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SYNOPSIS Devils Tower. The Four Corners. Mount Shasta. All places of extraordinary beauty — and impassioned controversy — as Indians and non-Indians struggle to co-exist with very different ideas about how the land should be used. For Native Americans, the land is sacred and akin to the world's greatest cathedrals. For others, the land should be used for industry and recreation. Narrated by Peter Coyote and Tantoo Cardinal (Metis), IN THE LIGHT OF REVERENCE is a beautifully rendered account of the struggles of the Lakota in the Black Hills, the Hopi in Arizona and the Wintu in California to protect their sacred sites. An Independent Television Service (ITVS) & Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT). Co-presentation and a Television Race Initiative (TRI) Selection.

MAKING THE FILM: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER MCLEOD P.O.V.: How and when did you become aware of the conflicts surrounding sacred sites? What interested you in this issue? Christopher McLeod (CM): From 1979 to 1983, I worked in the Southwest on a film about the ecological and cultural impacts of coal and uranium mining in Indian country — THE FOUR CORNERS: A NATIONAL SACRIFICE AREA? The US Congress had just passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (AIRFA), which allowed native people to publicly perform ceremonies that had been banned for a century. Native Americans tried to use that law to protect the sacred places where they pray, and in every case they lost. In 1988 came the final blow, when the Reagan Supreme Court overturned two lower court rulings that had actually sided with northern California Indians who were trying to prevent a logging road from going through their sacred "high country" in the Siskiyou Mountains east of Eureka. It is a wild place of vision questing and medicine gathering, and the Forest Service wanted to build a road from the town of Gasquet to Orleans (called the G-O Road) to gain access to old growth timber. The loss of the GO Road case sparked a crisis in Indian country: sacred sites could not be protected by law, the claim of religious freedom could not protect sacred land. In the early 1990s, native people looked back on the AIRFA court battles and concluded that the American public had no understanding of what sacred places meant to Indian communities, why they were important and how their protection was fundamental to the free exercise of their religions. Clearly, public education was badly needed. P.O.V.: Of all the sacred sites conflicts in America, why did you focus on those at the Four Corners, Mount Shasta and Devils Tower? CM: There are more than 500 Native American cultures in the United States. They are as different as the French, the Italians and the Irish, but they all have endangered sacred sites. The three stories we chose were meant to open the door to understanding and dialogue. They were developed with an advisory board composed of native people and were based on personal relationships nurtured for decades. Having worked on and off in the Southwest for twenty-five years, there is something about the landscape of the Colorado Plateau that speaks to me. It feels sacred. The Hopi articulate that perception and have shown a willingness to work with outsiders who feel the same way about the landscape they have long inhabited and protected. A place like the Grand Canyon is sacred to people around the world, and we felt the canyon country would give us images that could provide an emotional opening in trying to convey the meaning of sacred places to a wider audience. I live in northern California, and Mt. Shasta is the archetypal mountain that defines our bioregion. All the northern California tribes consider it sacred — it is a volcano, it is alive — and so, in their own way, do many environmentalists. In the early 1990s, a friend of mine was the attorney representing the Winnemem Wintu in their efforts to stop a proposed ski resort on the Mt. Shasta. So, I had a personal introduction to Wintu leader Florence Jones, a well-respected elder and healer. Florence agreed that education about the importance of sacred places was needed and she agreed to participate in the film. In 1997, after shooting for two years, it became clear that I needed help. I called a friend at Stanford and asked about a prospective graduate from the film department's masters program. Malinda Maynor (Lumbee) soon joined the Sacred Land Film Project as co-producer, and with Malinda's participation, insight and hard work the film began to take off. As the Hopi and Wintu stories came along slowly, the conflict over climbing at Devils Tower, Wyoming, escalated into a legal battle in 1997 when Mountain States Legal Foundation and several commercial climbers sued the National Park Service for asking climbers and tourists to respect Native American beliefs about the tower. We decided to add a third story to round out the film geographically, and to include the legal conflict over climbing a sacred site - because ultimately America is a nation of laws, and many value conflicts ultimately are worked out through legal arguments. The fundamental irony of the denial of religious freedom to the first Americans is mirrored in the fact that it is a federal crime to climb the faces of