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Rising like an island in the center of California’s Sacramento Valley, the Sutter Buttes figure prominently in the traditional creation and afterlife stories of the Maidu and Wintun peoples, whose ancestors once lived within view of this small mountain range. In the 19th century, European settlement and the imposition of private property rights severed the Native American way of life — but it is the concept of private property rights that today both preserves the Buttes and leaves them precariously open to development.
“The Gold Rush and the events of the 1800s stripped us of our cultural identity and our resources. We lost who we were,” Arlene Ward, a member of the Mechoopda Maidu tribal council, told SLFP. ”Now in the 21st century, many people are taking up their identity as native peoples. The Sutter Buttes are significant to who we are and it may be that there are practices we want to revive and we will want to go to that power place — but it has to be there for us.”
Read more about Sutter Buttes in our latest sacred site report.
A day before his official Jan. 22 inauguration, Bolivian President Evo Morales held a symbolic swearing-in ceremony at the Kalasasaya Temple in Tiwanaku, the seat of an Andean empire that flourished for more than 400 years. Morales, an Aymara Indian, chose the sacred site because the Aymara are the principal descendants of the Tiwanaku empire.
Before addressing a crowd of thousands of indigenous supporters, Morales joined priests and elders for private cleansing rites, then participated in a series of public offerings and prayers to the Andean deities for guidance.
“From this millennial place a new light is born, a light of hope for the Bolivian people and for humanity,” Morales said in a speech delivered in Aymara, Quechua and Spanish.
Morales vowed to continue to fight for the rights of indigenous Bolivians. Last year Morales led a constitutional overhaul that enshrined traditional religions and increased protection for indigenous land rights.
After a nearly 20-year hiatus, uranium mining has resumed on public lands surrounding the Grand Canyon.
In late December 2009, Denison Mines Corp. began extracting high-grade uranium ore from its Arizona 1 mine, located about 10 miles from the boundary for Grand Canyon National Park.
The mine had been shut down in 1992, never having produced any ore, after a crash in uranium prices. However, with a rebound in prices in recent years and increasing uranium demand — including the Obama administration’s January announcement of major investment in the construction of new nuclear reactors — mining companies are looking to restart old mines and open new ones in northern Arizona, which reportedly holds the most concentrated source of uranium in the United States.
Renewed interest in uranium mining has put Native American tribes, environmental-protection advocates and other stakeholders on alert. In July 2009, members of the Havasupai Nation and their allies gathered at the Red Butte sacred site, on the south rim of the canyon, to address the reemerging threat.
The U.S. Department of the Interior is taking a cautious approach to ensure that communities, landscapes and watersheds are protected, it says. In July, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a two-year moratorium on the filing of new mining claims on the 1 million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon. During that time the department will consider imposing a 20-year restriction on new mine development. Also on the table is the Grand Canyon Watersheds Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) in January 2009, which would withdraw the lands from mineral exploration.
“Over the next two years, we will gather the best science and input from the public, members of Congress, tribes and stakeholders, and we will thoughtfully evaluate whether these lands should be withdrawn from new mining claims for a longer period of time,” Salazar said in a statement.
The moratorium, however, doesn’t affect existing valid mine claims, which are protected by the outdated General Mining Act of 1872. According to the Bureau of Land Management, six mines are expected to reopen on the federal lands in question.
In November 2009, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon Trust sued the Bureau of Land Management for failing to update 1980s-era environmental reviews and mining plans before allowing Denison to reopen the Arizona 1 mine. The groups say the current mine claim is not valid, and thus subject to the moratorium. The suit is still pending.
Of particular concern is potential impact on groundwater and regional aquifers, which supply water districts including Las Vegas and Los Angeles. As a part of the Interior Department’s two-year review, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a series of studies to determine the effects of uranium mining on the natural resources of the region. The results, released Feb. 17, show elevated levels of uranium in wells, springs and soil around uranium exploration and mining sites.
Elsewhere in the Southwest, uranium mining threatens Native American sacred sites. New Mexico’s Mount Taylor — held holy by the Navajo, Acoma, Zuni and other tribes — sits atop a vast uranium deposit that has also attracted the attention of mining companies since the upsurge in uranium prices. In 2009, native tribes and environmental groups launched an effort to protect the mountain, which resulted in its receiving state protected status as traditional cultural property. (Read an excellent piece of long-form journalism on this complex story in High Country News.)
Visit the websites of the Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Trust for more information on uranium mining at the Grand Canyon and ways you can help.
