Winds of Change: Tribal Wind and New Futures

by Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth Fund

I am standing at Porcupine Butte, near a village with the same name on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation. The KILI Radio station sits on the Butte, and blasts 50,000 watts of power across the Prairie, with everything from Lakota talk shows, to almost any kind of imaginable music. KILI is an amplifier for the heartbeat of the Lakota nation. It is February, and the winds, or taté in Lakota, are blasting as well; my hair heads out in all directions sort of in an Albert Einstein ‘do. The wind at KILI Radio is at around l7 miles per hour this time of year, strong, and prime for a wind generator. That is what we are doing. A consortium of KILI Radio, Honor the Earth, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, Native Energy, and the Midwest Renewable Energy Association is putting up the first wind turbine on the Pine Ridge reservation. The plans for Pine Ridge are emerging, the intent to begin harnessing some of the power which blows over the reservation on an annual basis, at a rate about 4,500 times higher than the community could use.

I’m waiting to go on the radio with Debbie White Plume, a local activist; Tom Casey, the station manager for KILI Radio; and Stone Gossard, the guitar player for the band Pearl Jam, who has an interest in both Pine Ridge and alternative energy. The band figures it produces around 5700 tons of carbon on a six-month concert tour, and is interested in doing something about that in ecological terms. Pine Ridge is a good place to start, as is renewable wind energy.

Bob Gough has arrived. Deftly moving across the Great Plains, the wind “always at my back” in his vintage blue Honda Accord, Zoie the rez dog in tow, Bob is a jack-of-all-trades: lawyer, erstwhile handy guy, and Secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy. The Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, or Intertribal COUP, is a twenty-eight tribe member agency committed to restructuring energy production in the Great Plains. Intertribal COUP is moving an agenda of wind generation in tribal communities across the country, with an amazing dream.

“The 3000 megawatts of wind energy tribes want to produce over the next two decades represents up to a $3 billion economy,” Bob explains. “After thirty years, you don’t have a hole in the ground, the water is still clean and you still have l00% of your resource.” That is visionary. And, put wind turbines in the grid, and coal-fired power plants won’t end up there.

“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 Pat Spears, a Lower Brule Tribal member and President of the Intertribal COUP. In the spring of 2003, the Rosebud Tribal Utility Commission and Intertribal COUP put up the first commercial-scale 750 KW wind turbine on Native land, through an innovative set of financing strategies involving leveraging rural electrification dollars, Department of Energy money, and “green tags” purchased, sold and retired by Vermont-based Native Energy, whose partners included the Dave Mathews Band and Ben and Jerry’s.

The Rosebud Tribal Utility Commission plans to establish a larger 30 megawatt “wind farm” up on the reservation to power tribal homes. Since the “load” on reservations like Pine Ridge and Rosebud is only at about l0 megawatts, the surplus represents export income for cash-strapped tribal economies. The Rosebud turbine stands as a model and COUP hopes it will “set the stage” for a broad wind generating plan for the tribes in the Great Plains region bringing 3000 megawatts of power to market in the next decade, beginning with “distributed power production” between up to ten reservations, sharing the benefits, and the experience. That’s the beginning of what could be over 200 gigawatts of wind power potential or over one-third of all present US installed electrical capacity.

Indeed, that is a vision of both environmental justice, and the beginning of a solution to the challenge of global climate change: stop combusting. While politically and geographically isolated from most urban areas, it turns out that Indian reservations are the windiest places in the country, go figure. And with the work of allies like Honor the Earth, a project of the Tides Center, funding support by the Nathan Cummings, Max and Anna Levinson, the Ford Foundation , Oak Foundation , and a broad consortium of organizations, there is the beginning of a plan to bring that wind to market Those markets are national, and the potential is as well: not only are the prevailing winds whipping from the Great Plains towards the eastern seaboard (either full of coal emissions or wind emissions), but new visions of renewable energy as forwarded by organizations like the Apollo Alliance and others mark the potential for both an ecological and economic transformation. The people of Pine Ridge and 23 other wind rich Native reservations are ready to be a part of that. After all, the wind or taté is wakan, and the future is made by those here.