Mt. Rushmore. P.O.V.: How did you gain the trust and the participation of the Native Americans (the Hopi, the Wintu and the Lakota tribes) in your film? CM: As an outsider, asking Native Americans for information about sacred (secret) sites, guarantees controversy and conflict. With the Hopi, my work goes back twenty-five years, so I was able to build on the trust generated by my first film. Many Hopis liked how we made the FOUR CORNERS film and the way we distributed it. It was educational, not-for-profit and a collaboration all the way. I knew the Hopi were very sensitive about sacred sites near their villages, so I offered from the outset (in 1991) to focus on places off the reservation, sites they had lost control of but were still concerned about and for which the revealing of information would not be as problematic. In the case of the Wintu, Florence Jones said early on, "I looked you over and decided to trust you," and then she allowed us to film several of her ceremonies at Mt. Shasta. The rest of the Wintu community, however, was very concerned that Florence would be taken advantage of, that the footage would be used inappropriately, that more harm would come than good. In community-wide meetings over the next two years, I reiterated our promise to show a rough cut of the film to participants to insure that no secret information was being revealed, to make sure that all of our narration was accurate. We gave copies of interviews to the interviewees, consulted on the rough and fine cuts and gave copies of the finished film to all participants. To demonstrate our intentions, we made a 55-minute film for the exclusive use of the Wintu, including all of the songs and prayers we had filmed, and made a 40-minute version for public viewing, which we showed just once, at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco (in 1997). With the Lakota and Devils Tower, we came on the scene at a time when there was a fair amount of media attention around the climbing lawsuit, so we were able to start filming there more quickly, and shot the entire segment in two fourteen-day shoots in June of 1997 and 98. After meeting the runners and the elders at the tower one evening in June of 1997 and filming a few scenes, we awoke early the next morning to the sound of Oliver Red Cloud, great grandson of Chief Red Cloud, singing a song that went on for an hour. We joined him at dawn for coffee, and he explained that he was telling the spirits who we were and what we were doing with our film equipment. An hour later we were filming the pipe ceremony north of the tower and after the ceremony was over a huge rainstorm blew in and the film rolled as the lightning bolt hit the top of the tower. P.O.V.: You said in your film that Native American sacred sites are usually not revealed publicly, and have not been shown— why were you granted access? and how difficult was it to gain this access? CM: It took a long time, but there has been a growing need, universally sensed in native communities, that perhaps the time has come to open up a little and share enough information so that non-Indian people will understand how important sacred places are to Indian cultural survival, the fulfillment of cultural covenants and to the health of the earth. We agreed early on to take care not to reveal secret information or locations. We took our time. We listened. I was very fortunate to have cameramen like John Knoop, Andy Black and Will Parrinello, who appreciated the need not to shoot some great and very tempting scenes. We were surprised, as we developed the film, that industrial threats were not the only problem - but tourists, New Agers, rock climbers (and filmmakers) were also considered significant threats to sacred sites. By listening to the concerns of native leaders, and shooting scenes that would depict those threats prominently, we slowly gained allies who could see that we were proceeding carefully and were honestly trying to tell the story from a point of view that reflected their concerns. P.O.V.: How difficult was it to gain the participation of non-Native Americans? CM: Everyone wants to tell their story. Most non-Native Americans are aware of the deep conflicts that course through the history of this land and I suppose we all struggle with trying to make sense out of deep, shadowy memories — how the land was taken, what missionaries did to native religious leaders, the racist underpinnings of our multi-racial society. We told everyone what we were doing and why, and that we intended to give fair representation to all sides. This film is about a very old conflict that has rarely been treated honestly. I hope that we have lived up to the trust everyone placed in us as filmmakers. P.O.V.: Your film provides historical and contemporary information, with interviews, and many beautiful images of the areas under conflict — why have you chosen to employ this structure? CM: After shooting more than 100 hours of footage, we applied three times to Independent Television Service (ITVS) for finishing funds, succeeding on the third try after Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT) offered a challenge grant. To secure those funds we had started editing. We were a team of four: scriptwriter Jessica Abbe, editor Will Parrinello, co-producer Malinda Maynor and myself. We initially