The McArthur River watershed floods during the monsoon, and perhaps the Aboriginal people keep track over tens of thousands of years, relating the severity and length of flooding to the health of the people and their land. When a mining company wants to put an open pit zinc, lead and copper mine in the center of the river course, build a giant 28-foot high earthen berm wall around the open pit to try to keep monsoon water out, and dig a 5.5 kilometer diversion channel to re-route the river away from its normal channel, the corporation is clearly rising to a major engineering challenge. Do the engineers care if it all fails?

Or is this another experiment in domination and control posing as science and certainty? In these aerial photos, there are two prominent sacred sites visible in addition to the channel of the river itself, which the local people revere as the dreamtime pathway of the Rainbow Serpent. The mining company has fenced off the sacred sites and threatens to fine any employee who trespasses or defaces the sites. Keep an eye on rainfall totals for Australia’s Northern Territory as we head into the wet season…

On our first day in Borroloola we were down by the McArthur River waiting for a group of Aboriginal women to arrive for a riverside interview. While we were waiting, I saw a beautiful white egret standing amidst the grass and I went down to the river’s edge to take a photograph. When the women arrived and were getting out of the car, one quickly yelled, “Get away from there!” followed by quite a commotion, with everyone yelling and waving their arms, until I finally heard one woman exclaim: “There are crocodiles here and they jump right out of the river and drag people away!”

We never did see a croc right there in that location, but just a little ways down the river on the very next day….

In June 2007 our film crew was invited to make a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain in the Ooch Enmek Nature Park in the Altai Republic of Russia. Before starting the three-day journey, the park’s founder, Danil Mamyev, was blessed by the local shaman, Arzhan, who offered milk to the fire. Danil then ascended the mountain in a wild rain, snow and hail storm to make his offerings and whisper his prayers.

Check out our first blog video, a three-minute film of Danil’s journey: Pilgrimage To A Sacred Mountain

For twenty-three days I saw no newspapers, no clocks, no calendars, no mirrors. Time and identity melted into the landscape of the Altai: racing clouds and falling rain, a new and growing moon, shamans’ fires sputtering under spoonfuls of cow’s milk and crackling to devour dry cedar. I was transfixed by the rippling green mountains that gave way to snowy peaks as we traveled higher into the heart of central Asia, emerging onto the treeless plateau that is a secret and sacred place where Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China meet.Half way through the trip, our four-person film crew spent almost an hour struggling to figure out what day of the week it was — and what date in June? When we decided it was Saturday, June 16, I called my wife in California, only to be told that I was wrong, it was actually Sunday, June 17. We laughed. In a timeless world it didn’t matter. (Just one less day of shooting…)

But every day, everyone around us seemed to know exactly where we were in relation to the earth and the moon and the mountains. People kept noticing that we had started our new film project with the changing from old to new moon and everyone felt that was auspicious — a good sign.

I came with a list of ideas and questions: What is the history of cultural repression in the Altai? What forms did it take, and what was the effect on shamanism? How is identity tied to land here, and how does it compare to America or Australia? What areas have WWF and UNESCO and the former Soviet government “protected” and why did local Altaians establish different protections, in the new “nature parks”? What are the different standards and values reflected in these community protected areas? What do Altaians see as important and needing protection? How are culture and nature integrated in their protected areas? If these new protected areas attract tourists, spiritual pilgrims, could the influx pollute the land and undermine protection efforts? What is the Altai strategy to communicate to tourists what the land means to the local indigenous people?

We were guided through our mountain journey by Chagat Almashev, director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. Starting long before our arrival, Chagat cautioned us that political activism is limited and is not the way the local people work. Better to work on the cultural protection level, Chagat counseled: identify sacred sites, map them, assure their authenticity and identity in the complex bureaucratic Russian system, talk to elders and leaders, seek local input and consensus, and take care not to impose an American environmental activist agenda. “This is the best way to protect the Altai,” said Chagat.

Early on, Chagat introduced us to Svetlana Baidysheva, the Altai Republic’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development. In a national tourism development competition against all the other Russian republics, the Altai won, which will translate into $2.8 million per year in federal money. Chagat wants local consultation and some measure of control of future tourism development. Major European investment is about to pour into the Altai. Svetlana told us that she projects 6.6 billion rubles per year will be invested (which I calculate at $260 million per year), with a German firm to handle infrastructure design and construction, and an Austrian firm to handle financing and financial management. On the day we met Svetlana, 20 Germans had just visited. A ski resort is being planned along with major infrastructure development. Will the Altai become a European playground?

We had dinner in Gorno Altaisk with Svetlana, who raised her glass of vodka, wished us well on our journey and offered this toast: “Altai is a sacred site. Nature responds to your intentions.”

Maya Erlenbaeva is mapping sacred sites for the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. She has spent the last two years meeting with elders and visiting sacred places around Kosh Agach and recording detailed information and locations on maps.Maya’s colleague, Chagat Almashev, explained: “Russians don’t recognize spiritual places, they’re intangible. So our strategy is to ‘passport’ sacred sites, to record information that will validate them in the Russian system, with every detail properly recorded. Then they will exist—they will be real.”