In January, the U.N. released its first-ever report on the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” which presents a global view of the current situation of indigenous peoples, examining poverty and well-being, culture, education, health, human rights, environment and emerging issues.
Authored by indigenous peoples, the report offers statistics and information to raise awareness about indigenous development, advance the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and influence the U.N. Development Program’s 2010 Human Development Report, themed “Rethinking Human Development.”
The report highlights the critical situation for indigenous peoples around the world and translates the urgency into hard statistics. Indigenous peoples make up about 5 percent of the world’s population and 15 percent of its poor, as they are the first population to be affected by industries that harm the environment or resource-intensive projects. In the United States, nearly a quarter of Native Americans and Alaska Natives live below the poverty line, with lower life expectancy and higher death rates from causes including diabetes, homicide, suicide and car accidents. The statistics are grim.
Although indigenous peoples are caretakers of some the world’s greatest regions of biodiversity and enrich global culture in a plethora of ways — from traditional knowledge in herbal remedies and land management to environmental principals — their plight has yet to enter mainstream conversation or find serious discussion in major news outlets.
Yet every effort counts, and actions such as the release of “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” will further the urgently important dialogue on global interdependence, land rights, resistance to the loss of biological and cultural diversity, and hope for a collaborative future.
A controversial and long-delayed hydroelectric dam project on Brazil’s Xingu River received the green light on Feb. 1 when the Brazilian Environment Ministry issued an environmental license for the dam’s construction.
If the project goes forward, the Belo Monte dam would be Brazil’s largest hydroelectric complex and the world’s third largest. The dam would flood an estimated 170 square miles of land in the state of Pará, displacing some 16,000 people and and impacting thousands of others, including tribal people, whose livelihoods depend on the river and forest. The dam would also dry up the river around its “Big Bend,” home to the Paquiçamba reserve of the Juruna indigenous group.
First proposed in the 1980s, the project had been stalled for years because of widespread national and international protest. A 2005 lawsuit filed by federal prosecutors claims that indigenous communities were not consulted on the project, as required by Brazil’s constitution.
The Brazilian Environmental Justice Network has launched an international campaign demanding that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and other Brazilian authorities stop the project. The online magazine Intercontinental Cry has details on what you can do. You can also get additional information from our friends at International Rivers, long-time opponents of the Belo Monte Dam.
Read our Xingu River System sacred site report to learn more about indigenous struggles to protect the river.
The National Preservation Institute will be presenting a seminar entitled “Consultation and Protection of Native American Sacred Lands,” to take place April 28-29 in Seattle, Wash.
Designed to provide continuing education and professional training to those involved in the management, preservation and stewardship of Native American sacred lands, the seminar will cover areas including federal laws, tribal and federal land-management guidelines, historical and cultural factors, the consultation process and other tools for achieving protected status for culturally significant places.
For more information, including a detailed agenda, pricing and registration information, visit the NPI website.
Reversing an earlier U.S. district court decision permitting Barrick Gold Corp. to proceed with plans for a massive open-pit gold mine at Nevada’s Mount Tenabo, a federal appeals court ordered a preliminary injunction against the mine.
Mount Tenabo and its environs are part of Newe Sogobia, the ancestral land of the Western Shoshone, who object to the project on religious as well as environmental grounds. The plaintiffs challenged the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s decision to approve the Cortez Hills mine in November 2008.
In its Dec. 3, 2009, decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the merit of the environmental claims of the Shoshone’s case and said that an injunction was in the public interest, noting “the irreparable environmental harm threatened by this massive project.”
The court thus reversed the district court’s decision, sending the case back to the lower court to issue an injunction pending the preparation of an environmental impact statement that “adequately considers the environmental impact of the extraction of millions of tons of refractory ore, mitigation of the adverse impact on local springs and streams, and the extent of fine particulate emissions.”
Cortez Hills would be one of the largest open-pit cyanide heap-leach gold mines in the country. The proposed mine area had been found, in repeated ethnographic studies by the Bureau of Land Management, to be a place of extreme spiritual and cultural importance to the Western Shoshone. The area is home to local creation stories, spirit life and medicinal plants, and it continues to be used for spiritual and cultural practices.
Learn more in our Mount Tenabo sacred site report.
Backing away from a definitive move to ban climbing Australia’s iconic Uluru, Northern Territory Environment Minister Peter Garret on Jan. 8 approved a management plan that instead would allow for an eventual ban once certain conditions were met.