tried to edit the film thematically, to avoid three separate stories, but the material resisted. Each of the three cultures is different, the three ecosystems they inhabit — the plains, the canyons, the mountains — are different, and when we started crafting three films within the larger film it worked better. The traditional documentary style of interviews intercut with images has always made sense to me — I am comfortable with it. In this case our interviews were each about 2 hours long. So, we shot Beta SP videotape of the interviews and 16mm film of landscapes to get the most beautiful, powerful images of the places we were trying to convey as sacred. Though we shot the film piecemeal, raising the money from over 300 donors in $5-$10,000 chunks, and shooting sporadically when we could afford it, we were only able to complete IN THE LIGHT OF REVERENCE successfully with the large grant of finishing funds from ITVS and NAPT. P.O.V.: You have woven a Native American story into the body of your film — where does this story come from and why was its inclusion important to you? CM: There are actually several stories woven through the film, told by our female narrator, Tantoo Cardinal. They are important because no Native American sacred place exists without stories and songs that convey the crucial information about the place — why it is special, what has happened there, how it is to be treated, the nature of its power. The Spiderwoman story that comes at the beginning, middle and end of the film, is a Hopi story which, in addition to providing the image of the web, honors the feminine aspect of the land and gives voice to a spirit teacher who instructs the people how to care for the land. The Lakota story about White Buffalo Calf Woman presenting the pipe to the Lakota at Mato Tipila ("Lodge of the Bear" aka Devils Tower) is a clear example of how an important cultural tradition is linked to a specific place in the landscape. For outsiders to understand what that place means to the Lakota, the story is essential. The Wintu story about the Creator instructing the many different spirits each to choose a physical form is directly linked to Mount Shasta, the place of creation, and the humorous moral of the story — that humans will need help from the spirit world because they do not know their purpose — goes to the heart of explaining what goes on at ceremonial sites. The story allowed us to present this information without having to try to lay it out rationally. The story works subconsciously. It is non-linear, like any good story. Ultimately, each of these stories is about values. They teach what is important, what threatens natural harmony, how to get back into balance after wandering into ignorance. These stories contain the collective wisdom of many generations — and of the land itself. P.O.V.: What do you hope to achieve by making this film? CM: We hoped to provide: an educational tool to teach the meaning of sacred places on public television and in schools; an activist tool for use in native communities to help protect land and reinvigorate traditional culture; and a vehicle that could be used in community dialogue to inspire reverence for nature within technological society. It has long been clear to me that cultural disintegration comes from disconnection from the land. My friend Terry Tempest Williams has asked "What is our wound?" And she answers: "Separation from the sacred." I think this is worth thinking about, individually and collectively. Taking the spirit out of nature has led directly to the destruction of the natural world. But a deeply felt spiritual connection to the earth leads us to defend it and heal it because we are part of it. Native people have been saying this, and practicing it, for a long time. If IN THE LIGHT OF REVERENCE can open people up emotionally and get them talking about these issues, it will have succeeded. And of course, if this helps lead to legal protection of sacred sites and a real guarantee of religious freedom for native people, that is our ultimate goal. This can only happen through public education and community dialogue. P.O.V.: What kinds of feedback on the film have you received from the Native American community, if any? Have you shown the film to any of the participants - what has their response been like? CM: We screened the completed film in the three native communities we worked with before releasing it to the general public. All of the native participants saw it several times before it was finished. Elaine Quiver (Lakota) said to me, "Somebody took the tape and passed it on to someone else and there's a growing clamor: 'We're going to do it, tell them to do it, go ahead and let it out.' And the tape is still going from house to house." After a screening last fall at a "Sacred Lands Symposium" in Cody, Wyoming, a Native American park ranger came up to me and said, "You didn't make a film, you made medicine — and it is good medicine." An all native jury at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco gave the film the best documentary feature award. I just heard that a bus load of Lakota folks went to Yellowstone in July, aboard a casino bus, and they watched the film on the road.

Press Room: Read the IN THE LIGHT OF REVERENCE press release.

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