Episode 08: In Our Lifetime: Tribal Energy Sovereignty and Equity

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Energy Optimist. I'm your host, Gwen Brown, Vice President of communications with the Interstate Renewable Energy Council or Iraq, an independent nonprofit that's been building the foundation for the rapid adoption of clean energy and energy efficiency for more than 40 years. Each episode we tackle a thorny energy policy challenge in bite sized interviews with leading experts. If you're totally new to energy policy, we'll demystify it for you. And if you're a seasoned practitioner, we'll hopefully leave you with renewed optimism to keep doing the work to improve our energy system. Because hope is the fuel for change. As the sun goes down, so does your main source of light. You don't have the option of just flipping a switch to turn on the lights in your home, so everything from household chores to your kids homework becomes harder or impossible after the sun sets. I could be describing life a century ago, before electricity became widespread, but this is the current reality for certain communities living in America. Specifically, 14% of Native Americans living on reservations still do not have electricity today in 2025. This podcast explores energy policy and the energy landscape in the US and an understanding of the American energy landscape is incomplete. Without an understanding of how energy resources and services differ geographically and, uh, between different groups, Native Americans face significant and unique inequalities with regard to energy access and affordability. To understand some of the electricity policy reasons for, um, these current realities, it's helpful to take a step back in time. Electricity first started to become available in American cities in the late 1800s, following the establishment of the first electric generating station in New York City by Thomas Edison and 1882. By around 1900, the modern vision for regulating electric utilities began to emerge. But building out electric infrastructure to sparsely populated rural areas was still prohibitively expensive, and utilities had little incentive to expand their grids beyond urban and suburban areas. By the mid 1930s, almost 90% of farms in America still lacked electricity. In 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration to address this. A ah year later, Congress passed the Rural Electrification act, which provided financing to build transmission lines to bring electricity to these rural areas. In less than 20 years after the passage of that act, electricity had reached 80% of farms. That's a pretty remarkable achievement. And the Rural Electrification act is one of the most foundational acts in the history of our electric grid. But this foundational act has a dark side. Not all rural communities were included in these investments. Specifically, Native American communities were largely left out of the investments of this act and were not connected to the grid. That, in addition to the broader scope of significant historical discrimination against Native Americans, contributes to the unequal access we see today in terms of energy for Native communities. In addition to being more likely to lack electricity access altogether, tribes face many other challenges related to electricity, including higher utility rates leading to significant energy burdens, that is the percentage of income spent on energy costs as well as older grid infrastructure and more frequent power outages. Not only are Native American tribes still confronting these inequalities, they also face unique barriers to developing clean energy projects that could help them have greater control over their energy costs and resources. Fortunately, a number of groups are doing incredible work to address these injustices and ensure that tribes can access the benefits of clean energy. One of these groups is the alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, founded by today's guest, Sherry Smith in 2016. In today's discussion, we'll explore some of the energy challenges faced by Native American tribes and efforts in progress to build a brighter future and help tribes own their own clean energy systems. Sherry is a 25 year veteran of the renewable energy industry. She leverages her vast knowledge, experience, network and relationships to support tribes in their self determined pursuit of renewable energy as a means to diminish poverty, protect the Earth from climate change, and restore economic prosperity and true sovereignty. Just a few of the highlights of Sherry's career include leading workforce development and training for SolarCity and Tesla, where she coordinated all community, academic and government stakeholders in the massive effort to identify and train a diverse and inclusive team of over 1400 employees at a 1 GW solar manufacturing plant in Buffalo, New York, as well as thousands more at uh, Tesla's battery Gigafactory in Nevada, the largest in the world. Prior to that, Sherry worked in private practice for several years, providing workforce technical consulting services for colleges, universities and governments, as well as several U.S. department of Energy sunshot initiatives. She also served as the Director of Education and Outreach for the American Council on renewable energy, or ACOR for listeners awareness. This interview was recorded in early January 2025, prior to the change in Presidential administrations, so our conversation does not reflect new federal policies that have been emerging since that time.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for being with us today, Sheri. I'm um, really excited for our conversation.

