBay) into door handles at the front entrance.

Seven years ago, when Earth Island Institute invited me to a “vision meeting” in Berkeley to discuss ideas for a building that would honor the memory of David Brower, I was happy to attend and found myself urging the building’s founder and main proponent, Peter Buckley, not to drop plans for an auditorium. Apparently, it was going to take up too much space and cost too much. As a filmmaker, I argued that the auditorium would be the building’s most powerful educational gathering place, where the force of image, music and word — tools that David Brower understood well and used to maximum effect — could be marshaled to inspire audiences to take action to protect the Earth. Thanks to Peter’s vision (and a generous donation from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation) we now have a fantastic theater, where films are already moving audiences and inspiring dialogues are reaching for the new ideas we desperately need to get our species back on a sane path.

Now that the move is “over” we return full time to filmmaking — with the first task to select a new Associate Producer from an incredible field of applicants. As I write this, into the office flows news of death in Peru, resistance in Tibet, a court ruling on the San Francisco Peaks and a lawsuit filing by the Winnemem Wintu. Filmmaking will have to wait until next week. It’s time for an e-mail alert to the Sacred Land Defense Team!

In October, six new brides paraded through a green meadow,  the tops of their heads covered with  a yellow headdress made of butter. A throng of women beat drums, sang and danced. The four-day Mascal ceremony in Ethiopia’s Gamo Highlands was drawing to a close as the rainy season gave way to planting, harvesting and prayers for fertility and happiness.

On the hillside above, young men known as callonitis (cowboys) prepared to descend an ancient pathway, an initiation ritual for the 12-year-old boys, who were surrounded by a group of young men chanting encouragement. Suddenly, in the middle of the meadow directly beneath the callonitis, a large crowd gathered and began erecting a circle of poles in the center of the meadow. The brides’ attendants began pointing and yelling. A delegation of elders gathered and climbed up the hill. Tense negotiations followed and we learned that fundamentalist Protestants were building what they described as “a building for a conference” directly in the path of the young boys’ final ritual procession. The crowd around the Protestants grew into the hundreds. Police arrived. My Ethiopian friends would not allow me to go up on the hill to film the confrontation.

Dorbo is sacred and its surface may not be pierced. This is a very old rule, known to all. The fact that a road and power lines have bisected the huge meadow has not diminished the importance of the place. Its ritual use and cultural meaning go back thousands of years.

“That building is meant to be a church,” said Nathaniel Wolde, our young production assistant, angered that the final ritual was being disrupted and communal land taken by zealots before our eyes. “It’s a provocation”

“It is illegal,” answered Metasebia Bekele, the Ethiopian anthropologist who was traveling with us, as we watched the melee unfold on the hillside above us.

With a surge, the two big crowds began to move toward each other and gunshots boomed as the police tried to keep the traditional people from advancing on the Protestants. People screamed, cried and ran as gunshots continued. The police were firing into the air.

A few final gunshots rang out as the crowds swirled and ran from the police. Rocks flew through the air. Through the viewfinder in the camera I could see three policemen with Kalashnikovs chasing people, and others waving big sticks as they ran. More stones rained down.

Later, as the black of night set in and the stand-off continued, we drove away on the only road out of town, which took us right past the two crowds lingering on the hilltop. In the dark there was one last frightening BOOM and a rock smashed the windshield of our car.

The Rift Valley feels like it has forever been a home to humans. It’s hard to imagine all that’s gone down here between Lucy, our great great grandmother, 3 million years ago, and Haleka Malabo, a sacred site guardian in Ethiopia’s Gamo Highlands, today. Walking down a gentle hill into Dorbo Meadow on the first day of my research trip to the remote mountains of southern Ethiopia, I could feel that I was entering a ritual scene that had played out countless times over thousands of years. Eight elders in white robes sat in the meadow discussing business as they waited patiently for the American filmmaker. A thin, metal spear rose into the air in front of each man. Haleka Malabo smiled a welcome as cattle, sheep and horses grazed nearby, and an inviting, shadowy forest beckoned in the distance behind him. My three Ethiopian guides, Metasabia, an anthropologist, Nati, a local activist, and Kapo, our translator, explained that I was witnessing traditional land management — the ancient system by which this council of elders rotates grazing lands, plans ceremonies, resolves disputes and enforces the strict rules that protect sacred places throughout Gamo.

In my years of working with Native Americans and Native Hawaiians I have learned the patience that comes from trust-building. Usually, my camera sits in its case and elders say amazing things during powerful discussions and ceremonies that pass before my eyes undocumented, except inside my aging brain.

In this case, as Haleka Malabo began a prayer with outstretched hands and bent over to pick a few blades of grass to offer to the wind, Metasabia leaned over and whispered, “Why are you not filming?”

“I haven’t explained why I’m here — or asked permission yet,” I replied.

“I told you,” he said, “I already received permission when I met with the elders last week and told them you were coming. Film!”

I know now that the elders of the Gamo Highlands were receptive to our film project in part because my old friend Wolde Tadesse has been so helpful to sacred land protection efforts in his homeland. As a program officer for The Christensen Fund, Tadesse has developed an effective strategy to protect and strengthen cultural and biological diversity throughout the Rift Valley, and particularly in the Gamo Highlands, which rise to the west of the two huge lakes that fill the valley floor, Lake Abaya and Lake Chamo.

Over the last five years, Tadesse has counseled me not to focus too narrowly on specific sacred sites, but instead to recognize the interconnectedness of the entire landscape, from home and garden to mountain and forest. From ritual sacrifice field to community meeting places (called debushas). From barley fields to mourning fields. “You have to go and see for yourself,” he said over and over as he patiently waited for our film team to complete our work in Russia, Australia and Peru, and finally make it to Ethiopia.

Kapo Kansa Gano directs the Society for the Practice and Maintenance of Indigenous Cultural Environmental and Spiritual Knowledge. Standing by another new church and a cleared forest he said, “The Protestants want to destroy the artifacts on the ground, and they tell people, ‘Don’t acknowledge sacred places, mountains, rivers, a tree in the forest. All you need is the gospel. All you need is Jesus.’ They cleared this forest for a church. It was an important meeting place where everything was discussed. They call the traditional practices ‘satanic’ – and say ‘this is not important for the world.’ Meanwhile, our government is ignorant. We go to meetings and speak of special places and they say ‘you are lying’ — so we need recordings, we need to show this to them.”

We filmed the annual pilgrimage of the Winnemem Wintu to their healing spring on Mt. Shasta this past weekend. Everyone was overjoyed to see the spring bubbling and flowing into Panther Meadows, which is carpeted with wildflowers. As the glaciers in the rest of the world continue to melt, the glaciers on Mt. Shasta are actually growing, leading Winnemem leader Caleen Sisk-Franco to smile and say, “We must be doing something right.”

Caleen feels the spring dried up last fall due to water bottling plants at the base of Mt. Shasta which are sucking huge quantities of pure water from aquifers and are diminishing the artesian pressure that for countless generations has kept Panther Spring alive and well.

