Sitting in the lush central mountain range of Puerto Rico (Borike), the ancestral home of the Boriken Taíno people, Caguana is the largest and most complex ceremonial site in the West Indies. Caguana Ceremonial Center consists of a large central plaza, a ceremonial dance area, 10 rectangular earth-and-stone–lined ball courts and plazas and one circular plaza
The Badger-Two Medicine Roadless Area sits on National Forest land within the Rocky Mountain Front. Adjacent to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, Badger-Two Medicine is a dramatic landscape where the plains, the mountains, and two rivers meet.
On the island of Hawaii, the remote rainforest Wao Kele on the slopes of Kilauea is the home of the volcano goddess Pele and her ʻohana (family) of deities, an ancient hunting ground that continues to be a place of ceremony for Native Hawaiians today.
The remnant of an ancient volcano, Cave Rock is home to the spirits of the Washoe people, whose ancestral land encompassed the Lake Tahoe Basin. They no longer have domain over their sacred place; instead it is managed by the Forest Service, which permits recreational use in violation of Washoe beliefs.
In the vast and rocky Mojave Desert of Southern California, Ward Valley is sacred land for the five lower Colorado River Indian tribes, and critical habitat for the endangered—and traditionally revered—desert tortoise Gopherus agassizii.
From many places in northern Arizona, the horizon is dramatically marked by three 12,000-foot volcanic peaks that rise out of the Colorado Plateau south of the Grand Canyon and north of Flagstaff.
In 2000, California’s water wars entered a new phase with an ambitious plan called the CALFED Bay-Delta Program. Included in the plan was the proposal to raise Shasta Dam, on the McCloud River
To the native tribes living along the Klamath River in Oregon and California, the river and its fish — especially salmon — are sacred, and stewardship of these natural resources is a core spiritual practice.
Often called “the world’s longest art gallery,” Nine Mile Canyon in Utah contains over 10,000 petroglyphs, pictographs and archaeological sites left by the Archaic, Fremont and Ute people thousands of years ago.
The mound temples and historic villages of the Muscogee people, descended from the Mississippian culture, in the Ocmulgee Old Fields of Georgia have been subject to development intrusions since the 1700s.