Speaker C: Well, thanks for having me, Gwen. I'm so, uh, honored and delighted to be here again. I'm Sherry Smith. I'm the founder, president and CEO of the alliance for Tribal Clean Energy. I descend through both my mom and my dad from the Mi' Kmaq nation of so called Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I am also of European descent.

Speaker A: And can you tell us more about your work at, uh, the alliance for Tribal Clean Energy and how you came to found the organization? Kind of the big picture of what issues your organization is tackling.

Speaker C: Our mission is supporting the self determined efforts of Native American tribes and Alaska Native villages to pursue a, uh, clean energy future, whatever that looks like for them. And the reasons that tribes pursue clean energy are varied, but they generally center around energy freedom, um, being free from the colonial construct of traditional fossil fueled energy, or they're focused on climate change resilience and mitigation, or, uh, economic development and job opportunities, or all three and more. And so the organization that is now known as the alliance grew out of the organization Covenant Tribal Solar Initiative that I established back in 2015, 2016 timeframe while I was working at SolarCity. And it was during that time that I was serving on a board at Penn State and met a colleague there who was a professor of architectural engineering. And he had been visiting the Northern Cheyenne tribe for many years. And then one day in 2015, this tribe made a momentous decision and they signed a resolution forsaking forever coal and making a commitment to pursue clean energy, which had followed two generations of battling arch coal, who in 1973 came to town and essentially swindled them out of their mineral rights and had been trying to develop a large open cast mine and associated railroad on their homeland. And it stood to disturb so many acres of sacred sites and homelands in the Cheyenne believe, as many tribes do, that the blood and the sweat and the tears of their ancestors are in this land. The tribe is one of the poorest in the nation. And you know, mining this coal and setting up operations would mean jobs, but it also would mean desecrating the earth and causing all kinds of other issues. And it was a young woman named Vanessa Braided Hare who founded an organization with her dad Otto called Eco Cheyenne. And they did a grassroots effort to educate the entire reservation across 450,000 acres, five districts, all the tribal members to what the negatives were of this coal development. And so this resolution was signed. I got this call from my colleague at Penn State and he said, you know, this tribe, they've been saying no to coal for so long. Can SolarCity help? Give them something to say yes to. And so I went to Linen and Pete and they were like, yeah, go. And so through our Give Power foundation, which was at SolarCity at the time, we went and we did a demonstration project on the home of A tribal elder and some amazing and spiritual things happened and the community came to understand the literal and figurative power of solar energy to eliminate financial burden and to generate electrons in a self determined way. And I myself had some pretty, pretty deep experiences that I certainly can't explain in a short time with you, but suffice it to say that it was the first time I had ever seen what we call energy poverty. You know, I grew up in a suburban area in New England. You know, I visited the tribal community of my great grandmother as a kid and it was very different than the plains. And what I saw was abject poverty and third world conditions. And if I were to describe this place, and I have to people, you know, homes that were poorly constructed had houses with inefficient heating systems and no insulation and you know, the unemployment rate being 80% and the average lifespan being under 60 years old because of diabetes and alcoholism and all the things that come with living in a food desert. Right. I was stunned. And what impacted me the most was that the high cost of energy that was being charged to these tribal members double or more what non natives were paying for the same electrons down the same lines simply because they were native was shocking to me. And at that time that I was working with the Cheyenne and we did another big demonstration project, SolarCity was merging with Tesla. And when I conceived of the idea for the nonprofit, I took some time to get my ducks in a row and I left Tesla and gathered a team of friends in the industry, including the gentleman who was the professor at Penn State. And I founded an org called Covenant Tribal Solar Initiative. And, and we worked for several years and did demonstration projects with the Cheyenne and other tribes. And when the Biden administration came into office and I got a call from our old friend Jigar Shah and he said that the IRA was going to include tremendous resources for tribal clean energy. I was floored. I actually cried on that phone call. And he said, can you help us get the word out to Indian country about what is in this bill? That's when I knew we as an organization had to pivot away from our demonstration phase years. And there's still value in that. And that subset colleagues that was working with me back then spun off and continue to do that sort of work. But my gut was that my org needed to become what is now the alliance for Tribal Clean Energy and respond with a really robust set of resources and a really highly qualified team of subject matter experts. And that's what we did.