Good news this week on that front: After California Attorney General Jerry Brown threatened to sue Nestlé for an inadequate Environmental Impact Report analysis of their plans to bottle water in the town of McCloud, Nestlé cancelled their contract for the huge operation (extracting 200 million gallons per year). Local activists opposed Nestlé for years, but Jerry Brown wanted to know the climate change impacts of producing 3.1 billion plastic water bottles. Thanks, Jerry.

More good news: AJR 39 passed the State Senate on Tuesday by a vote of 24-10. The joint resolution from the California Legislature urges the U.S. Congress to correct mistaken U.S. policy and restore federal recognition to the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. The journey to justice is long and hard, but it continues — and if Panther Spring is our guide, more tears will flow before we turn things around.

Congratulations to the Winnemem, and thanks to Assemblyman Jared Huffman of Marin for sponsoring the resolution, and to Debbie Davis, Amy Vanderwarker and all the folks at the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water for your hard work getting the votes lined up to pass AJR 39. On to Washington!

Our three-week film shoot in Peru is drawing to a close as we head back to Cusco after two great days at Machu Picchu. Everyone on the crew — associate producer Ashley Tindall, cinematographer Vicente Franco, sound recordist Willy Elizarde, and fixer Vernonica Perez — is getting a little tired as we’ve had several 4 am calls, once to climb a glacier to film a Q’eros ceremony, once to film sunrise bringing light back to “The Lost City of the Incas” (no longer lost as evidenced by the swarms of tourists). Hiking many miles with gear and working in extreme cold at 15,000 feet definitely took a toll. But spirits are high as we enjoy the beauty of the Andes and the warmth and wisdom of the native people.

With the help of Q’eros community president Marianno Carmen Machacca and 23-year old videographer Fredy Machacca and his band of horsemen (Juan, Anselmo, Lorenzo, Gregorio and others) we had a remarkably adventurous and productive seven days with the Q’eros on their annual pilgrimage to Q’olloy riti and then back home to the village of Cochomoco. I recognize the arrogance of trying to access a community like the Q’eros with very little time invested in developing trust, but with the help of some truly generous people who have worked with the Q’eros for years it felt like we met with acceptance, approval and trust, and the footage we came away with will, I think, be deeply revealing of profound sacred places and people. The weather cooperated, snow-capped mountains (Apus) like sacred Mt. Ausangate revealed themselves, we lived to tell the tale of our 4 am ascent to the foot of the retreating glacier at Q’olloy riti, and even Benito the Q’eros shaman gave us an interview.

At a community meeting after filming a potato harvest, I agreed to help pay for the roof of a new and badly-needed school in Cochomoco and Fredy Machacca asked three of our film team to become godparents and participate in the ritual of cutting his one-year-old son Nicasio’s hair, which we accept as a responsibility for the future, as we look forward to years of collaboration and friendship with Fredy and the Q’eros people.

After filming at Q’oyllur riti for two days, we pack up quickly and chase up the rugged mountain trails after the Q’eros with all our equipment, horses and aching lowlander lungs. We arrive in Qochamoqo long after the Q’eros have arrived home, some in Qochamoqo and some back to the other Q’eros villages, like Hatun Q’eros which lies another eight hours hike further into the Andes.

It is beyond quiet in the narrow valley in the shadow of Huaman Lipa. We film the village for two days. Life here is slow-paced and routine, lovely and harsh. The impossibly adorable children drive the alpaca and sheep up the slopes at dawn. The women gracefully spin wool as they walk on dangling spindles. The men dig at the soil, unearthing dozens of varieties of native potato.

Milton Gamarra of Asociación ANDES has been working with the Q’eros of Qochamoqo to repatriate native varieties of potato that had ceased to be cultivated. As Peru adjusted to European colonization and modernity, many indigenous communities no longer grew their traditional potatoes and lost the bountiful nutrition that the variety had provided. But, with help from the International Potato Center in Lima and their potato gene and seed banks, ANDES is bringing these potatoes back. Communities like Qochamoqo have seen their subsistence production improve. However, with the changes in climate due to global warming, they are now experiencing droughts. Most of Peru’s glaciers are melting. Temperatures are climbing even at this altitude. Now, potato blight (remember Ireland?) is spreading, reaching up to higher elevations and threatening the existence of indigenous communities who have lived in balance with nature for millennia.

In the early morning, the Q’eros enter Anccasi on their way to the annual festival of Q’oyllur riti at Mount Ausangate, the main apu for these indigenous people of southern Peru. They come through town in small groups and families, first heralded by the whimsical dancers and drum-and-pipe band that staggers hungry and slightly inebriated (they’ve been fasting for several days and feted in each village) down one pass and up to the next. They walk dozens of hours to reach the tent city at the base of the nevado Ausangate, a glacier that has been the site of Q’oyllur riti for hundreds of years.

We follow on foot and on horse, trying to keep up with the Q’eros, who seemingly surmount all the intervening mountain passes effortlessly despite their hunger, their sleeplessness, the great altitude and the searingly bright Andean sun. Filming intermittently, our crew captures their arrival at the festival. It is truly an astonishing sight to gaze upon the tent city after breaching the last pass and descending down the tiny well-worn path to the edge of the valley. There we hear the fireworks breaking the mountain silence and the tinny sounds of music caroming around the stalwart mountains and echoing up to us.

Below, we stumble into the marshy festival grounds where bands from nearly every village in southern Peru have converged in a cacophonous yet ecstatic celebration of the mountain and the Lord of Q’oyllur riti. As in most of Latin America, Christian and traditional beliefs collide here at Ausangate. For the Christians, Q’oyllur riti is the celebration of a young boy’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the snow. For the traditionals, like the Q’eros, the annual rite is a pilgrimage to the apu, where they give thanks for their fortunes and ask for the gods benevolence for the coming year.

We are now in Anccasi, a tiny Quechua village of wattle-and-daub huts and a handful of cinder block buildings around a dirt square at somewhere around 3700m, a full day’s drive from Cusco. It is cold. Period.

Fortunately for us some money for the community materialized about a year ago and allowed Alejandro Chispe (the mayor) to build a simple structure  — a community center – with a metal roof, wooden floor and freshly painted peach walls and shuttered windows. This room is where we are all camped, our whole entourage laid out side-by-side, with our equipment and gas-powered generator along one wall and food along the other. A couple of water barrels and a plastic board and squeaky fold-out chairs serve as our dining area.

Our crew is an eclectic mix of Babel proportions, which so far has led to a great deal of humor and confusion – as we all have varying degrees of competency in Quechua, Spanish (here called castellano) and English. Besides Toby and myself, we are:

Veronica (our 26-year-old fixer from Lima who is both tiny and exceptional), Vicente (formerly of Spain but with the laid-back humor of Northern California and the energy of a Real Madrid forward), Willy (our soft-spoken Peruvian sound recordist whose thin clothing and hipster glasses betray a preference for urban environments), Fernando (our baby-faced mountain guide) and Toro (the excellent but shy camp cook).

We are also joined by Milton Gamarra (the passionate potato researcher from Asociacíon ANDES) and Ricardo (a potato farmer and volunteer production assistant who is half Jokey Smurf and half Bionic Man) and, lastly, Fredy Flores Machacca.

Ah, Fredy, an aspiring filmmaker and the only Q’ero among us as we prepare to meet his community in the next days. He is full of energy and passion. What an inspiration!

