On June 13 the Federal Court in Darwin, Australia delivered a blow to the spirits of the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrawa and Mara peoples. As many of you know, we have been following the events surrounding the zinc mine expansion and diversion of the McArthur River in the Northern Territory since last year. Now, in a decision that has been awaited since last August, the Court upheld the government’s decision to allow Swiss-based Xstrata Corporation to pursue a $110 million mine expansion project at the McArthur. This expansion plan includes a 5.5 kilometer diversion of the river which would allow Xstrata to tap a large deposit of zinc, a mineral which is skyrocketing in value on the world market, in great part due to Chinese demand. Since July 2007 the mining company has been forging ahead with the construction of the diversion canal anticipating this decision. Opponents of the diversion plan continue to charge that the diversion of the river will destroy sacred sites and have deleterious environmental effects on the fisheries and mangroves downstream.

The Gudanji and Yanyuwa people of Borroloola, with whom we filmed last August, have been persistent in their opposition to the diversion as moving the river would cut their rainbow serpent and turtle dreamings (see our site report on the McArthur River) and forever damage the community spirit of the people. They also fear that Xstrata’s subsidiary, McArthur River Mining (MRM) has dug up burial grounds and removed bones from the site.

The traditional owners, as Aboriginal peoples are known in Australia, and the Northern Land Council – an agency that was set up to administer land rights claims for Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory – had sued the former federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell a year ago, charging that he had not followed correct procedure or analysis when he issued a permit for the mine’s expansion plan. This lawsuit followed a back-and-forth series of politically and culturally charged events, including the a decision by the NT Supreme Court halting the river diversion in April 2007 and the Northern Territory government’s highly contentious passage in May 2007 of last-minute legislation to allow for the diversion to begin.

In response to the litigation and publicity, MRM had refused to allow the traditional owners onto the property to conduct ceremonies. Last month, led by our friend Jacky Green, the Gudanji formed a roadblock at the mine entrance in protest. Xstrata issued several trespass notices to the protesters and police stepped in on behalf of the mining company.

After the June 13th decision, the Gudanji again gathered at the mine entrance with about 80 people, including Yanyuwa, Garrawa and Mara people, asking to be permitted onto the site to perform a farewell ceremony to the sacred sites. MRM refused and accused the Northern Land Council of staging a media stunt. The council fired back, charging that MRM was in violation of Australia’s Sacred Sites Act by refusing permission to the people to access their sites and perform ceremony. On June 19th, the police once again cleared off the protesters.

The Northern Land Council will now press its case with the new Environment Minister Peter Garrett. They hope he will agree to conduct a federal environmental impact assessment and halt the mining company’s river diversion work. We’ll keep tabs on news from the McArthur River and let you know how you might be of help!

To read the national press coverage, check out the recent articles in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne) and The Northern Territory News (Darwin). To find out what actions may be taken in Australia in the coming months, check out the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory’s page and their McArthur River blog.

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.

In the misty mountains of the Vilcanota Cordillera, southeast of Cusco, on the steep slopes of the Andes, the Q’eros grow potatoes, herd alpaca, chew coca and pray to the mountain deities they call Apus. On my recent research trip to the Q’eros village of Qochamoqo, I was accompanied by Milton Gamarra, the Potato Repatriation Coordinator with Associación ANDES, who hiked in at harvest time to see how different potato varieties were doing in the face of climate change. The Q’eros harvested three fields at varying elevations and carefully bagged the different types of potatoes to determine how each seed type is faring under a variety of conditions. As El Niños come and go over the years, resilience has always been central to the vitality of Q’eros culture, and as the planet warms and the glaciers melt, the Q’eros are determined to be on the cutting edge of awareness with regard to climate change and what they can do to survive it.

Watch a new four-minute film clip documenting my recent trip: Research in the Andes.

In their continuing struggle to regain federal recognition as a tribe, the Winnemem Wintu have been lobbying for a state resolution sponsored by Assemblyman Jared Huffman of Marin. Assembly Joint Resolution 39 (AJR 39) urges the federal government to investigate the Winnemem’s history and treaty claims and encourages the U.S. Congress to restore federal recognition to the Winnemem Wintu Tribe.

On April 21, the California Assembly passed AJR 39 by a vote of 46-29 with 4 not voting. The resolution now goes to the State Senate.