Speaker A: That's incredible. Thank you so much. For walking us through that, like all the phases that led you to where you are today. So you've already talked a bit about some of the experiences that you've observed on, um, tribal lands and just the really significant challenges that tribes are facing when it comes to energy. Recognizing that there is a huge amount of diversity in tribal nations, and certainly not all of them are facing the same things. Could you give our listeners kind of a big picture overview of what are the common challenges that tribal communities are facing in terms of energy access and affordability?

Speaker C: It's 2025, and in our country right now, 14% of Native Americans that live on reservations don't have electricity yet. That is thousands of people that don't have electricity yet. So. And when I say that to people, they look at me like, no, that can't be right. Well, it can be right. And, you know, 35,000 households on Navajo alone don't have electricity. And our friends and colleagues at Navajo power and their Navajo power home program is pretty quickly electrifying homes. But we still have that issue. And it's not just Navajo. It's. It's in the plains. It's other places in the southwest where the infrastructure just stopped because the only humans that were living further out were natives. So in different regions of the country, especially the northern plains, the southwest, really rural areas of our country, in the middle especially, and not exclusively, it happens in other parts of the country as well. But we see this energy poverty, and not just the lack of access to, uh, electricity, but the disproportionate burden that the costs of energy mean for families. And in these areas, uh, many tribes are served by rural electric cooperatives. And those co ops charge rates to native members. Not all of them, but many of them. We see it in Montana, seen it in North Dakota. We see it in the southwest where cooperative utility will charge native people living on a res double or more what non native people are paying for the same electrons down the same lines. And, um, people look at me, and the first thing they say is, that can't be true. That must be illegal. How do they get away with that? And the answer is because it's complicated. The standard answer that we get from these utilities is, oh, well, you know, it costs us more to get the power out there. Well, no, it doesn't. The answer from FERC has been, well, the co ops manage the board, set the rates. The reason I founded this organization in the first place was that point right there that people are suffering because of this policy, of this practice. And Its blatant discrimination. So how that plays out in real life is that a family that's already stricken by poverty in a community that has 80% unemployment is in the dead of winter, for example, in Montana or North Dakota gets, uh, a 800 or $900 electric bill, and they have to make that decision of whether to heat or eat. And most of the time, you know, they make a decision to feed themselves and the family and their power will get shut off due to nonpayment. And that doesn't happen in other areas of the country. You know, where I live, the utility can't shut power off to a home that shelters an elder or someone who's sick or an infant. But in these areas, it happens. And it happens right now in 2025, it happens that the power gets shut off, and then these co ops demand $1,000 reconnect fee or other ridiculous amount like that. And this family would have paid their electric bill had they had that sort of money lying around. And people resort to things like burning trash. Wood is scarce. They burn furniture, they burn tires indoors to keep warm, which has impacts on health, of course, and it's dangerous. And when they run out of things to burn, human beings freeze to death due to exposure to cold in their own homes in the winter and due to exposure to heat for lack of air conditioning in the Southwest in these blazing summers that are a result of climate change. And this sounds like it can't be true, but it is. And it's my personal mission to address this, and I've made it a mission of the alliance, and our donors are supporting legal support to investigate these rules and how this inequity, this massive injustice and inhumane situation could be true.

Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. That is devastating. And I think so many Americans are unaware of the fact that tribal nations are facing these kinds of circumstances even in the modern era.