Toby and I arrived in Lima, Peru on May 13 for a few days of logistical set-up for this shoot and then flew on to Cusco to meet up with our director of photography Vicente Franco, sound recordist Willy Ilizarbe and our fixer Veronica Perez Orbezo. We spent a couple of days in Cusco which were filled with last minute preparations, good food (after all, we knew we’d be camping for eight days and Peru is known for its cuisine) and all the dull but necessary stuff of pre-production. We even had to rush around tracking down emergency oxygen supplies as we were going to be above 14,000 feet for more than a week. Then we left the city of Cusco in two vans driven by Miguel 1 and Miguel 2 (henceforth known – inexplicably – as Pachín) for several weeks filming with the Q’eros community.

Along the way we stopped for a few shots of the construction of the Transocéanica carreterra. This is the first highway that will bisect South America. With several lanes running in either direction, this highway is bound to rapidly change western Brazil and southern Peru from a cluster of rural towns with slow and ancient Andean-Amazonian trade to a network of expanding modern cities. Theories abound here about why the highway is being pushed through this difficult terrain at an amazing 5 kilometers a day (by Peruvian government estimates), but the amount of timber and minerals coming from the southern state of Madre de Dios bordering Brazil is a clear indication that making travel more convenient for locals and tourists is not the primary reason. Forget Brazilian socialism and Peruvian “progress”, say the people here. The Amazon and the Andes are open for business and the only people seeing the benefits are “los grandes” – a local term like “fat cats”, well-connected businessmen and government officials.

While construction crews stretch and smooth this highway over the devilish turns and passes of the sawtooth Andean chains, local life continues at campesino pace. People who have slung their hay and wood and children onto their backs to walk grassy paths for centuries now find they walk the same route but on the precarious shoulder of the highway. Trucks fly by at reckless speeds, and buses can no longer pull over to let them on. It seems that in the design of the carreterra, the builders did not consider how the majority of people living in the Andes travel: on foot.

“Why is this sacred but that is not sacred?” “Is Kaho`olawe deserving of focus if Mauna Kea and Haleakala and Kilauea are excluded?” “Is sacred land separate from knowledge, chants, stories, heiaus?” “The bombing of Kaho`olawe has been stopped, but they are still bombing Makua Valley on Oahu, so why not film there?” These are the questions Native Hawaiians ask me as I make the rounds in search of understanding of their struggle to strengthen their long, deep, but battered connections to their islands and their traditional culture.

On my second research trip in February, a Hawaiian lawyer asked me, “What do you mean by sacred?” These are hard questions for a journalist to answer. I’m supposed to be asking the questions! But this is what happens to the outsider who probes for information about closely held secret knowledge. Past history has shown native people that it is a huge risk to be open about these subjects. The best of intentions often have unintended consequences.

Pualani Kanahele, a highly respected elder and hula master, asked me, “How can you assure me that your work will not result in harm to our sacred places?” My reply that I take this question seriously and will do everything I can to make sure that our work helps and does not harm was not a good enough answer for her. “It is your responsibility to answer that question to my satisfaction,” she replied.

My old friend, Palikapu Dedman, talked easily about his role in Kaho`olawe’s history and his uneasy feelings about the state of the movement, which arise mostly because he’s concerned about the issues that confront the Big Island of Hawaii right now — and there are many. He took me to the `Ahu `Ena Heiau near the King Kamehemeha Kona Beach Hotel in Kailua-Kona, where the Sheraton chain recently bought a 60s era hotel in the middle of the tourism madness of Kona. The site of Hawaii’s capital from 1812-19, there are burials all around, but the hotel stages a hula luau show every night with the sacred heiau as the background, part of the stage set, and the gates to the property are locked at 10 PM. Palikapu coordinated a demonstration last fall at the site and beached a red fiberglass double-hulled canoe right in the middle of the scene, which rankles the hotel and makes Pali smile.

“I tell students: aloha — you have it at home — nurture and protect something, a forest, your water, a place, that feeling,” says Pali as we walk the beach. “Young people should take on an issue, fight it all the way, learn it every step, eat and sleep it, until it becomes part of you — not just a demonstration and you go home. Do that and you then have experience and lessons for your entire life.”

“I want policy, law, legislation — so we don’t have to write letters asking permission to worship in our church. To be forced to ask permission of someone who now owns the land and is not of our race and religion is a racist act.”

These are the hard lessons learned from a lifetime of struggle for native rights, and one island was a particularly powerful teacher.

The people who are focusing on Kaho`olawe have their eyes on a prize of international significance. There are problems to be sure — not the least of which is all of the unexploded ordnance that litters the island, even after a $350 million multi-year clean-up. However, the reconciliation of human and nature, of present with past, is the daunting challenge we all face. Tackling it is messy.

Davianna McGregor, a member of PKO and a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii, sees the Kaho`olawe story as “the rebirth of the sacred” and asserts that the long struggle was not anti-military but pro-Hawaiian, and that the value and practice of aloha aina has been central all along — love the land, care for the land. “We are planning for the future of Kaho`olawe as a sacred place, asking how to bring the island back into the proper realm,” she says, “how to be when we go there, the protocols, rededication of sites, calling back our gods of nature, to provide a place for people to be immersed in the elements and honor the land as sacred.”

Unlike our recent production trips to Siberia and Australia, where we did extensive research at our home base in California and then just went in shooting, the possibility of making a film about Native Hawaiians restoring Kaho`olawe is going to be a long and delicate process. The issues in Hawaii are old, deep and complicated. Across eight different islands are community leaders who have created a variety of groups to deal with both local and state-wide issues, and alongside and woven in are diverse families with different histories, priorities and agendas. There are alliances and there are rivalries. There are so many sensitive, painful issues involving land rights, disturbance of burials, tourist insensitivity, military power, national parks, cultural preservation, resort development and the marketing of the sacred that it is truly a minefield.

The Protect Kaho`olawe `Ohana (PKO) has established a wonderful alternative model to the standard Western environmental activist/protest group. Soon after the occupation of Kaho`olawe began to get international media attention, Hawaiian elders advised the young activists that they should establish their group as a traditional Hawaiian family, or `ohana. All of the values and cultural practices that govern the family would thus be built into the politics and spirituality of the movement and would inform its process, decisions and policies.

PKO’s mandate thus was to take care of the island as a family would — caring unconditionally for both people and land — aloha aina.

Adding to the complexity is the overlay of state power and money that came with victory. When the U.S. Navy transferred the island back to the state of Hawaii a new entity was established to manage the island, the Kaho`olawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC), which Emmett Aluli now chairs, and which was created so that the PKO could play a key role.

Emmett has guided me through more than twenty meetings with the many different Native Hawaiians who have been involved with Kaho`olawe for decades and who now navigate in uncharted waters aboard the PKO and the KIRC. It’s their decision whether they want to tell their story in a film.

On Maui, I spent eight hours with Uncle Les Kuhilio, an elder and a lifelong fisherman with deep experience on Kaho`olawe. He’s slightly older than the generation that occupied the island, and that means that the truth dawned for him in a different way. Les said that his generation never learned in school that the U.S. military overthrew Queen Lili`uokalani in 1893 — that fact only came to light after the Kaho`olawe struggle and other battles over development sparked a new hard look at history. We had a long, interesting, conversation, delving into the nature of the sacred and the dangers of fighting political battles over sacred places.

