Thank you to everyone who contributed to our year-end funding appeal! Thanks to YOU we reached our $25,000 matching donation goal! We appreciate your continued support of Standing on Sacred Ground. Your contribution enables us to continue with the post-production of our four-part documentary series on sacred places in the United States and around the world. With your help we are now making the final push to completion. We have finished the fine cuts of our first two hours and are busy with final editing of the other two hours: music composition, maps and graphics, archival footage licensing, color correction and sound mix. I’m happy to report that the native Canadian actor Graham Greene (Oneida) is narrating the series, and he sounds great!

Last September, I had the privilege of joining three of the sacred site guardians featured in our film-series – Caleen Sisk, Chief of the Winnemem Wintu, Emmett Aluli of Hawai‘i and Danil Mamyev of the Altai Republic of Russia – in Jeju, South Korea at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) World Conservation Congress. We screened edited segments from Standing on Sacred Ground and Caleen, Emmett and Danil spoke to a large international audience. The importance of the alliances formed during production of our film series is becoming clearer to me as we plan our distribution campaign. Our indigenous partners are enthusiastically looking forward to putting the new films to work.

As we move forward in this final phase, you can keep up with the latest sacred site news and the progress of our work on Standing on Sacred Ground by visiting our website to watch video clips, read our blog and explore our tool kit to learn how you can take action to help protect sacred places and their indigenous guardians.

Thank you again for your contribution. I am glad to be able to count on you as a valued member of our community of supporters from all over the world.

— Toby McLeod