Indian Country Today, May 19, 2015, Marc Dadigan
"In an opening scene of the documentary Profit and Loss, Mike Mercredi, Athabasca Chipewyan, describes how thrilling it was for his teenage self to get a job driving one of the biggest rigs in the world at a massive oil sands extraction area in Alberta, Canada.
Yet the allure slowly transformed to horror, as he began to understand the extreme effects of the oil sands industry, which uses heated water from Lake Athabasca to extract oil from the sand, on his homelands. The films shows nightmarish visuals of a landscape that has seen the oil sands industry denude the boreal forests, poison culturally vital fisheries and, many believe, infect astoundingly high numbers of local indigenous people with deadly cancers.
'I had this overwhelming anxiety. I walked into the office and put my badge down and I quit,' Mercredi says in the film. ...
From Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia to California and Russia, the indigenous people in the documentary series represent almost all the continents, but they face many of the same threats to their sacred sites and ancestral lands: government megaprojects, consumer culture, competing religions, resource extraction and climate change. But, producer Christopher McLeod said, the films show far more is at stake than indigenous religion.
'The sacred places are the heart where the indigenous worldview, the values and languages are anchored,' he said. 'They’re a source of information and insight about adapting to climate change. It’s no coincidence the planet is dying and the sacred places are being destroyed.'
The film series is the culmination of nearly 10 years of work for McLeod and the Standing on Sacred Ground team, and he said it truly began almost 30 years ago when he was working on a film about uranium and coal mining in Hopi and Navajo territories and elders told him his work was missing an entire dimension: the sacredness of certain places and the obligation of indigenous people to care for them."