You can watch a new three-minute film clip of the Winnemem testimony to the Assembly Committee on Governmental Organization, titled A Long Journey To Justice. For a blog report on the Winnemem’s experience in Sacramento see the January 9 post below.

“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.

Kaho`olawe 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 Kaho`olawe, 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.

Caleen Sisk-Franco, Spiritual Leader and Tribal Chief of the Winnemem Wintu, discovered last week that the healing spring on Mt. Shasta that is the birthplace of both the Winnemem people and their ancestral river had dried up. Everyone asked why — Global warming? Cremation ashes that have been dumped in the spring by New Age visitors? Forest Service management practices? Water bottling plants sucking water out of the base of the mountain? Please watch our new four-minute film clip: The Spring at Panther Meadows. For the full, sad story — before watching the clip — you can read the November 10 posting below.

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.

Check out SLFP’s new video: Song for the Rainbow Serpent! Three percent of the world’s zinc lies beneath the serpentine riverbed of northern Australia’s McArthur River — and the zinc will soon be headed to China’s steel mills. For Aboriginal Australians, the entire river is respected as the Dreamtime pathway of the Rainbow Serpent, one of the most important of the ancestor spirits who formed the land and still enforces the law. Xstrata Zinc is starting to excavate an open pit mine at McArthur River and is building a 5.5 kilometer diversion channel to redirect water around the deep hole the mining company is digging. When we tried to enter the area with traditional owner Harry Lanson, the mining company threatened to arrest us for trespassing and ordered us to leave. As Harry Lanson asserted his right to visit the land he was born on, to show us his sacred sites, a helicopter landed within 100 feet of our “mob” — which included more than a dozen children. We retreated back down the road to the river. Even after the humiliation and stress, the Aboriginal women proceeded with the dance they had come to do next to the river, to honor the female form of the Rainbow Serpent, which in English they refer to as a “mermaid.”

Check out a new two-minute film: A Song for the Rainbow Serpent

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.

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 the Sustainable Development of Altai, 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 documenting the sites, they are also trying to head off a proposed natural gas pipeline that the Russian state-owned corporation Gazprom is planning to build through the area 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.

Check out our new 3-minute film clip: Mapping Is Power.

We applaud the United Nations’ passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and congratulate the many, many indigenous elders and activists who collaborated over decades to enshrine these fundamental human rights in international law. However, in the spirit of dialogue and debate we offer these thoughts on the removal of the words “sacred places” from the document, in final negotiations behind closed doors as the declaration moved toward the General Assembly in 2006.

Throughout the 1990s, as indigenous people around the world worked to build support for the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, sacred places were explicitly mentioned. In 1994, the draft stated (bold text for emphasis):

PART III

Article 12

Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artifacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature, as well as the right to the restitution of cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.

Article 13

Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practise, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of human remains.

States shall take effective measures, in conjunction with the indigenous peoples concerned, to ensure that indigenous sacred places, including burial sites, be preserved, respected and protected.

In the 2006-7 version that was approved this week by the General Assembly (with adjusted Article numbering in which the old Article 12 became 11 and 13 became 12), this very important language was changed:

PART III

Article 11

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.

2. States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.

Article 12

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains.

2. States shall seek to enable the access and/or repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, transparent and effective mechanisms developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned.

Our attempts to discover why the words “sacred places” were removed in what appears to have been a small committee meeting in 2006 have so far failed to bear fruit. States probably objected to a fearful concept that seems to threaten economic development and private property rights, and a committee of indigenous negotiators may have compromised to undercut resistance as a promised vote by the General Assembly finally was approaching.

The Declaration was tabled and did not come to a vote in November 2006, and thus the compromise may not have been necessary. It is definitely unfortunate. Including the specific mention of “sacred places” would have been a huge, historic step forward — indeed for twenty years the draft declaration included the requirement that states cooperate with indigenous people to ensure respect for and protection of sacred places. This language reflected a consensus built and sustained over many years.

We are left with “archaeological and historical sites” and “religious and cultural sites” — terms that governments and modern societies do not understand in the indigenous context and hence usually reduce to human built structures, places where there is archaeological evidence, material sites related to the human past. This omission can effectively and conveniently eliminate sacred natural sites, where an undisturbed geophysical formation is understood to be sacred, imbued with power and spirit, experienced on a level beyond the physical — a mountain, a spring, a tree or grove, a lake, a river, a rock — “sacred places.”