The red sandstone monolith is a place of spiritual significance for its Aboriginal traditional owners, who have long urged an end to climbing.
Under the new 10-year management plan for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, the 1,142-foot rock will remain open to climbers until the number of annual visitors choosing to climb drops to below 20 percent, until the park board determines that adequate new visitor experiences are in place, or until the climb is no longer the primary reason visitors choose to come to Uluru.
Those conditions may be hard to meet. “Realistically, I would expect the climb to remain open for at least a number of years,” Garrett said.
Last year — citing respect for Aboriginal belief along with safety concerns — the park board proposed an outright climbing ban in its draft management plan, which caused an uproar in the tourism sector. During a public-comment period on the proposal, the government received 153 submissions, 78 in support of the closure and 75 against.
With the new plan, park management will now focus on adding new attractions, such as more night-time and cultural activities. “The most important thing is to create new experiences — without new activities some visitors will still think the most important thing about Uluru is the climb,” Harry Wilson, chair of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta board, said.
If and when a ban is ultimately deemed appropriate, Garrett said the tourism industry will be given at least 18 months notice so it can adjust its marketing. In the meantime, park management will continue to promote a “do not climb” message to visitors.
To learn more about Uluru, read our sacred site report.
In our latest sacred site reports, monks in China and Mongolia are taking a spritual approach in confronting modern threats to Buddhist and Daoist sacred mountains, while in Malaysian Borneo, one of the world’s last nomadic tribes fights to save its traditional rainforest lands from logging, hydropower and oil palm plantations.
Nine Sacred Mountains, China—Throughout China’s history, Buddhist and Daoist pilgrims have gone to mountains seeking spiritual sustenance and solace; there are five sacred mountains that are preeminent for Daoists and four sacred mountains that are paramount to Buddhists. In the 20th century, political upheaval led to the violent repression of religious expression, and sacred sites across China were destroyed. Despite losses, the devotion of monks and local residents to the holy reputation of these mountains prevented total destruction.
Now, as China gradually moves away from its past of religious intolerance and forges a new social and political identity amid unprecedented economic growth, the sacred mountains continue to attract traditional pilgrims and a considerable number of secular visitors. With these dual roles as spiritual destinations and economic enterprises, the sacred mountains face new challenges, such as uncontrolled tourism and habitat destruction. In this modern era, Buddhists and Daoists are turning to age-old philosophies as an impetus for environmental conservation.
Bogd Khan Uul, Mongolia—Considered the world’s oldest officially and continuously protected sacred site, this mountain massif was declared a sacred mountain reserve in 1778, and evidence of its protected status dates back to the 13th century. During the decades-long rule of communism in the 20th century, religion was repressed and nearly all of Mongolia’s 900 Buddhist monasteries were destroyed.
However, reverence persisted and the post-communist era ushered a revival of the national tradition of nature conservation, the restoration of monasteries and resanctification of sacred natural sites, including Bogd Khan. Unfortunately, real estate and tourism development, including a ski resort, now threaten Bogd Khan, and Mongolia’s deep-rooted conservation ethic must face yet another modern challenge.
Lands of the Penan, Malaysia—Living in the rainforests of Borneo, the Penan people are one of the last indigenous groups in the world with members who still follow a traditional nomadic lifestyle, relying solely on their natural environment for material and spiritual sustenance. In recent decades, logging has destroyed or altered the rainforest, forcing most Penan into a settled or seminomadic lifestyle marked by impoverishment, political marginalization, and increasing difficulty finding traditional sources of food in a diminishing rainforest.
These circumstances have driven many Penan into activism that began in the 1980s with road blockades against lumber companies and legal battles over land rights. Today, the Penan are fighting to save their rainforest home in the face of hydroelectric dam construction and a misguided race to plant oil palm plantations for biofuel.
In a first test of the Obama administration’s promise to honor the needs of Native Americans in policy- and decision-making, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met with local tribes as a step to determine whether to approve a massive offshore wind-farm project in Massachusett’s Nantucket Sound.
Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes have been fighting the Cape Wind project since 2004. They claim the wind farm — which would include 130 turbines, each 440 feet tall — would obstruct their view of the rising sun and the ocean, interfering with rituals and ceremonies. In addition, the shoal on which the turbines would be built was once dry land and contains sacred burial sites.
On Jan. 4 the National Park Service, in response to a claim by the affected tribes, announced that Nantucket Sound was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which could potentially delay or deny the Cape Wind project. The claim appears to refer to some 500 square miles of Nantucket Sound; never has a Native American claim over such a large area of water been approved.
