In the Light of Reverence

Background

In 1978, the U.S. Congress made the American Indian Religious Freedom Act law, finally allowing Native American spiritual practices that had been outlawed for more than a hundred years. But when tribes tried to use this law to defend the sacred places where they prayed, they lost every single court case. A major defeat came in 1988, when the Supreme Court reversed two lower court decisions that had supported northern California Indians trying to block a logging road—called the G-O Road—through their sacred high country in the Siskiyou Mountains east of Eureka.

This land was used for vision quests and gathering medicine, but the Forest Service wanted the road to reach old-growth timber. The loss of the G-O Road case triggered a crisis in Indian country, making it clear that the law did not protect sacred sites and that religious freedom could not cover the places essential for worship. In the early 1990s, Native people reviewed the court battles over the Act and realized that non-Native Americans had almost no understanding of what these sacred places meant to Indian communities, why they mattered, or how protecting them was vital to practicing their religions freely.

So they decided to focus on educating the public. The dispute over climbing at Devils Tower, Wyoming, turned into a legal fight in 1997, when the Mountain States Legal Foundation and several commercial climbers sued the National Park Service for simply asking climbers and tourists to respect Native American beliefs about the tower. Filmmaker Christopher McLeod, who had already spent five years filming with the Hopi and Winnemem Wintu, chose to include the Devils Tower story to give the film geographic balance and to cover the legal battle over climbing a sacred site, since America is a nation of laws where many value conflicts are ultimately resolved through legal arguments.

The filmmakers pointed out the irony that while Native American sacred places were not protected, it is a federal crime to climb the faces of Mount Rushmore. McLeod and his collaborator Maynor worked on the film for a decade. The documentary, In the Light of Reverence, is narrated by Bay Area actor Peter Coyote and Tantoo Cardinal of the Métis people. It premiered in San Francisco on February 17, 2001, at the Palace of Fine Arts.