Here, in essence, is what Les Kuhilio said about Kaho`olawe: “So man calls it sacred? Whatever man sees, man destroys. If it’s sacred, it’s secret. Once known, everyone wants to leave footprints or fight over it. ‘Mauna Kea is greater than Mount Sinai — mine is better than yours!’ Everyone wants knowledge about sacred places, to fight and control ‘the sacred.’ It is not land in isolation; it’s everything in balance. The island can protect itself — that is sacred. The island stopped the bombs, not us. The chants tell the story — and it is not written down. The power of meaning, the power of knowledge, the wisdom of meaning, that is the sacred!”

Everyone I talked to acknowledged the unique power of the island and the magical quality experienced there. `Ohana member and State Film Commissioner Donne Dawson put it this way: “An island so devastated, that needed to be healed, has ended up healing those who come to help heal it…”

In their endless struggle to regain federal recognition, the Winnemem Wintu traveled to Sacramento today to lobby for passage of a non-binding resolution — AJR 39 (Assembly Joint Resolution 39) — which would urge the U.S. Congress to look into their situation and take corrective action. We filmed the Winnemem’s day in the halls of power to document the energy it takes to fight for recognition and to illustrate the bizarre process the Winnemem endure as they patiently tell their story over and over and over again in search of political support and justice.

Sponsored by California Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D, Marin County), the resolution ran into predictable Republican opposition at a hearing of the Committee on Governmental Organization. Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries from Lake Elsinore said, “I guess the 800 pound gorilla that hasn’t been mentioned by anybody here so far is the concern that there are supporters of your effort whose goal it is to either tear down or stop the continued existence of Shasta Dam. That would appear to be some of the groups that are endorsing this effort. I totally respect your rights as native people to fight over the use of your historical lands. I do not like the idea of other people using your tribe as pawns in a game that has to deal with statewide water issues.” Others accused the Winnemem of seeking a casino. With tribal leader Caleen Sisk-Franco sitting behind him, Headman Mark Franco handled all the questions carefully and with characteristic humor.

The key moment came when African American Assemblyman Mike Davis turned the tide with an offer of solidarity: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… Errors occur all the time and I think it should be our honor to move this motion in the right direction.” AJR 39 passed the committee by a vote of 11 to 1, with 2 not voting. It now goes to the floor of the Assembly, and then on to the State Senate.

Committee Chair Alberto Torrico said that just before the hearing started the committee received a letter from a tribal member that disputed Caleen and Mark’s roles as leaders of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. A woman who has been tossed out of several tribal groups, and who has been curiously associated with a Republican PR firm, Gorton and Moore, wrote in the letter: “Caleen and Mark want absolute control over traditional Winnemem Wintu lands and sacred sites to keep other Winnemem from having access to them…One of the strategies Caleen and Mark often use is to get guilty white Americans to support them financially and politically…They have stolen the history of all our people.”

The nasty letter attacking Caleen and Mark got me thinking about identity and history. I looked at some old photos from the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives and asked Mark and Caleen who the people in the photos were. Caleen replied, “That’s my great-great-grandfather, Charlie Pitt, also known as Theodore Charles. He was married to Judia Charles, Tunalulimet,” who according to anthropologist Peter Nabokov was “a noted medicine woman.” Mark added, “Charlie Pitt was disinterred when Shasta Dam flooded the McCloud River villages and he was reburied next to the big tree in the new cemetery.” Charlie Pitt was also the late Winnemem healer Florence Jones’s grandfather, and Florence probably handled the re-burial, moving her salmon-fishing ancestor to a site close to where she had also reburied her own parents, near where Florence now rests.

Rising gracefully out of the ocean south of Maui is a presence everyone feels. It’s the island you cannot visit. Littered with “unexploded ordnance” courtesy of the U.S. Navy, access is restricted. Yet the island is the site of a cultural renaissance with international implications. Native Hawaiians control visitation to this sacred place and are working with the wounded land to bring it back to life while reviving spiritual traditions and healing a culture as abused as the island itself.

Kahoʻolawe is also known as Kanaloa, which makes this the only island in the Pacific that bears the name of a Polynesian god. Kanaloa is the deity of the ocean, and the power of the sea touches all who make the journey.

In 1979 I was visiting the home of my Hopi friend and mentor, the late Thomas Banyacya. You never knew who you were going to meet at Thomas’s house. One morning at the kitchen table I found myself listening to a young Native Hawaiian man describing how he and a group of eight others in January 1976 had occupied a small island that the U.S. Navy had been using for bombing practice since shortly after Pearl Harbor. Dr. Emmett Aluli of Molokai had been drawn to see what was on the assaulted island and the experience changed his life. The island spoke to him. It came to him in dreams. Emmett consulted his Hawaiian elders and they encouraged him onward. His quest led him to Hopi country in Arizona to consult with other native leaders about strategies to defend land, water, sacred sites and cultural beliefs and practices against determined, well-armed, and often violent adversaries.

I crossed Emmet’s path again in 1990 when I went to film a demonstration in the Wao Kele O Puna rainforest on the Big Island of Hawaii. He and Palikapu Dedman had formed the Pele Defense Fund and they were fighting against geothermal drilling in the domain of the revered fire goddess Pele, who inhabits the active volcano at Kilauea. Roads were being bulldozed into the forest and drill rigs were probing for power. The activist movement spawned on Kaho`olawe was applying lessons learned to try to save another sacred place. One hundred and forty one people were arrested that day defending their culturally significant forest, and we edited a segment on Wao Kele O Puna into our 1991 film, Voices of the Land.

During that shoot we talked a USGS scientist into taking us out to film the flowing lava. The sounds, the heat, the drama were unlike anything I have ever experienced. Earth flowing. Rivers of fire. Fear of getting too close proved unnecessary as I kept walking into a wall of air so hot I had to retreat. Our sound recordist, Andy Black, wearing stereo headphones, at one point had a total panic attack because hearing the crackling lava through both ears suddenly gave him the impression he had committed a fatal error and was surrounded by lava.

Emmett and I went our separate ways for another decade, until November 2006, when we found ourselves standing next to each other in a lunch buffet line at a conference on Stewarding Sacred Lands at the Kumeyaay Nation in the southern California desert. We each had more gray hairs on our heads, but we enjoyed catching up and the spirit of camaraderie was still strong. After I described our new Losing Sacred Ground film series, Emmett said, “You might be interested in what we are doing to restore the island of Kahoʻolawe, both ecologically and spiritually.”

He sure got that right…

In the post 9/11 world, it’s risky to comment on human tragedies that produce martyrs in places which then come to be regarded as “sacred.” Innocent people who die deserve tremendous respect. The place of their passing comes to have great emotional power for those left behind. So it was quite surreal to find myself visiting Pearl Harbor for the first time with two Native Hawaiian activists on December 7.

