On a hilltop in the French city of Chartres stands a cathedral renowned as a testament to human builders inspired by faith in the divine. One of the world’s best-preserved medieval cathedrals, it is a Gothic architectural achievement that has been called a miracle of stained glass and stone.
Green patches of woodland dot the landscape of India — from bamboo groves on the eastern coast to clumps of trees in the northwestern deserts, and from jungles in the tropical south to dense Himalayan forests in the north.
The Black Hills stretch across western South Dakota, northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana and constitute a sacred landscape for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Omaha.
A world-famous natural bridge located at the northern edge of the Dine (Navajo) Nation, Rainbow Bridge is the site of hundreds of thousands of tourist visits every year and is recognized as a National Monument.
Snoqualmie Falls, 30 miles east of Seattle, Washington, is sacred to the Snoqualmie Tribe of the Puget Sound region. They believe it is the place where First Woman and First Man were created by Moon the Transformer, himself the son of an Indian woman and a star.
The wetlands around Lawrence, in eastern Kansas, hold over a hundred years of memories of Native children forced to grow up in isolation from their families and cultures. These memories bear their traces in unmarked child graves and a medicine wheel erected by contemporary Haskell students.
What was once Quechan land is now prime gold mining territory, and the off-reservation sacred landscape around Indian Pass in the California desert is endangered.
In the Yunnan Province of southwestern China, strong indigenous cultures have lived for centuries in a dramatic landscape of vertical mountain slopes, high plateaus and deep river gorges.
Since 1532, the inhabitants in the region of Cajamarca, high in the Peruvian Andes, have been invaded by waves of outsiders obsessed with gold. Though the form of colonization has changed over the years, the local descendents of the Inca are still fighting to preserve their land and way of life.
Snowcapped Tongariro and his fellow volcanoes, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe, rise majestically from the central volcanic plateau of New Zealand’s North Island. To the Maori tribes who have inhabited this land since at least the 14th century, Tongariro is tapu, sacred.