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One of the key strategies indigenous people are using to protect sacred places is to define their homeland, claim title to it and interpret their sacred places by creating maps—mapping is power. In the Altai, we filmed indigenous people mapping sacred sites as a protection strategy.

Our Altaian guide, Chagat Almashev, Executive Director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai (FSDA), explained, “Russians don’t recognize spiritual places, they’re intangible. So our strategy is to ‘passport’ our sacred sites, to document all of the precise information and validate them in the Russian system. If every detail is properly recorded, then they exist and are real.” It’s a form of cultural affirmation, rather than simply reacting to every new threat that comes along.

Chagat’s colleague, Maya Erlenbaeva, a cultural heritage expert, is mapping sacred sites in the area around Kosh Agach, where the Altai Republic borders Mongolia. Beyond mapping sacred sites, they are trying to document an area through which a proposed natural gas pipeline may be constructed by the Russian state-owned corporation Gazprom to carry natural gas to China.

Chagat and Maya took us to meet a local healer, Maria Amanchina, who lives on the edge of town beneath snow-covered mountains. Maria interviewed us twice before agreeing to be filmed in her cozy yurt, where a dancing fire burns in the center and a shaman’s paraphernalia adorns the rounded walls. Maria performed a “Feeding the Fire” ceremony, and then led us up to a clear, cold sacred spring, where she and Maya spent hours discussing the standing stones, shrines and offering sites that surround the spring.