The narrative I heard from them involved the history of the U.S. military in Hawaii and the impact this has had on land and culture. As I’ve been researching a possible film on the Navy’s use of Kaho`olawe Island as a bombing range, and the successful native campaign to return the island to sovereign Hawaiian control, I came first to Oahu — the seat of local political power. I visited the palace where the Marines staged the 1893 coup that led to the future American annexation of Hawaii, the university where intellectual battles over native rights have been fought, the beach where tourists bag the prized vacation visit as hole-in-the-wall bakeries pay $20,000 a month in rent, and the museum where thousands of human remains are still stored in the basement.

From an overlook high above the water, Pearl Harbor’s ecological and spiritual significance are obvious. All that fresh rainwater captured by a ring of green mountains flowing toward the sea, merging in a giant bay with an island at its heart — I could see what a great source of food for native people this had been. Fish, turtles, crustaceans, oysters, pearls in paradise. But all that is lost: 748 contaminated areas have been consolidated into one Superfund site. The water is as gray as the destroyers.

Terri Kekoolani (DMZ Hawaii) and Kyle Kajihiro (American Friends Service Committee) described the cultural significance of the island in the center, now Ford Island, once surrounded by fish ponds and used as a retreat for royalty, a place of re-creation and pro-creation. The beautiful bay surrounding it was originally called Ke Awa Lau O Puuloa — the many harbors of Puuloa — or Wai Momo — harbor of pearl — and the calm, shallow inlet was home of the benevolent shark goddess Ka’ahupahau and her brother Kahi’uka. Terri and I walked through the visitor center and memorial and she couldn’t help but note the irony of the huge selection of souvenirs being sold at the National Park Service bookstore: “It’s a cash machine,” she said. Pain upon pain.

“I see Pearl Harbor not as a source of food and the unraveling of sovereignty — it is a womb and vagina, fed by streams,” said Terri, as we walked among Japanese tourists and looked across the water to the mountains. “Now it represents the constant memorialization of war and fear.”

As we drove away we encountered an ocean of flags, one for each American killed in the shocking aerial assault back in 1941. A sacred native place taken for another purpose, bombed by surprise in a high stakes geopolitical power struggle, used as justification for permanent war, now marked as a modern kind of sacred site.

What do you do when a sacred spring goes dry? Perhaps you cry enough tears to fill it up. Maybe you get scared that this is a sign that the world is ending.

On the southern slope of Mt. Shasta, just below tree line, the Winnemem Wintu revere a bubbling spring that they consider to be their origin point as a people. Its waters flow down to become the Winnemem, the middle water, known by its conquerors as the McCloud River. Winnemem ancestors lived along this river for countless generations, until Shasta Dam flooded them out and stopped the salmon runs.

On Saturday, we hiked to Panther Meadows to visit the spring. When we filmed In the Light of Reverence, a visit from the Winnemem would be a joyous time, with people singing songs to the spring and bubbles viewed as personal greetings. This time, an ominous fog filled the meadow and a white rope surrounding the bone-dry spring seemed to form the outline of a coffin. Indeed, the spring seemed dead.

Where once white sand danced when water emerged from the mountain to touch the air, now a hard packed suface of dry, brown soil lay lifeless between rock walls that usually cradle clear, cold water. The Winnemem stared in disbelief. In tribal memory the spring has never gone dry. How could this be?

When the Giver of Life stops giving — this is a frightening moment.

Tribal leader Caleen Sisk-Franco tried to counsel her people to have hope, to pray, and to fight harder to protect their sacred places. But when she got down on her knees in the dry spring bed to try to call the water back, she could not hold back the tears.

Looking down on a spiritual leader who has become a good friend, my heart was breaking. It felt like all of our efforts have failed. Global warming. Dams. Water bottling factories. Vanishing salmon. A corrupt government refusing to honor promises or recognize indigenous people. Time passing and changes coming too slowly.

A visitor from the Altai Republic of Russia, Urmat Yntaev, got down on his knees and tried to rouse the waters with a deep throated chant. Winnemem women grieved and wailed at the loss of this friend, their mother. The teen age boys who danced the war dance on Shasta Dam cried as they tried to find the words to pray for the spring’s revival. My cameraman, Will Parrinello, after filming for two-and-a-half hours, finally had to stop after the light faded, and as the songs and prayers went on he finally was able to relax and experience the scene and tears came streaming down his face.

But all of the droplets offered by humans did not bring the water back. We can only hope that a wet winter of rain and snow, a change in human behavior and a growing indigenous movement to support each other’s struggles will set things in balance and bring Panther Spring back to life.

We’re preparing our Annual Report and have created an aerial map of the McArthur River Mine diversion. The river follows the Dreamtime pathway of the Rainbow Serpent, but a giant zinc deposit has attracted the attention of mining giant Xstrata, which plans to divert the river through a 5.5 kilometer channel so that they can dig an open pit mine and export the zinc to China. It’s all hard to visualize so we went up in an airplane to film the river and the mine, and if you click on the image to the left you’ll get a clearer view of what’s happening. Note that the small mountain at the top center of the image is a sacred site knows as Barramundi Dreaming.

The situation for many of Australia’s Aboriginal people is bleak, after two hundred years of land theft and racist oppression. Visiting the artist Bardayal Nadjamerrek in the small, growing community of Kabulwarnamyu, in the heart of Arnhem Land, was like a breath of fresh air. “Lofty” — as he’s known throughout Australia — and his family were drawn away from the savannah plateau to coastal missions in the 1920s, but the wise elder has returned as part of the Outstation Movement to live off the land in an alcohol-free environment. The de-populated land became overgrown and huge wildfires raged in recent years. Lofty and his community are now managing the land, doing controlled burns in the early dry season, and gaining recognition nationwide for their visionary efforts.

Peter Cooke helps manage the community fire regime and is working on setting up a formal Indigenous Protected Area, or IPA. As we planned our filming, I asked Peter about sacred sites we might film and he said: “Some places in the landscape have powerful forces, are dangerous, are where people do things that increase the species or resources or whatever they value. But there aren’t any non-sacred places. The whole landscape is imbued with spirit of ancestors. We don’t really focus on specific places. It is a sentient landscape where people call out to ancestors and spirits. So, how do you manage land that people think about this way, where living people interact with ancestors? There are places like that in Lofty’s country. Some of those places he doesn’t like taking visitors to. Some are secret and some are not. There are many classes. But ’sacred sites’ is a western gloss that we put on a differentiated nature.”

Leaving Sydney, we paid our respects to the Rainbow Serpent one last time, and bowed to Lofty’s huge, beautiful painting, which watches over airport travelers and their baggage as they come and go from Oz.

This afternoon we took a break from filming Anton took the men out to fish around the other side of the island. While they were hunting barracuda by boat, Steve’s daughters took me fishing for barracuda by hand. Juanita (15) managed to keep an eye on her little sisters Shanny (9) and Harriet (3) as they clambered over the sun-baked rocks and searched for bait among the tide pools.

Then, having stabbed bits of hermit crab onto mid-size hooks, they wrapped one end of the clear filament around their left hand and swung the fishing line lasso-style out onto the fiercely shimmering sea.

