Volume 17 Winter 2005 Issue No. 2

In This Issue:
Sustainability

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EDITOR’S ESSAY

Building Green Campuses for the Seventh Generation

by Marjane Ambler

As we go to press, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have blasted us out of our complacency about energy prices and the value of clean water. People paid exorbitant prices for a bottle of drinking water, a flushable toilet, and a shower. Because of fuel prices here in southwest Colorado, the school district is considering going to a 4-day school week.

The hurricanes intensified the national discussion of energy. However, most of the discussion is focusing upon short-term solutions, such as investigating price gouging, rather than the real problem: The planet has limited supplies of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and we are running out.

This issue features tribal colleges that are taking a longer view. The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy requires leaders to consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation, their great, great, great, great, great grandchildren.

On the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, the Indian people and their neighbors benefit today from the foresight of Chief Oshkosh who, more than five generations ago, said, “There must be a way to harvest timber without cutting it all down.”

Today, the reservation boundary can be seen in satellite images; there are trees inside the boundary and none outside. Their long tradition of sustainable forestry won attention worldwide and inspired the College of Menominee Nation to create a Sustainable Development Institute. Mayan people from Belize traveled to Wisconsin to learn from the Menominee.

Two of the campuses described in this issue are creating islands of energy and water sustainability. Located in the dry American Southwest, the Lifelong Learning Center at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA, Santa Fe, NM) will be up to 40% more water efficient and 60-65% more energy efficient than the original campus buildings and conventional buildings in Santa Fe.

Ten miles from the Canadian border in North Dakota, the temperatures can drop well below zero in the winter and rise into the 100s in the summer. To keep students and staff comfortable with these extremes, Turtle Mountain Community College (TMCC, Belcourt, ND) installed geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool its new campus, thus reducing the energy needs by 40%.

When TMCC installs its wind turbine, it will be energy independent and in fact selling power to the local utility. Several other tribal colleges described in this issue have reduced their water use and have utilized wind, photovoltaic, and geothermal heat pumps to augment their energy.

Back in the 1970s, some of us expected to see such innovations across the country, the norm rather than the exception. OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries) imposed an embargo in 1973, limiting the oil sold to Western countries. Then in 1979, another crisis occurred in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

Long gas lines spurred the United States and other Western countries to focus upon alternative energy and conservation. People started buying smaller cars. Businesses, schools, and individuals turned down the thermostats and turned up their interest in conservation and alternative energy.

The crisis passed, and the interest dimmed. However, high energy costs continued to plague many rural areas, such as the reservations served by many of our tribal colleges. American Indians “pay the highest rates for fuel and electricity and have the highest percentage of unelectrified and unweatherized houses,” according to the Native American Renewable Energy Education Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

American Indian people remember a time when they sustained themselves without fossil fuels. Their homes utilized the heat of the sun and the moderating temperatures of the earth. So some tribes began researching alternatives.

In an area known to some as the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has 4,500 times more wind power potential than it can use. Currently that reservation occupies two of the poorest, least-electrified counties in South Dakota, according to Honor the Earth (a nonprofit organization based in Minneapolis). On the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, residents reportedly use logging chains as wind chimes, and the wind has derailed trains.

“We believe the wind is wakan, a holy or great power. Our grandmothers and grandfathers have always talked about it, and we recognize that,” explains Patrick Spears, president of Intertribal COUP (Intertribal Council on Utility Policy).

That organization is developing a plan for wind generation to revitalize tribal communities and economies across the Northern Great Plains, according to Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth in their book on renewable energy. North Dakota has the highest wind energy potential in the country, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

With help from federal and private funds, tribal colleges are demonstrating the value of decentralized power production (also known as distributed generation). Whether or not it is feasible to generate enough electricity from the wind and sun to serve a large region, they have found that it is feasible to serve local needs.

When you look around the towns and cities where you live, chances are you don’t see very many buildings, especially institutional buildings, that boast 40– 60% energy savings. Most of us have accepted the conventional wisdom in the United States that renewable energy is a nice idea but expensive and unrealistic, and that energy conservation saves pennies, not thousands of dollars.

But gradually and quietly, the momentum is growing, both on reservations and elsewhere. Governors of 18 Western states have set a goal of 30,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2015, according to Dr. Stanley R. Bull of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The importance of reducing dependence upon utility companies extends beyond energy. Tribes extend their sovereignty when they become more energy self-sufficient. Even small systems are important. Honor the Earth partnered with Oglala Lakota College recently to install a 2-kilowatt solar/wind hybrid renewable energy system at a community center. Such a symbolic step is part of social change – it gives individual tribal members more control over their destiny.

As these tribal colleges pass knowledge of renewable energy on to their students and their communities, they accomplish more than just reducing their energy bills. They leave a legacy of knowledge for the seventh generation.

Marjane Ambler has been editor of Tribal College Journal since 1995. She is the author of Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development (University of Kansas Press, 1991). For more information about Indian renewable energy, see the Resource Guide in this issue and especially the book by Winona LaDuke, Indigenous Peoples, Power & Politics: A Renewable Future for the Seventh Generation.