Speaker C: Yeah. And as far as just general energy challenges, many tribal communities, because of their rural locale, are serviced by old, you know, our grid, which is, you know, as, you know, multiple grids, uh, it is antiquated. And the tribal communities are the lowest priority. They are the first to lose power and the last to be reconnected. And so perishable foods and things go bad. You know, just in Hopi alone, I hear stories about, you know, you have to go three hours to get perishable food, to get meat. They store these foods in freezers, and when the power goes out for four or five days, you. You lose all that perishable food. And so they have to, you know, folks are running around divvying it up among tribal members, you know, trying to preserve it and save it and have it eaten. But it's a devastating situation. And so there's, you know, inadequate energy infrastructure. That is a challenge. And then when tribes go to pursue development on their own of energy infrastructure, things like limited access to the grid come into play. Insufficient access to capital is a major problem. And this combination of systemic barriers and the historical inequities is creating this environment where achieving energy stability and having even just affordable energy is a giant hurdle for most tribes in rural areas.

Speaker A: Wow. Thank you for shining a light on that. Clean energy projects require more than just funds. They require technical expertise and permitting and site development and a lot of other work that goes into getting a project off the ground. Can you talk a little bit about how the alliance helps tribes address these other needs of clean energy projects?

Speaker C: Sure. So the alliance was formed to provide no cost services to tribes to help them develop their capacity to plan and develop and manage clean energy projects there. Of the 574 federally recognized tribes and the many more that are not recognized, most tribes don't have the capacity to even know which grants to apply for. So that's why we exist. And we are 100% philanthropically funded. We do not run on federal funding ourselves. We help tribes to procure federal funding. And um, I specifically structured us in a way that, that we wouldn't run on federal funding because we don't want to be subject to the volatility of elections, for example. And also it's our belief that in order for us to affect the change we need to in Washington, that we need to be considered peers with our federal colleagues. And we're grateful for the great relationships that we have in, in our federal agencies. And we can't really do that if we're functionaries of government and being paid to uh, work for the Fed. So the, these services that we offer are no cost. Our donors pay us to do this work and our team of subject matter experts are engineers and electricians and financial experts and policy experts and construction experts and everything in between. We have a network of preferred providers and these are energy service providers and developers and anyone operating in uh, the clean energy space that is needed to develop and deploy clean energy, clean energy projects, we vet them and we put them through an intensive sort of interview process and we put them through cultural training called Pathways to Trust. And we do our best to create this pool of providers that we have a confidence can be in right relation with tribes that will not act in an exploitive way, either on purpose or by accident. Because most people who haven't been exposed to Native communities don't understand that it's not business as usual. You don't walk into a tribe and pitch your services to them like you do another business. It is very unique and we recognize that and the tribes recognize that and they're grateful for the support of the alliance as a buffer between these non native entities. That and many of them are good and well intentioned. And so we're identifying those and we're maintaining a catalog of those providers and we're introducing them to tribes and bringing them in on these projects. It's all about removing barriers and supporting the tribes in developing their own capacity to develop their energy infrastructure going forward.

Speaker A: Incredible. Thank you for walking us through that. In September of 2024, your organization launched something called the Indigenous Power and Light Fund, which is a fund that aims to fast track tribal clean energy projects by financing some of the upfront costs that might not be addressed by federal funding. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about this initiative and what challenges it's trying to solve?

Speaker C: Yes. The Indigenous Power and Light Fund for Energy Sovereignty was conceived to provide a reliable source of gap funding for tribal clean energy projects. Because the money that the ira, for example, made available and other programs under the Investing in America compendium of legislation of the Biden administration, they all have an asterisk which is we'll pay for 80% of this project, but you need to cover 20%. There's a match. And the pre development costs are not generally covered by these grants. And pre development costs for things like feasibility studies, environmental studies, engineering studies, interconnection studies, all of that are not covered. And many grants, if not most, require that you complete that stuff before you can even apply for the money. I liken it to, uh. It's like the feds invited the tribes to a dinner and said, here's the menu, here's $75, have dinner. And when you open the menu, everything on it is $100. And oh, by the way, you can't even come into the restaurant if you don't have that $25. You can't even open the menu. I don't want to diminish the efforts of the Biden administration to move billions of dollars into Indian country. But there's definitely a catch with any administration making clean energy funding available. And funding in general to tribes always has that kind of catch. So this fund was established to be able to fill the gap. Right now the fund is, uh, our goal is to reach $100 million by the end of 2025. We have one third of the money raised and we're going to start accepting applications within the next several weeks. Starting off the fund is straight up grants, no strings attached grants. We will also be offering loans and eventually we believe that the fund will become a native CDFI and be able to offer other flavors of investment and accept different types of investment as well. But for now it's a grant making fund and our partners at, uh, the lemelson foundation, the MacArthur foundation and the Hewlett foundation joined us in establishing the fund. And we have many other donors that have stepped up since and given seven figure donations to this fund. And they truly believe that it's absolutely the right thing to do, given that our energy infrastructure was largely, largely built on, on the backs of Native Americans and definitely on our lands. And it's a way for some of the wealth that was accumulated due to the extraction or the stealing of lands, for example. It's a way to, to give back just a little bit of the wealth that was made because of that.