I stood on the rocks peering into the bristling blue waters seeing only the reflection of the sun and clouds, my eyes watering at the intensity of light and color. I asked if there were many fish in this area. Juanita looked at me confused. You don’t see them? she smiled. See the fish? I was perplexed. What fish? At that moment, Harriet, who was perched on a rock twenty feet away, snapped her elbow back and brought up a sizable barra, turning around to hold it up for Juanita to gauge its worth and for me to admire. Juanita nodded and turned back to me. There are scores just there, she pointed a few yards out, they are all around us. Big, too! I narrowed my eyes. But where? I couldn’t see a thing. She nodded and laughed. My dad says we all have bush eyes. You see that boat? she pointed at the empty horizon. I rubbed my eyes, straining. Ten minutes later the fishing boat roared into my view.

Steve Johnston and his son Anton came into King Ash Bay on the McArthur River to take us out to Vanderlin Island, their home and one of the Sir Edward Pellew Islands in the Gulf of Carpinteria. The islands sit at the mouth of the McArthur, and the Johnstons have reported that the oysters, turtles and fish in the gulf have been poisoned by the heavy metals running down the McArthur from the mine site near Borroloola.We boarded their fishing boats and headed out. Dave, Charles and I climbing in with Anton and Will, Dave W. and Toby filming with Steve in his boat.

As Anton steered us out the mouth of the river towards Vanderlin, he pointed out viscous sand clouds appearing just under the surface of the waves. These are the trails of the dugong, an endangered mammal related to the manatee or sea cow and now endangered due to polluted waters and commercial fishing in the gulf. Anton knows these waters well and, although there were no obvious markers to my eyes, he located a spot that he indicated was a dugong dreaming, a place known to his people for all of known history. We circled around and within minutes there were dozens of these elusive creatures surfacing and schooling nearby.

Charles shouted with surprise. He’d been studying and researching the McArthur River and the Gulf area for many years, and had become familiar with the plight of the dugong, but he’d never seen one in person. We followed their lines and suddenly saw a mother surface with her calf right at the bow of the light boat.

I stood on the bow, perched to photograph them, catching the shot just before they plunged beneath the waves, their presence erased in the churn of our wake.

When we tried to enter the McArthur River Mine area with Traditional Owner Harry Lanson, we were told we would be arrested if we didn’t leave immediately. When Harry argued that he should be able to visit his sacred sites, mine security forces called in the troops. Here is how close the chopper was to Jacky Green and his kids when it landed.

On our first day in Borroloola we were down by the McArthur River waiting for a group of Aboriginal women to arrive for a riverside interview. While we were waiting, I saw a beautiful white egret standing amidst the grass and I went down to the river’s edge to take a photograph. When the women arrived and were getting out of the car, one quickly yelled, “Get away from there!” followed by quite a commotion, with everyone yelling and waving their arms, until I finally heard one woman exclaim: “There are crocodiles here and they jump right out of the river and drag people away!”

We never did see a croc right there in that location, but just a little ways down the river on the very next day….

For twenty-three days I saw no newspapers, no clocks, no calendars, no mirrors. Time and identity melted into the landscape of the Altai: racing clouds and falling rain, a new and growing moon, shamans’ fires sputtering under spoonfuls of cow’s milk and crackling to devour dry cedar. I was transfixed by the rippling green mountains that gave way to snowy peaks as we traveled higher into the heart of central Asia, emerging onto the treeless plateau that is a secret and sacred place where Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China meet.Half way through the trip, our four-person film crew spent almost an hour struggling to figure out what day of the week it was — and what date in June? When we decided it was Saturday, June 16, I called my wife in California, only to be told that I was wrong, it was actually Sunday, June 17. We laughed. In a timeless world it didn’t matter. (Just one less day of shooting…)

But every day, everyone around us seemed to know exactly where we were in relation to the earth and the moon and the mountains. People kept noticing that we had started our new film project with the changing from old to new moon and everyone felt that was auspicious — a good sign.

I came with a list of ideas and questions: What is the history of cultural repression in the Altai? What forms did it take, and what was the effect on shamanism? How is identity tied to land here, and how does it compare to America or Australia? What areas have WWF and UNESCO and the former Soviet government “protected” and why did local Altaians establish different protections, in the new “nature parks”? What are the different standards and values reflected in these community protected areas? What do Altaians see as important and needing protection? How are culture and nature integrated in their protected areas? If these new protected areas attract tourists, spiritual pilgrims, could the influx pollute the land and undermine protection efforts? What is the Altai strategy to communicate to tourists what the land means to the local indigenous people?

We were guided through our mountain journey by Chagat Almashev, director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. Starting long before our arrival, Chagat cautioned us that political activism is limited and is not the way the local people work. Better to work on the cultural protection level, Chagat counseled: identify sacred sites, map them, assure their authenticity and identity in the complex bureaucratic Russian system, talk to elders and leaders, seek local input and consensus, and take care not to impose an American environmental activist agenda. “This is the best way to protect the Altai,” said Chagat.

Early on, Chagat introduced us to Svetlana Baidysheva, the Altai Republic’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development. In a national tourism development competition against all the other Russian republics, the Altai won, which will translate into $2.8 million per year in federal money. Chagat wants local consultation and some measure of control of future tourism development. Major European investment is about to pour into the Altai. Svetlana told us that she projects 6.6 billion rubles per year will be invested (which I calculate at $260 million per year), with a German firm to handle infrastructure design and construction, and an Austrian firm to handle financing and financial management. On the day we met Svetlana, 20 Germans had just visited. A ski resort is being planned along with major infrastructure development. Will the Altai become a European playground?

We had dinner in Gorno Altaisk with Svetlana, who raised her glass of vodka, wished us well on our journey and offered this toast: “Altai is a sacred site. Nature responds to your intentions.”

Maya Erlenbaeva is mapping sacred sites for the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. She has spent the last two years meeting with elders and visiting sacred places around Kosh Agach and recording detailed information and locations on maps. Maya’s colleague, Chagat Almashev, explained: “Russians don’t recognize spiritual places, they’re intangible. So our strategy is to ‘passport’ sacred sites, to record information that will validate them in the Russian system, with every detail properly recorded. Then they will exist—they will be real.”

After we interviewed Maria by the fire in her yurt, with a brilliant sunbeam shining down from the hole in the ceiling, she invited us to visit a sacred spring in the mountains nearby. Maria wanted to perform a purification ceremony for Maya and to show her some standing stones above the spring.

We drove across rugged country and climbed into a beautiful valley. Maria built a fire and offered milk as she whispered prayers and sang. Chagat, Maya and Maria prepared prayer clothes which each of us tied to a tree next to the spring. After hiking up into the hills, Maria showed Maya a field full of standing stones and carefully explained each one to the diligent sacred site mapper. We will have to wait for translations to know what Maria told Maya, as we filmed the whole scene without any idea what was going on.

After we climbed down and a chill breeze whistled up the valley, Maria insisted that I take off my clothes and bathe in the frigid waters of the sacred spring. It was a necessary ritual. She and Maya sat down by the fire and turned their backs as I followed the shaman’s instructions. I don’t think they peeked, but I could hear them laughing.

