The 5,642-foot-high mountain known as Avi Kwa Ame in the Mojave language is the creation site for ten Yuman-speaking tribes including the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe. In response to more than a decade of efforts to protect the site, President Biden has designated 450,000 acres in Nevada as the “Avi Kwa Ame National Monument,” only the second monument to protect Native history.
Tomales Point and Point Reyes, the Farallon Islands and the West Berkeley Shellmound, all in northern California’s Bay Area, are sacred places. Their entirety forms an immense ceremonial and mortuary complex for the Coast Miwok and Ohlone, indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Area. These coastal sites are evidence of early Polynesian settlement in the Americas.
We interviewed Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine, as one of the “big-thinkers” for our Standing on Sacred Ground film series. In this episode Satish discusses sacred places, pilgrimages, global warming, Indian sacred groves, and the much-needed cultural shift “from EGOcentric to ECOcentric.
For more than five decades, Malcolm Margolin was a fixture at the heart of Berkeley’s intellectual community. As the founder of Heyday Books, he was instrumental in publishing hundreds of titles. Most significantly, in 1978 he published his own groundbreaking book, The Ohlone Way, which woke an entire region up to the amazing natural and human history of the greater Bay Area. He passed away from complications with Parkinson’s disease on August 20, 2025 at the age of 84.
On the spring equinox in 1981, Toby McLeod interviewed the reclusive, rabble-rousing author Edward Abbey as the founders of Earth First! staged their first guerrilla theater, direct action at the much-despised Glen Canyon Dam. The footage was edited into Toby’s first film, The Cracking of Glen Canyon Damn—with Edward Abbey and Earth First!
In this episode of Sacred Land Speaks we bring you Toby’s interview with Abbey, and the dramatic tale of a real life Monkey Wrench Gang. Also included are highlights from Jessica Abbe’s 1985 interview with the renowned author, one of the few other on-camera interviews Abbey ever gave.
The California Supreme Court is deciding whether to take on the West Berkeley Shellmound case. Project Director Toby McLeod argues that they must!
On the day the California Court of Appeal heard arguments over whether to uphold lower court protection of the West Berkeley Shellmound, landowners erected a six-foot chain link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. It was a gut punch.
In a stunning development, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed the West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site on their 2020 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
Help stop the Bureau of Reclamation from enlarging Shasta Dam. Please send your comment letter by October 5, a sample letter is provided in this blog. Thank you!
When Soviet forces forcibly relocated the Yaghnobi from their mountain valley in what is now Tajikistan, the Russians were unable to crush the spirit of the people. Their cultural lifeblood remained in their homeland and they returned to create the Yaghnob National Natural Park to protect their ancient cultural landscape.