Speaker A: Wow, that sounds like a really incredible, uh, initiative. And I'm really excited to continue to follow all the grants and loans that the fund makes and the projects that are possible as a result of it.

Speaker C: Yeah, we're excited.

Speaker A: Another thing I'd like to explore is a petition that the alliance for Tribal Clean Energy has filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or ferc. You're asking the commission to change some requirements for tribal nations that are seeking to develop and deploy energy projects on tribe controlled lands. Can you talk about what that petition aims to change and why?

Speaker C: Great question. So our petition to ferc, it is specifically designed to address commercial readiness deposits, which are a requirement of any entity that wants to enter the interconnection queue. And you might be wondering what commercial readiness means. Right? What is commercial readiness? So the intent of the order for quarter 2023, which mandated commercial readiness deposits, was a good one. It was designed to stop speculative projects from clogging up the queue because developers would come in and submit applications for Q position and not really ever intend to develop all of them, but was just kind of speculating and that clogs up the queue. And every time one of those speculative projects falls out of the queue, the whole queue has to be restudied again for its impact on the grid. Right. So this is frustrating and expensive and we get it. But our argument here is that tribes are not speculating. When tribes put forth a project, there are indicators, indisha of readiness that are not like what a developer's in disha of readiness are. When a tribe is proposing a project, it is always after intense thought and buy in by the community and resolutions being signed and money being spent on some of those feasibility type activities. Our argument is that as sovereign nations, we're not speculating and you can't lump us into the same category as developers who have deep pockets and can afford these exorbitant fees. So we're asking for a deferment of these fees to the point where, you know, we'll pay deposits that are lesser when we have secured our financing for projects and we're asking for a deferment of the deposit and the withdrawal penalty requirements that disproportionately affect tribal nations. These deposits are hefty. They impose significant financial burdens on tribes working to develop clean energy projects on their own lands, and they ultimately hinder progress. I'll give you an example of the Hopi Nation, which Chairman Nuvanyama of the Hopi Nation has given me permission to talk about because he wants society to understand the systemic barriers that tribes face when trying to develop their own energy programs and infrastructure. So the Hopi Nation sits on land that has been occupied by Hopi people for millennia. And in the last two centuries, electrical infrastructure has been built right over their homelands. 500kV lines run right overhead, but they've never been allowed to access them. They don't get the benefit of electricity from them. And so with the closing of the Kayenta Mine and Kanta Generating Station, hopi lost about 85% of its annual revenue in the form of lease payments and jobs. And so this 400 megawatt utility scale generating plant that Hopi has planned is designed to replace that revenue. And it's designed to allow this tribe to participate in wholesale energy markets and to sell power and use their lands in that way and have a return and to also benefit from lower energy costs. And so in the case of Hopi, they made it to the first place in the interconnection queue. And the commercial readiness deposit at that time that was requested was $7.5 million. $7.5 million in comparison with the Hopi Nation's annual budget of 16 million is pretty close to half. As Chairman is fond of saying, am I supposed to cut, you know, ambulance service or education or senior, uh, services, or to pay this 7.5 million? No, that's ridiculous. So a group of concerned allies, uh, got Together. And we tried to raise the 7.5 million from philanthropy. But when it comes time for you to pay your deposit, you're only notified, you know, 30 or so days in advance, 45 days in advance. Philanthropy can't move that fast. So the tribe was able to secure a $7.5 million letter of credit from a wealthy tribe who stepped up to help. And we thought we were home free and submitted that to aps, Arizona Public Service and TFRC and got a letter back that said, sorry, this tribe is not listed on Standard and Poor's or Moody's. And so it doesn't qualify. And that's an issue we have as far as the color of the money and something we'll address. But in that moment, the tribe was left with no choice. They were going to lose that first place position in the queue. So they had to seek a letter of credit from a commercial bank, and that commercial bank wants an exorbitant fee to do that. So now we're diminishing the equity that the tribe has in the project. And the whole point here of developing clean energy on tribal lands is, whenever possible, the tribe should own it. And so here you have one example of the hindrance that that commercial readiness deposit causes.