When we met the shaman Maria Amanchina in Kosh Agach she asked us about our dreams. She wanted to know where we had been and what we had felt as we traveled through the Altai. I told her that I had two dreams while camping on Uch Enmek. In one dream, I saw a bird flying from below. It had a red underbelly and black and white striped wings. Danil Mamyev had told me the next morning that a village in Karakol Valley takes its name from a bird of similar description. I also told Maria of a second dream, in which I saw Danil standing in a lake, waist deep in water. Maria told us she would consider our request for filming, and wished us well on our journey to the Ukok, saying that we were welcome to use the firewood she had left there. A few days later we returned with fresh new tales about the blizzards that always seem to sweep in when we film with Danil.

I told Maria about an idea I was working on, an insight that came to me on Uch Enmek as I listened to Danil talk about shamanism: “Danil told us the true role of a shaman is to interact with the natural world, and to enable people to open up so they can decide for themselves where they need to go and when to visit sacred sites. It strikes me that the goals of the shaman and goals of the artist-filmmaker are very similar: to help open up each person’s inherent qualities and abilities…to enable relationship with place and with other people…to show signs or images that stimulates one’s inner work…and to inspire change.”

Maria replied: “You are on the right track with your thinking.”

Both Maria and Danil talked a lot about signs, interacting with the land, the natural relationship between a person and their place, opening oneself to a sacred land. It reminded me of what Vine Deloria said in our last film, In the Light of Reverence: “If you look at the earth, there are certain places that seem to have power and we don’t know what kind of power it is, except you have a different feeling — you feel energized. And that’s why in lot of the ceremonies you simply go out into the land, at a certain place, under supervision of a medicine man, and open yourself up. What I think is powerful about these religions is you can continue to have revelations. What the revelation is telling you is how you and your community, at this time in life, can adjust to the rest of the world. So it’s not like we designated a place and said: ‘This is going to be sacred.’ It came out of a lot of experience. The idea is not to pretend to own it, not to exploit it, but to respect it. Trying to get people to see that that’s a dimension of religion is really difficult.”After considering our request to film, Maria replied: “I have always said no, and I have had many requests. In this case I say yes.”

There is a big international black market for rock art – petroglyphs and cliff paintings – ancient sacred images that depict traditional knowledge rooted in the landscape. In southern Utah, people are using battery-powered saws to cut sandstone slabs off cliffs, which end up hanging in living rooms in New York and Tokyo. I’ve been looking for a graphic example of an attempt to steal a petroglyph for 20 years.

In the Altai, tourists can buy a boulder with a thousand year-old carving at a roadside stand for $30. At Chui Oozy Nature Park, which was formed to protect the rock art from vandalism and thieves, I finally found solid evidence to illustrate the problem.

The person trying to steal this image of an Argali mountain sheep had started to remove a circular piece of rock, but made a bad hammer stroke that broke off one of the animal’s horns. Having ruined the image, the thief gave up and walked away. This image illustrates the need for protection of sacred sites through community involvement and better public education, and demonstrates the need for more resources to fund ranger patrols and law enforcement. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

We made it out of Kosh-Agach and up to the Ukok Nature Park’s camp at the sacred radon springs, cold water baths that Maria told us would reinvigorate us (if not make us glow a bit for the next 200 years!)  As soon as we arrived a massive snow storm headed our way. We quickly geared up to film with Danil, driving the wazi (Russian army van) up the road as far as we could go and then stumbling through the falling snow to a precipice. We filmed Danil in a short interview (see our Pilgrimage to a Sacred Mountain video) as long as we all could take it and then retreated to the warm and dry cabins.

Once the storm blew through, we sat down with Sergei and Danil to talk about what brought us to the Ukok Plateau. Gas. And, more specifically, Gazprom’s plans to build a natural gas pipeline through this majestic, biodiverse plateau to China.Local Altaians are up in arms over this plan. While Gazprom has made promises to protect the environment and landscape and bring energy to the local district, people do not believe it. The Ukok is where the Ice Princess was unearthed from her grave and where many other burial sites have been disturbed.

Many Altaians believe the Russian federal authorities are in a rush to exploit the country’s natural resources for profit and may destroy the land and culture of the Altai to accomplish their goals. During the interview Sergei brought out his map to show Danil the planned path of the pipeline.

Two days ago we repacked all our gear and selves back into our two minivans and made our way along the Chuisky Tract (the only “highway” through the Altai). This two-lane road was once a part of the Silk Road and still functions as the main conduit for anything moving from Russia, China and Mongolia through the precipitous heights of the Golden Mountains of Altai. We pass goats, pigs, men on horseback and logging trucks on our long ascent before we are passed up by some flash vehicles bearing Moscow license plates. The Altai is now a tourist destination for many affluent Russians eager to hunt, fish, climb, ski and lounge on the sunny banks of the marvelous Katun River which winds its way down from sacred Mt. Belukha in the far southwest of the country.

But, today, we’ve gone the opposite direction. We head to Kosh-Agach, the easternmost town in the Altai. It sits on the near-barren high steppe, cowering under the snowy peaks that stand as sentinels marking the entrance to the Ukok Pass. Tomorrow we will head out early to drive up the pass and camp on the edge of the Ukok Plateau. But, today, we discover the town of Kosh-Agach, a dusty and ragged place that can hardly be called a city but which has more sprawl than a town could justify. The frigid vast blue sky above our heads, the unpaved streets riddled with potholes and wheel tracks and the bleak wooden storefronts lend this place the air of a squatter town in the old American West. The few people lingering on the streets hardly look at us, although we Patagonia-clad crew of Americans with film gear tumbling out the back of late model vehicles must be an odd sight. Soon, the man we came to meet, Sergei Orchurdaipov — Director of the Ukok Nature Park and representative to the Altai Assembly for Kosh-Agach Rayon — shows up. He’s a hefty man in Russian camo fatigues with a buzz cut, fashionable sunglasses and a booming laugh. He’s nothing like Danil, but these two men know each other well and clasp hands, smiling and nodding while certainly exchanging at little joke in Altai about these strange Americans.

…to our incredible crew!  After days of rain, Will and Andy — ever the über-professionals — take a break from their “rest” day to dry out the equipment

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We’re a week into our shoot and are exhausted but elated. We are back in residence at the Uch Enmek Nature Park yurts having just returned from three days climbing through the wet alpine wilderness to Uch Enmek Mountain with Danil (a phenomenal guide who manages to maintain his humor while we interview him in the sleeting rain and bitter cold and, later, takes pity on the shivering Americans and builds the perfect fire to dry us out). He never shows signs of fatigue, even though he took a collective 50 pounds or so of equipment off our backs and carried it on his pack for our trek down the mountain. Back on the sunny Karakol Valley floor, our film team has met up with our friends from the U.S., Jennifer Castner and Alyson Ewald, who run the Altai Project, an NGO that works with Altai communities on sustainable energy and economic development.

Here we stand AFTER a nap and banya (hot steambath) but before the night’s shashlik (grilled lamb) and vodka. We owe a lot to Jennifer and Alyson (standing on the left) and the tight-knit group of people working on cultural, economic and environmental issues in this beautiful place. The Altai is not a place one Googles easily to find accurate and abundant information. We took time to talk to as many people as possible in the U.S. who know the country well and they introduced us to the most perspicacious and generous people in the Altai. This includes Danil (pictured center) and our friend Chagat Almashev, who runs the Fund for the Sustainable Development of the Altai, and Joanna Dobson, our wonderful translator and a British expat who has lived in Ongudai for many years (standing far right).

