East Bay Indigenous leader Corrina Gould’s face appears on several video monitors in the Sacred Land Film Project editing room in Berkeley’s David Brower Center as her deep, lilting voice fills the room: “The historical trauma is so fresh,” she says, staring into the camera. “It’s like a kid falling down and scraping their knee and the scab is just right there.”
Filmmaker Christopher “Toby” McLeod, MJ ’83, and his team (which includes his wife of more than 30 years, Jessica Abbe, MJ ‘85, and editor Callie Shanafelt Wong, MJ ’11) are riveted, listening intently for ways to trim the interview for a new film featuring Gould’s landmark success on Berkeley’s Fourth Street—the biggest urban land-back victory in California history. They can’t do it.
“It’s 98 percent gold,” says McLeod, shaking his head. “You don’t even know where to cut it because it’s so good.”
McLeod is among the first and most prolific American documentarians to make films about Indigenous leaders and so-called “sacred lands”—often places of Native American burial and ceremony. Across 40 years, his Sacred Land Film Project, an old-school production company—once supported by leading environmentalist David Brower himself—has made eight full-length documentaries, dozens of short films, a series of podcasts, and now this latest project featuring Gould.
Rematriate the Land is about an 8-year fight over a 2.2 acre plot of land—now a parking lot across from the former Spenger Fish Grotto in the bustling Fourth Street shopping area—once an Ohlone burial site known as a “shellmound.” The victory, achieved by an Indigenous women-led organization called the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and their leader Gould, pitted Native groups, housing advocates, and developers against each other. McLeod was supporting the effort to protect the West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site—and documenting it—every step of the way.
Indeed, some of the credit for the victory—as Gould said at a public event last summer—goes to McLeod for his behind-the-scenes organizing, and also to his team for making their previous film My Ancestors’ Home about the vision for the site that was shown to thousands of people over time. That film, made with animator Chris Walker, may also have helped to inspire the Kataly Foundation’s $20 million “shuumi land tax” donation (a voluntary gift from non-indigenous people) to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which, following the city’s litigation settlement, enabled the historic land-back agreement.
McLeod’s connection to Indigenous communities is more layered than covering a beat. For him, it’s had to be.
Telling Indigenous stories can be a fraught enterprise for white filmmakers like McLeod and his team. There’s the desire to support Native Americans in their struggles, on the one hand, and yet the lingering questions of whose story it is to tell and who gets to decide, on the other.
Amid that tension, McLeod has learned to practice humility. “I try to always hand the microphone over to the elder or the activist or the spokesperson for the community and not seek the microphone for myself,” he said.
He came to filmmaking from his undergraduate studies at Yale in the early 1970s, where he says doors opened before him. It was an era of anti-Vietnam war activism, civil rights protests and burgeoning environmental awareness, but not a time of widespread reckoning with racial privilege. White men ruled in that space, as in most others, he says.
McLeod’s first film, his thesis at Berkeley Journalism with environmentalist and film-maker Glenn Switkes, was about the devastation caused by the Peabody Coal Company’s strip mining of Hopi and Navajo lands in the Southwest.
“Making that first film taught me how to work with Indigenous communities,” McLeod said. “As an outsider, I had to slow down and be humbled. I had to seek the story that the community wanted to tell.”
McLeod said he learned right away that you couldn’t just show up to film sacred ceremonies or even gain access to interview tribal leaders—especially if you were two white guys.
Still, in 1980, he and Switkes rented a station wagon in Berkeley and drove to Hopi and Navajo lands in the Southwest. Tribal leaders welcomed them with kindness, but not with an invitation to film. At least not at first.
“In fact, they basically told us to go away,” McLeod said. “But we were patient and determined and really curious and doors slowly opened.”
At UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, McLeod met his wife and fellow documentarian, Abbe. The two shared an interest in Edward Abbey, the writer whose books inspired the eco-anarchist group Earth First!, becoming the first journalists to—independently of each other—capture the elusive author on camera.
“We were kind of competitive,” recalls Abbe of McLeod, whose paths crossed again at a gathering of Earth First! activists in Colorado. “We had dueling cameras and were eyeing each other suspiciously.”
In time, the “frenemies” became lifelong partners in filmmaking and parenting, a collaboration that has lasted some 32 years.
Abbe grew up in Shasta County, but only came to know the local Winnemem Wintu tribe members who lived there after McLeod introduced her to them in 1993. That’s when she learned that the history of her hometown was “much richer and sadder” than she had imagined.
She says making documentaries about and with Indigenous communities means coming at every story without preconditions or a set narrative.
“There are people who set out to make a documentary by writing a script in advance. That’s the opposite of what we do. We write questions. We document. Then we work to craft a story that holds the audience’s attention, while staying true to the people who let us in their door,” Abbe said.
She credits Ben Bagdikian, then-professor and later dean at the Journalism School, with teaching them how to navigate these challenges in storytelling.
“[He] taught by example: listen, be curious, and don’t make yourself the story,” said Abbe. “He was a mentor to each of us, and eventually an extra grandparent to our children.”
McLeod said Bagdikian and Professor Andy Stern, head of the documentary program at the time, allowed him to take four years to complete his thesis film—including a year spent editing in a closet in Dwinelle Hall, former home of the school’s broadcast program.
“I was able to learn patience in dealing with Indigenous communities because Ben and Andy Stern allowed flexibility,” said McLeod. “If I’d had a journalism professor who said ‘You have to work on a deadline and you only have one shot. Get in and get out,’ I would have failed…I would have gotten spit out [by the Hopi community]. I realized that patience yielded a really good story.”
The resulting hour-long thesis documentary—The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?—was among the Berkeley Documentary Program’s early successes. The film aired on PBS and won the Student Academy Award in 1984.
At a celebratory event to mark Sacred Land’s 40th birthday last fall, more than 150 tribal leaders and community members, friends and family members gathered to watch film clips and hear tributes.
“I would say that I grew up alongside these films,” says 27-year-old Fiona McLeod, Toby and Jessica’s daughter, who was among the first to speak at the event. “Our house was the office, was the conference room, was the editing room, and was the waypoint where so many people in this audience stopped by on various journeys. That to me was what home has always been.”
She said her father would leave for months at a time and come back with stories and, always, with a slide show. “In the same way that our house was this hub, I have often joked that the Sacred Land Film Project was like a third sibling to me and Miles— a much older and somehow more demanding sibling.”
McLeod says that for decades, often after showing his films, people have asked him, “‘What can we do to support justice for Indigenous people?”
He’s answered the question hundreds of times and always advised: “Work with local Native Americans where you live to protect or restore a sacred place.” That’s what he’s said for years, and it’s what he’s doing now.
After McLeod finishes Rematriate the Land, Gould has encouraged him to focus on daylighting Strawberry Creek from under the Fourth Street parking lot—not making a film about it, but actually making it happen. He doesn’t know anything about daylighting creeks, but that’s okay. He’s happy to listen and learn.