After we interviewed Maria by the fire in her yurt, with a brilliant sunbeam shining down from the hole in the ceiling, she invited us to visit a sacred spring in the mountains nearby. Maria wanted to perform a purification ceremony for Maya and to show her some standing stones above the spring.

We drove across rugged country and climbed into a beautiful valley. Maria built a fire and offered milk as she whispered prayers and sang. Chagat, Maya and Maria prepared prayer clothes which each of us tied to a tree next to the spring. After hiking up into the hills, Maria showed Maya a field full of standing stones and carefully explained each one to the diligent sacred site mapper. We will have to wait for translations to know what Maria told Maya, as we filmed the whole scene without any idea what was going on.

After we climbed down and a chill breeze whistled up the valley, Maria insisted that I take off my clothes and bathe in the frigid waters of the sacred spring. It was a necessary ritual. She and Maya sat down by the fire and turned their backs as I followed the shaman’s instructions. I don’t think they peeked, but I could hear them laughing.

When we met the shaman Maria Amanchina in Kosh Agach she asked us about our dreams. She wanted to know where we had been and what we had felt as we traveled through the Altai. I told her that I had two dreams while camping on Oochen Mek. In one dream, I saw a bird flying from below. It had a red underbelly and black and white striped wings. Danil Mamyev had told me the next morning that a village in Karakol Valley takes its name from a bird of similar description. I also told Maria of a second dream, in which I saw Danil standing in a lake, waist deep in water.Maria told us she would consider our request for filming, and wished us well on our journey to the Ukok, saying that we were welcome to use the firewood she had left there. A few days later we returned with fresh new tales about the blizzards that always seem to sweep in when we film with Danil.

I told Maria about an idea I was working on, an insight that came to me on Oochen Mek as I listened to Danil talk about shamanism: “Danil told us the true role of a shaman is to interact with the natural world, and to enable people to open up so they can decide for themselves where they need to go and when to visit sacred sites. It strikes me that the goals of the shaman and goals of the artist-filmmaker are very similar: to help open up each person’s inherent qualities and abilities…to enable relationship with place and with other people…to show signs or images that stimulates one’s inner work…and to inspire change.”

Maria replied: “You are on the right track with your thinking.”

Both Maria and Danil talked a lot about signs, interacting with the land, the natural relationship between a person and their place, opening oneself to a sacred land. It reminded me of what Vine Deloria said in our last film, In the Light of Reverence: “If you look at the earth, there are certain places that seem to have power and we don’t know what kind of power it is, except you have a different feeling — you feel energized. And that’s why in lot of the ceremonies you simply go out into the land, at a certain place, under supervision of a medicine man, and open yourself up. What I think is powerful about these religions is you can continue to have revelations. What the revelation is telling you is how you and your community, at this time in life, can adjust to the rest of the world. So it’s not like we designated a place and said: ‘This is going to be sacred.’ It came out of a lot of experience. The idea is not to pretend to own it, not to exploit it, but to respect it. Trying to get people to see that that’s a dimension of religion is really difficult.”After considering our request to film, Maria replied: “I have always said no, and I have had many requests. In this case I say yes.”

There is a big international black market for rock art – petroglyphs and cliff paintings – ancient sacred images that depict traditional knowledge rooted in the landscape. In southern Utah, people are using battery-powered saws to cut sandstone slabs off cliffs, which end up hanging in living rooms in New York and Tokyo. I’ve been looking for a graphic example of an attempt to steal a petroglyph for 20 years.

In the Altai, tourists can buy a boulder with a thousand year-old carving at a roadside stand for $30. At Chui Oozy Nature Park, which was formed to protect the rock art from vandalism and thieves, I finally found solid evidence to illustrate the problem.

The person trying to steal this image of an Argali mountain sheep had started to remove a circular piece of rock, but made a bad hammer stroke that broke off one of the animal’s horns. Having ruined the image, the thief gave up and walked away. This image illustrates the need for protection of sacred sites through community involvement and better public education, and demonstrates the need for more resources to fund ranger patrols and law enforcement. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

We met today with Rima Yerkinova, the director of the Altai Museum, and interviewed her (for four hours!) about the 1993 disturbance of a 2,500 year-old burial on the sacred Ukok Plateau by Russian archaeologists. A young woman’s body, frozen in permafrost, was removed from an elaborate grave and the Altai people still feel very strongly that the desecration can only be healed by the return of the so-called “Ice Princess,” which the museum director prefers to call “the Ukok Princess.” Rima showed us four paintings by different Altaian artists, which she said were depictions of the Ukok Princess. The deep emotions triggered by the unearthing of an important ancestor, a woman whose dignity was physically violated, has yielded an outpouring of creative energy. The collecive unconscious of the Altai people has been stimulated by the woman’s spirit, says Rima. Russian archaeologists taking a body, treating it with chemicals to preserve it, and then displaying it in a glass case — all in the name of science — has had an unexpected positive impact by inspiring the Altaian people to express their feelings and their vision of who they are in art. Adding to the unsettled feelings is a proposal by Russian energy giant Gazprom to construct a natural gas pipeline and road across the Ukok Plateau into neighboring China. Clearly, as these four paintings illustrate, the identity and the soul of the Altaian people are profoundly linked to land and ancestors — and delicate political relationships with Russia and China.