Run Salmon Run
Sacred Land Film Project Director Toby McLeod participated in this year’s Run4Salmon, a two-week prayerful journey to restore McCloud River salmon runs and protect indigenous lifeways.
Sacred Land Film Project Director Toby McLeod participated in this year’s Run4Salmon, a two-week prayerful journey to restore McCloud River salmon runs and protect indigenous lifeways.
Surrounded by boutique storefronts in the upscale Fourth Street shopping area of Berkeley sits an unassuming 2-acre parking lot. For 5,000 years this was an Ohlone Village Site where two massive shellmounds grew—sites of burial and ceremony.
In 1875, biologist Livingstone Stone collected a sampling of belongings — baskets and ceremonial regalia — from the Winnemem Wintu people who lived along the McCloud River, below Mt. Shasta in northern California.
In the Altai Republic of Russia and in northern California, indigenous shamans resist massive government projects that threaten nature and culture. Altaians oppose Gazprom’s natural gas pipeline across the sacred Ukok Plateau and the Winnemem Wintu Tribe fights plans to raise the height of Shasta Dam.
From Papua New Guinea to the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, native people fight the loss of their land, water and health to mining and oil industries.
From the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia to the Andes of Peru, indigenous highland communities battle threats to their forests, farms and faith — as evangelical Christians disrupt sacred sites, and glaciers melt away.
Aboriginal Australians and Native Hawaiians reclaim land from government and military and successfully resist the erosion of culture and environment. The series concludes with the extraordinary story of Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana’s restoration of the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe after 50 years of bomb tests by the US Navy.
Ten years in the making, In the Light of Reverence explores American culture’s relationship to nature in three places considered sacred by native peoples, Devils Tower in Wyoming, Hopiland in Arizona and Mt. Shasta in California. Broadcast on the PBS documentary series POV.
The birth of the radical environmental movement is captured in this short, poetic film on the legendary direct action at Glen Canyon Dam in March of 1981.
Guardians of the Sacred follows 20 sacred site guardians from around the world as they journey to the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe for shared ceremony and strategic dialogue before attending the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Honolulu in September 2016.