Red Cloud's Revolution: Oglalla Sioux Freeing Themselves From Fossil Fuel
Red Cloud’s Revolution: Oglalla Sioux Freeing Themselves From Fossil Fuel
“People don’t like being on the grid here,” Red Cloud says, “because they’ve been coexisting with the earth – the sun, the wind – for most of their history.”
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Portable solar arrays helped power the Oceti Sakowin Camp, which rose on the north end of the Standing Rock Reservation in the summer and fall of 2016 in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Though primarily powered by wood and gasoline, the camps also ran on a great deal of solar. (Photo: Saul Elbein)
Henry Red Cloud, like so many Oglalla Sioux young men, left the reservation to work in construction. When he returned home in 2002, he needed a job, and also wanted to make a difference. He attended a solar energy workshop and saw the future.
Today, Red Cloud runs Lakota Solar and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center, which have become catalysts for an innovative new economic network – one that employs locals and connects tribes, while building greater energy independence among First Nations.
The company is building and installing alternative energy systems, and training others to do the same, throughout remote areas of U.S. reservations, thus allowing the Sioux and others to leap past outdated fossil fuel technology altogether.
Henry Red Cloud’s company has another more radical purpose: it helps provide energy to remote Water Protector camps, like the one at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Solar power and other alternative energy sources are vital at such remote sites, as they power up cellphones, connecting resistors to the media and outside world.
Henry Red Cloud, founder of Lakota Solar and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center. Photo by Saul Elbein
It’s high summer in South Dakota, and a cruel sun beats down with an endless floodtide of photons that burns skin through t-shirts and tinted car windows. That’s the way Henry Red Cloud likes it. To Red Cloud – descendant of a great Lakota insurgent chief, founder of Lakota Solar, and self-proclaimed “solar warrior” – that July sun is key to the independence of his fellow Lakota and native peoples across America; it also embodies a hot business opportunity. It’s July 5, the tail end of Red Cloud’s Energy Independence Day weekend, first announced in the wake of the Trump Inauguration, and meant to spread off-grid skills throughout Indian country – possibly with radical purpose.
I walked out of the sun and indoors to find Red Cloud leading a solar workshop, holding forth to a group of eager indigenous participants about photovoltaic cells and the danger of phantom loads – the way in which many appliances continue drawing current even when switched off. “Vampire” loads are a constant suck on household energy, consuming electricity and thereby emitting carbon to no purpose – while also draining an off-grid setup with limited juice.
A set up, like, say, the remote, off-grid camps at the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests in 2016.
Red Cloud offers up a hypothetical: “Let’s say you have a Water Protector camp, your solar array is charging, you notice the inverter is on, but nothing is plugged in.” The stocky 60-something instructor, with long ponytail and far-seeing eyes, frowns and shakes his head, indicating trouble. “Well, that empty power strip can draw more than your actual daily use,” draining down the batteries faster than they can charge.”
A bearded man in his late 20s raises his hand. “That bad for the array?”
“Well,” Red Cloud responds, “it’s not a problem if you know about it. Just plug in a couple cellphones,” and charge them up so protestors can reach out to the media from the remote site. That way, he says, at least now the array is doing some work.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/21/red-clouds-revolution-oglalla-sioux-freeing-themselves-fossil-fuel