Perhaps it is arrogant for humans to try to enshrine “rights” to sacred places, when the proper relationship is one of voluntary, deeply felt “responsibility.” But in an instrument of international policy, sacred places could have used explicit protection.

With the Australian Federal Supreme Court preparing to hear a case on the legality of the McArthur River mine expansion and river diversion plan, a group of 50 men, women and children boarded a bus in Boroloola and traveled nearly 1000 kilometers to Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory. They went to observe the court proceedings and pray, sing and dance in front of the Parliament Building. When they first arrived they burnt eucalyptus leaves and moved around the area smudging the buildings out of respect for an elder who had recently passed away. The smoke billowed around the group purifying all of the places where the elder had been during his last visit.

Australia’s booming economy depends in large part on resource extraction, and the powerful mining industry flaunts its economic and political clout with the current federal and Northern Territory governments. In April 2007, the Aboriginal people of Boroloola won a court case charging that the McArthur River Mine (MRM) permits were illegally issued by the NT government. The Territory Parliament then hurriedly passed a new law within a week that overturned the court ruling and allowed the mine to continue operating.

Barbara McCarthy, an indigenous member of the NT Parliament representing Arnhem Land, opposed the hasty legislation. She told me, “We did everything possible in the legal system and when we won the goal posts were moved again. It’s wrong. I’m sorry — it’s wrong.”

The community awaits a decision by the Supreme Court while MRM is continuing with the diversion of the river. A finding in favor of the plaintiffs will mean that Xstrata (the parent company of MRM) will not be able to proceed with the mine expansion plan and the diversion of the river. An independent monitor was recently assigned to review all environmental assessments of the mine and to evaluate the impact of the diversion. However, the monitor will be paid by Xstrata, diminishing its “independence” from the viewpoint of the Borroloola community members.

One remarkable and odd thing about our visit in Darwin was that the regional newspaper, The Northern Territory News, rather than running a story on the Aboriginal delegation protesting the mine expansion, ran a story about our film crew documenting the Aboriginal story.

Check out our new three-minute film clip: The Road to Darwin.

Every August, two thousand people visit northern Australia’s Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land to attend the Garma Festival, an international celebration of the Aboriginal culture that is still strong around Yirkalla. In August, we travelled to Garma to interview indigenous leaders and film the dances that take place at sunset every evening.

The evening dance is known as the bunggul and the place the dances are performed is remembered as the origin place of the digeridoo, known in the local Yolnu language as the yidaki. In this short film clip you will hear a song to the Mimih Spirits, sung by Crusoe Kurddal, one of the lead actors in the film “Ten Canoes.” You’ll see the Red Flag Dance that recalls the Macassan seafarers’ visits to Australia, and you’ll meet yidaki master Djalu and his wife Darngul.

To visit Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, outsiders need a permit. This is Aboriginal land, one of the few places left where native people control access to land they have inhabited for millenia. Australian legislators have been trying to abolish the permit system and undermine Aboriginal Land Rights. The federal government also recently declared the equivalent of martial law in the Northern Territory under the pretense of trying to stop child abuse, which the government claims is higher in Aboriginal communities than elsewhere. Local observers point out that rural communities share this problem the world over and theorize that this is a pre-election ploy by conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who is trying to rally his base in the runup to national elections. In any event, Aboriginal leaders are fighting these measures, and when they gathered in August these government actions were at the top of their agenda.

Manduwuy Yunupingu, leader of the band Yothu Yindi, opened the Garma Festival with these observations: “This government is a worrying government. It worries about itself. The corporate sponsors worry. In the Northern Territory we are about to be dispossessed of everything we have left from the last dispossession — dispossessed of what is left — of land, lives, children, health, education. The name is ‘mainstreaming.’ The name is ‘assimilation.’ Some of us are not enjoying this festival because we are worrying ourselves sick about the Northern Territory government’s agenda. We must stand up and fight the sickness of this government setting out to take away what is rightfully ours. It’s going to be bigger than anything in the past. Maybe this is the final, final. We represent the past of Australia. We’ve lived here for thousands and thousands of years. We have survived all sorts of droughts, weather, wars. We never set out to kill ourselves and wipe ourselves out. We set out to take care of this country. Aboriginal people want to survive, so we can share land and knowledge, so your family and mine can live together and build a better world. It works with dialogue. You must talk and reach settlement, so life continues in balance.”

In that spirit we offer this short film clip of the 2007 Garma Festival.

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.