Speaker A: On the one hand, it's so demoralizing to hear that these kinds of barriers are stopping such important projects, but on the other hand, I'm really excited to see this petition from your organization. What are the next steps? Like, when do you expect to hear? And, um, do you have thoughts on

Speaker B: how it will go?

Speaker C: Yeah. So it's important to note that because of this petition, and I have to give kudos to our colleagues at ferc. Chairman Phillips himself has visited tribal communities who are facing these challenges with these exorbitant deposits. He's met with us and many tribes. We've come to his office, we've met with all the commissioners. They've been so open to understanding and learning about why tribes are different. Why is the Indisha different? Why are we not speculating? And Nicole Sidaraman and her team at the Office of Public Participation have been amazing. And this petition has resulted in the first ever official tribal consultation on an electricity matter in our country's history. So even if it wasn't successful, it was successful to raise awareness of the challenges. And we have cautious optimism that the petition will be successful and that there will be consideration, uh, for the sovereign nature and the lack of speculation that tribes enter into these cues with the

Speaker A: examples that you've just given. And, um, the overview that you've talked about in terms of some of the challenges that tribal communities are facing when it comes to energy. They really tie into two terms that I think are pretty central to the work that the alliance is doing. So tribal energy equity and tribal energy sovereignty. And listeners who might not be as familiar with those concepts. Can you provide an overview of what energy equity and energy sovereignty mean to you and what your vision is for those terms?

Speaker C: This is a really good question. I've never been asked to define the difference. Really closely related. I think that if I were to explain the difference and what I believe they mean. Equity is about ensuring that tribal nations have a seat at the table where the decisions are being made about energy in our country. And like we said earlier, our nation's grid was built on the backs of Native Americans. There are natives, uh, alive in this day. Tribal elders that I've spoken to who remember their parents warning them that if they saw someone from the electric company that they needed to run because there was a price put on the scalps of Native Americans to clear them from land that still lives in the memory of people alive to this day. And so when you talk about equity, tribes deserve a seat at the table, uh, for no other reason than that, right? They're sovereign nations. We deserve a seat at the table. That we deserve equitable voice in how the electricity infrastructure that is going to power us going forward in society is built. It's also about, uh, fair access to resources and opportunities. And the Biden administration and Secretary Haaland have made it their mission to make sure that resources like we've never seen before have been made available to tribes. And upholding trust responsibilities and treaty responsibilities has been something that has been at the forefront in this administration. It's never been before. And so that's equity. And that these resources and opportunities aren't devised by feds who aren't Native. They reflect the unique needs and the individual context of the tribes they're meant to support. Right? And so energy sovereignty, on the flip side is the right that tribes have as, uh, sovereign nations to make their own energy decisions, to control their energy resources, their land, their water, and to develop energy according to their needs and their cultural values. And, um, our mission is to support the self determined efforts of tribes to develop clean energy. Right? And I'm fond of saying, how can we be sovereign if we're dependent on outsiders for our energy or any other resource? We're not. We're not sovereign. And our friend and colleague, Pillar Thomas, who's an energy Attorney and uh, she's from the Pascoyaqui Nation and she's been a fed and she was integral in the setup of the Office of Indian Energy. She says to me, don't say energy sovereignty because she doesn't believe that will happen in our lifetime. She prefers the term energy self determination. I believe both are possible and that there are some tribes that in my lifetime will achieve energy sovereignty to be completely sulfur light for their own energy. And achieving both equity and sovereignty is necessary to lead to true self sufficiency and resilience like we had before colonization.