Salazar, who must sign off on a federal permit before the project can move forward, met on Jan. 13 with all the major stakeholders, including tribal representatives, to try to reach a compromise.
“This meeting, I believe, is going to be the first test of whether or not we’re getting lip service and rhetoric from the administration or whether they’re truly going to hear the tribal nations — whether they’re going to pay attention and try to help us or whether it’s business as usual,” Cheryl Andews-Maltais, chair of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, said.
Opponents are asking for the project to be relocated to a less instrusive part of the sound. Salazar pledged a resolution by the end of April.
The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service is accepting public comments on the historic preservation aspects of the project until Feb. 12. Click here to learn how to submit your comments.
Sacred Land Film Project director Toby McLeod and writer Jessica Abbe will be in attendance at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival’s screening of In the Light of Reverence this weekend. If you are in the neighborhood and can join them please do stop by. The film will screen this Saturday, Jan. 16, at 1:30 p.m. at 106 Union with a special guest appearance by Caleen-Sisk Franco, Spiritual Leader and Tribal Chief of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and Mark Franco, Headman for the tribe.
In other SLFP news, if you haven’t already checked out our newly posted photo slide shows highlighting our Losing Sacred Ground production trips to the Altai Mountains of Russia and Australia, you can do so here. A gallery from the best of In the Light of Reverence is also included. Stay tuned, we’ll be posting more in the coming weeks.
A Department of Interior administrative law judge has overturned Peabody Coal Co.’s life-of-mine permit for operations at Black Mesa on Navajo-Hopi land in Arizona. The controversial permit was granted by the Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining in the final days of the Bush administration and was appealed by native activists and environmental organizations. The controversial strip mine has operated for more than three decades under a temporary permit.
Judge Robert G. Holt ruled on Jan. 5 that “OSM violated NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) by not preparing a supplemental draft EIS (environmental impact statement) when Peabody changed the proposed action. As a result, the final EIS did not consider a reasonable range of alternatives to the new proposed action, described the wrong environmental baseline, and did not achieve the informed decision-making and meaningful public comment required by NEPA. Because of the defective final EIS, OSM’s decision to issue a revised permit to Peabody must be vacated and remanded to OSM for further action.”
For details read more in Indian Country Today.
In a confrontation that ended with activists declaring transitory victory, a human blockade in California’s Six Rivers National Forest halted logging operations that the local Karuk tribe says is threatening its sacred sites and the survival of the forest. The protest took place near Orleans, about 140 miles northwest of Redding in Northern California.
Logging crews were turned back at about 5 a.m. on Dec. 16 at Orleans Mountain Lookout Road by approximately 15 activists, who lit a large fire in the roadway.
“This morning’s small but important victory marks the beginning of our campaign to defend Karuk sacred sites and protect the health of our forests,” Orleans local Chook-Chook Hillman said.
The blockade was organized by the Klamath Justice Coalition, which claims that current logging does not comply with the fuel-reduction plan agreed to in dozens of community meetings with stakeholders. Following a two-and-a-half-year consultation process, native and non-native community members from the Orleans region agreed to the Orleans Community Fuel Reduction and Forest Health Project, which was intended to enhance forest health and reduce the threat of wildfire through undergrowth removal.
As part of the plan, the U.S. Forest Service agreed to protect corridors of the forest around the Karuk Tribe’s ceremonial trail system. The plan banned commercial harvesting and heavy equipment in the protected areas, and prohibited cutting of hardwood species and large-diameter trees throughout the forest. It also called for multiparty monitoring of the logging operations.
Upon commencement of the plan, Karuk organizers said, subcontractors carrying out the logging work began violating the project guidelines.
“To date, we’ve had trees as large as three to four feet [in diameter] that have been felled in the buffer zone,” Karuk tribe spokesman Leaf Hillman said, noting that loggers have also set up heavy equipment, including a skyline logging system that uses towers and cables to move logs through the forest, inside the protected areas. In addition, the Forest Service failed to implement the promised multiparty monitoring.
Tyrone Kelley, the Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor, told the Associated Press that the current violations are the result of an oversight by the Forest Service, which failed to write the restrictions into the logging company’s contract. The Karuk Tribe is demanding that the Forest Service cease all logging on the 914 acres in question until these issues can be resolved.
