In April, I went to New York’s American Museum of Natural History to show a work-in-progress film on Russia’s Altai Republic at a conference on cultural and biological diversity. I met Satish Kumar, who has edited the magazine, Resurgence, for 35 years. Satish said to me, “Please be careful with the subject of sacred sites. The Ganges is not sacred alone. The Ganges is considered sacred because all rivers, all water, is sacred. We designate certain places as sacred only to lead the limited human mind to grapple with the sacredness of all life, every place.” I asked if he would be in the San Francisco Bay Area any time soon so that we could interview him for Losing Sacred Ground. He said, “I’ll be there in May,” and we arranged an interview in the gardens of the Green Gulch Zen Center. There are rarely moments in the middle of a film interview when you start to wonder where you are going to cut because every word you are hearing has the ring of eloquent truth, but as the hour-long interview with Satish unfolded I could not help but think “this man does not waste a word.”

One of the true frustrations of documentary filmmaking is that an interview bite in the finished film cannot possibly run longer than 45 seconds. So what if a complex question like “How do we need to address global climate change?” takes 3 minutes, or 3 hours, to really answer.

I hope you enjoy and appreciate this three-minute, uncut clip from our interview with Satish Kumar, on the subject of the real cause of global warming and what we need to do to truly change the course of our society.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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