Sacred Land Blog
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 Kaho’olawe 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 Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana and the Kaho’olawe 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 Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana 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. 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 journey
ed 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 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.
In July 2009, 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. 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.”
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.
Watch the Clip
The 2005 World Wildlife Fund report, Beyond Belief, concluded: “Sacred sites are the oldest method of habitat protection on the planet.” Yet these biological and cultural treasures are under assault — as are the people who have been safeguarding them for millennia. Building on the success of our award-winning PBS documentary In the Light of Reverence, the Sacred Land Film Project (SLFP) is producing a three-film series for public television titled Losing Sacred Ground. The series will expose corporate and environmental assaults on indigenous peoples’ sacred landscapes and promote strategies to protect the ecological integrity of these endangered places.
Losing Sacred Ground tells eight compelling stories of indigenous people resisting the destruction of nature and culture. This series gives voice to native people on five continents building a land rights movement to protect their traditional ways of life and spiritual practices, and exposes the greatest environmental and cultural challenges of our time as viewed from the unique perspective of indigenous elders and activists.
The series is now half way through production and will be completed in 2011. These documentaries would not be possible but for the unique relationships and trust built over decades by the Sacred Land Film Project.
If you enjoy the film clips you see here and would like learn more about sacred lands around the world please visit our interactive map. You can also sign up to receive periodic news alerts with up to date information about sacred sites and reports from our production trips. You may also contribute to the film series and educational outreach of the Sacred Land Film Project. Your support enables us to continue documenting these urgent stories!
Watch the Clip
Four Corners documents the cultural and ecological impacts of coal stripmining, uranium mining and oil shale development in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona – homeland of the Hopi and Navajo. It examines Peabody Coal Company’s massive Black Mesa stripmine and the history of uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau, including the 1979 Church Rock tailings spill on the Navajo Reservation, where high levels of lung cancer and birth defects have resulted from decades of radiation exposure. The film challenges the U.S. government policy of locating destructive energy projects in remote “national sacrifice areas” and illustrates serious “environmental justice” issues ten years before that term was coined. Concluding that the extraction of coal and uranium involves huge hidden costs, Four Corners argues for development of alternative energy from solar and wind along with a major conservation initiative.
Distribution: Seven-week tour of the Southwest, spring 1983; Congressional screening sponsored by Friends of the Earth, November 1983; EPA (DC) and UN (NY) screenings.
Broadcast History: PBS national broadcast, November 1983; the Learning Channel, 1985.
Awards: Academy Award, Best Student Documentary; Best Documentary, San Francisco Native American Film Festival; Best of Category, National Association for Environmental Education Film Festival; CINE Golden Eagle.
Produced by Christopher McLeod, Glenn Switkes and Randy Hayes. Written and Directed by Christopher McLeod.
“Four Corners is a beautiful, impressive and thoroughly honest film.
I hope millions of people see it.”
— Edward Abbey
Watch the Clip
Poison in the Rockies is an update of Downwind/ Downstream for the PBS science show NOVA, including 23 minutes of new material. It details how thousands of abandoned mines contaminate water by leaching heavy metals into rivers and streams, a problem that is compounded by acid rain and snow. The film highlights the EPA Superfund Program’s effort to clean up toxic mining waste in Leadville, Colorado, where children’s blood has been found to contain elevated levels of lead. Featuring interviews with Charles Wilkinson, law professor at CU Boulder, David Delcour, vice president of AMAX, along with scientists and environmentalists.
Broadcast History: Broadcast nationally on NOVA in January and May of 1990 and in May and December of 1992, with an estimated total audience of 25 million people.
Produced by Christopher McLeod and Robert Lewis. Written and Directed by Christopher McLeod.
“We are poisoning our water supply at the source,
the first civilization, probably, ever to have done that.”
— Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
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!
Watch the Clip
The birth of the radical environmental movement is captured in this short, poetic film on the legendary direct action at Glen Canyon Dam in March of 1981. The film contains one of the only interviews ever given by the late, great author Edward Abbey along with his classic speech from the back of a pick-up truck.
Check out Free Speech TV’s feature (on YouTube) which includes about half of the film.
Distribution: Earth First! Roadshow, Summer 1982.
Produced by Christopher (Toby) McLeod, Glenn Switkes and Randy Hayes.
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