The tribe conducts a semiannual ceremony throughout 9,000 acres of the forest, a region they’ve dubbed the Panamnik World Renewal Ceremonial District. Hillman said the area has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. During the ceremony, a priest travels through the forest on the tribe’s traditional trails to locations where various dances and prayers are held.
This is the same area that was the subject of the historic “G-O Road” case in the 1980s, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans did not have a First Amendment right to stop a Forest Service logging road from penetrating their sacred High Country.
The Klamath Justice Coalition is investigating legal measures it might initiate to halt the logging.
IUCN has published two new translations of “Sacred Natural Sites: Guidelines for Protected Area Managers,” co-edited by SLFP’s Toby McLeod with Robert Wild. The English, Spanish and Russian documents are available for free download. IUCN, aka the World Conservation Union, announced the new translations in a press release:
“We decided to present the Spanish version of the Guidelines at WILD9 precisely because this important international conservation gathering takes place in the traditional lands of the Maya people of Yucatan, shared by Mexico and Guatemala,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, IUCN Senior Adviser on Social Policy and close collaborator in this work. “This is one of the areas of Latin America with the greatest richness in biological diversity and indigenous spiritual traditions – and one where both are at risk because of many threats. Through this publication, IUCN wants to add its contribution to the efforts for their conservation.”
The Russian publication was presented last Friday at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting on the protection of traditional knowledge in Montreal, Canada.
“The CBD has recognized the importance of the protection of sacred natural sites in various documents and decisions, and produced its own guidelines for it,” said Petr Azhunov, Baikal Buryat Center for Indigenous Cultures. “But mostly these decisions remain on paper. I am attending the traditional knowledge meeting to explore ways in which we can make better use of the CBD to strengthen action on the ground, and I am highlighting the opportunities that the new Russian translation of the IUCN Guidelines offer for working with communities in Central Asia and congratulate all who have made it possible.”
Thanks to the WCPA Specialist Group on the Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas, and to Gonzalo Oviedo, IUCN Social Policy Advisor, for completing new versions of the guidelines accessible to a wider audience around the world. We are also grateful for the support of ProNatura in Mexico for making the guidelines widely available in Latin America, and The Christensen Fund for financial support.
Sacred Land Film Project has completed our 2009 annual report summarizing the year and recent production work on our new film series “Losing Sacred Ground.” You can download the report, titled “If We Don’t Laugh, We’ll Cry” now.
Here’s a sneak preview:
In northern California, soft October light shimmered on the McCloud River as Winnemem Wintu leaders Caleen and Mark Sisk-Franco showed us signs of ancestral villages. The grinding rocks, home sites and burials will be submerged if Shasta Lake, the enormous reservoir held back by Shasta Dam, is enlarged by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and backs further up into this wild stretch of the McCloud River.
Upstream from the houseboats, marinas and weekend fishermen, a tall boulder balances over a deep, shining pool named for the sucker fish spirit that inhabits it. If the dam is raised, the Winnemem will never see the Sucker Pool again. For generations, young warriors and leaders have swum across the pool as part of their initiation rites.
Mark and Caleen knelt on the shore, lit a pipe, put hands in the water and prayed for the sacred site as Will Parrinello filmed this quiet healing and blessing ceremony. “This is not a recreation area to us, it is a life way,” Caleen said later. “I had to swim across this pool, years ago. To think we might lose it breaks my heart.”
For the Winnemem, it was a bittersweet year. After strong local resistance, Nestlé dropped plans to bottle millions of gallons of pure water from within Mt. Shasta that would have threatened the mountain’s artesian springs. But high on the mountain’s slopes visitors continue to dump human cremation ashes in the Winnemem’s sacred spring, causing ecological harm to a pristine meadow and water source, and wreaking spiritual havoc by defiling the tribe’s origin place.
Facing daunting odds the Winnemem fight on, like indigenous communities all around the world. Their tenacity and sense of humor give me hope. “We will endure no matter what,” says Caleen, “and if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry.”
Read the full version of Sacred Land Film Project’s 2009 Annual Report.
- Read Our Latest Sacred Site Report, California’s Sutter Buttes
- Bolivian President Kicks Off Second Term With Ceremony at Indigenous Sacred Site
- Uranium Mining Resumes at Grand Canyon
- U.N. Issues First-Ever “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” Report
- Join Campaign to Save Brazil’s Xingu River
- April Seminar to Focus on Protection of Native American Sacred Lands
- Court Blocks Mount Tenabo Gold Mine
- Sacred Land Film: Thanks for your comment and additional information Ron!
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