After three days and two nights of slogging through rain, mud and sleet — Danil our indefatigable guide and inspiration — we emerge from the Siberian forest and toe-step up the slick moraine to where Danil will give his offering to the mountain.And this is the moment just before the clouds descended upon us and, in a matter of twenty seconds, slid across the distant comb-like peak thwarting our efforts to film the mountain and reminding us of man’s necessary humility when in the realm of the natural.

We arrived last night to the cozy campground at Uch Enmek Nature Park, a serene round of traditional gers (a type of large yurt) at the edge of the sacred Karakol Valley. We are here to find out how Altaians protect this landscape, which has been an important burial ground for millenia (as evidenced by the numerous kurgans or stone burial mounds) and center of steppe culture where petroglyphs and standing stones are signs of the continuous cycle of life in this valley. This morning, our guide Chagat and our translator Joanna brought us a visitor. Someone who, undoubtedly, will change everything we’ve planned for these three weeks and take us off in some wonderful new direction. For months we’ve been told by our local contacts that we must meet the elusive Danil Mamyev, that he knows everything about the Altai, that he has the most profound spiritual gravity, that he is the guide in this country. I was thus surprised when the stocky fiftyish man with unusually (for a contemporary Altaian) long gray hair and a bright red Gore-Tex jacket strode into camp. With a vise-like handshake that would put John Wayne to shame, Danil greeted us with a suspicious look in his inscrutable black eyes and then asked us to come with him to sit in the shade. As he sat with the grace of a bodhisattva under the broad canopy of a plane tree, he listened to us describe our project with no reaction. After Toby delicately inquired whether Danil would be interested in speaking with us on camera, in describing his work as Director of the Nature Park and his own personal connection to the land, I guessed we were certain to be disappointed. Danil, however, gave a quick satisfied nod and finally smiled. Would we be interested in going up to his sacred mountain Uch Enmek? he queried. He was going up there anyway on a pilgrimage and he would be happy to have us along. Needless to say, we got our things together immediately.

Two days ago we left the grim streets of industrial Barnaul for Gorno-Altaisk, the capital city of the Altai Republic. Arriving after a five hour drive in a speeding minivan, our beleaguered bodies crammed in among the sharp corners of our equipment, our eyes delighted at the sight of Gorno’s verdant hills and (almost) quaint city streets (if one averts the eyes from the Brutalist-style of ubiquitous concrete architecture). We got our bearings and slept off a little of the jet lag and then got down to business, interviewing the Director of the National Museum, Rima Yerkinova, and finally meeting all the people we’ve only talked with by phone or heard about for all these months of planning.

We left Gorno late last night and arrived in Erdogan, a rugged hamlet that appeared ghostly at night, its tumble-down barns and fences ethereally lit by our vans’ headlights. But, waking this morning, we discovered we’d arrived to a neat little village lying in the lap of voluptuous hills that would laugh the green off the Irish countryside. This preternaturally quiet valley is where the powerful Katun River broadens after it drops several thousand feet from the eastern Altai mountains. For 30 years the Russian government has wanted to put a massive hydroelectric dam on this site, ostensibly to power local industry and homes, but the plans have so far be shown to be economically unviable, not to mention environmentally tragic. However, the Katun Dam project is still high on many officials’ lists, so locals brought us out here to remind the world that the river and valley remain at risk.

We met today with Rima Yerkinova, the director of the Altai Museum, and interviewed her (for four hours!) about the 1993 unearthing of a 2,500 year-old burial on the Ukok Plateau by Russian archaeologists. A young woman’s body, frozen in permafrost, was removed from an elaborate grave and some Altaian people still feel that the disturbance can only be healed by the return of the so-called “Ice Princess,” which the museum director prefers to call “the Ukok Princess.”

Yerkinova showed us four paintings by different Altaian artists, which she said were depictions of the so-called princess. The emotion triggered by the episode has yielded an outpouring of creative energy while illustrating controversies all over the world involving scientific research and human remains. What are the ethics guiding archaeologists as they dig down into the earth to discover lost truths about human cultures and migrations?

Yerkinova is a passionate advocate of leaving human remains undisturbed. Meanwhile, she says, the collective unconscious of the Altai people has been stimulated by the woman’s spirit. As documented by the 1997 NOVA/BBC documentary Siberian Ice Maiden, a team of Russian archaeologists led by Natalia Polosmak discovered the body, carefully coaxed it out of the ice with warm water, treated it with chemicals to preserve it, and then displayed their remarkable find in a museum display case. Yerkinova told us that the incident has had an unexpected impact by inspiring the Altaian people to express their feelings and their vision of who they are in art. Clearly, as these four paintings illustrate, the identity and the soul of the Altaian people are profoundly linked to land and history.

We plan to return to Russia in the future to interview archaeologist Natalia Polosmak about the Ice Maiden story.

Today, we finally put to use the 700 lbs. of equipment that we’ve hauled halfway around the world. Our first interview of Losing Sacred Ground was with Mikhail Shishin, a pensive professor of cultural anthropology and philosophy in Barnaul. He also is the committed leader of a determined group of Russians and Altaians that have formed The Fund for the 21st Century Altai, an NGO that works to educate Russians and the international community about the unique culture and environment of the Altai.

Speaking of the rapid development going on in Altai — including the proposed natural gas pipeline that Russia plans to build across the Ukok Plateau to China — Mikhail struck a somber but rational note: “It seems to me that we’ve reached a point in Altai when we need to balance everything very carefully. We can either have a world where everything is homogenously globalized, where pipelines are everywhere, roads are everywhere, and people move freely, or we can set aside certain places, places that preserve culture and spirituality, places where water remains and where enormous glaciers are reservoirs for all humanity. The taiga is here, where the air is regenerated and we receive oxygen – perhaps this is more important?”

Here’s the Sacred Land Film Project crew, looking jet-lagged yet spry, in Moscow’s Red Square. From left to right, we are Will Parrinello (camera), Toby McLeod (director/producer), Andy Black (sound and camera) and Ashley Tindall (associate producer). After a 14 hour flight from San Francisco through Atlanta and what will be a 12-hour layover (and sprint to see the sights) in Moscow, we will take a red-eye flight and arrive in the Soviet-era city of Barnaul (Altaisky Krai province) around 6 am. That will make it a 36-hour sprint to the other side of the world! Thankfully we’re coming back to Moscow at the end of this trip, so this won’t be all we see of this fascinating city of politics, churches, shopping and traffic.

The Sacred Land Reader, a 92-page collection of essays on Native American sacred places, is now available to download from our website. The Sacred Land Reader compiles some of the best essays from last 10 years exploring the meaning and importance of sacred lands. Featured are Sacred Lands and Religious Freedom by Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., and Sacred Places of Native America — A Primer to Accompany the Film In the Light of Reverence, by U.C.L.A. anthropologist Peter Nabokov.

The Sacred Land Film Project has published a 48-page Teacher’s Guide for use with In the Light of Reverence, our award-winning documentary film on Native American sacred land struggles. The guide contains 23 activities for high school and college teachers in the areas of Social Studies, Environment and Language Arts.