Speaker A: Wow. It's really devastating to kind of think about some of the experiences the tribal communities have faced. But I, um, am heartened to know that organizations like yours are trying to remedy these historic injustices. We're trying to, yeah. It's definitely a long road. What's in store for your organization in the coming year? Do you have any exciting things that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Speaker C: Yeah, we have three flagship events now. The first is our Tribal Clean Energy Finance Forum being held in March. We have our third annual Tribal Energy Equity Summit that is coming back to the Mille Lacs tribes property, the Intercontinental in St. Paul, and that will be happening the week of May 5. And our third annual Tribal Energy Technology Symposium at ARI, which is the largest, as you all know, the largest clean energy event in North America. So those are our three flagship events. We host those events to give opportunities for members of the energy industry to interact with tribes and to learn about the tremendous opportunities that exist to partner with tribes in clean energy development. If you look at all the lands left in our country to develop utility scale, especially energy, there's not much land left and a lot of it, a great percentage of it, is tribal land. So tribes can be amazing partners and uh, have so much to offer. But you know, we can help to remove some of the mystery and to ensure mutually respectful and understanding symbiotic relationships between Native and non Native entities for the purposes of profitable projects for both parties and also for purpose. To advance clean energy in tribal communities means so many things. You know, it's climate resilience, it's economic development, it's jobs, and it's clean, uh, regenerative energy that's in line with Native ethos of protecting and preserving the earth.

Speaker A: That's really exciting. I hope I can maybe make it to one of those events in the coming year.

Speaker C: Please, you have an open invitation.

Speaker A: Gwen, fantastic. Thank you so much. I was really interested to read about the Tribal Energy Equity Summit in particular. And it sounds like the prior energy equity summits have had some really exciting impacts. And I'd love to ask you briefly about that. What came out of those first two

Speaker B: and what are you hoping for in

Speaker A: the coming summit that you're holding?

Speaker C: The impacts of the first two energy summits have been amazing. And they have led to a coalition of federal, state, tribal governments working together and having dialogue about all of the things that have occurred in the history of our country and how energy development in the United States has impacted tribes and what we can do to move forward from the injustices of the past and be in mutually beneficial relationships going forward. And I tend to open our events by saying none of us in this room are responsible for these things that happened in the past, but we're all responsible if we've learned about the inequities and the injustices and we don't do anything about it moving forward. And so these events are so collaborative and we really strive to have less talking heads and more everyone on the same plane and interacting and conversing rather than just PowerPoints. And they're really inspiring. And the Equity Summit specifically is really designed for the tribal leaders and the focus is on them. And it's humbling for, uh, non native colleagues in the Fed and state, uh, governments and industry to come. And they come away with such a profound understanding of how we got here and how they can do their part to make things better going forward.

Speaker A: Wow. Fantastic. And that'll be in May in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Awesome. Um, all right, well, that we've had such a fantastic conversation today. I've really enjoyed learning more about some of the issues that you're working on and all of the exciting activities and programs that you have. I'd like to end with what we ask all of our guests, which is what gives you hope. I know all of us working in the energy trenches, uh, you know, recognize it's a. There are daunting issues that we are facing. And I think it's important to take a moment to kind of step back and think about, like, what are the positive things that we're seeing. So I'd love to just hear what makes you hopeful.

Speaker C: Well, what gives me hope every day and inspiration are the tribes. They just remind us every day we've been here since Chimei Memorial and we're not going anywhere. And this too shall pass, and we are resilient and we will survive. And tribes especially are familiar with administration changes, the Western government that's been foisted upon them in order to get federal recognition is fraught with, you know, administration changes and the fallout from that. And so, you know, I'm not going to say that tribes aren't worried about what happens to all the progress we've made in the Biden administration, but they just look forward and say, yes, we'll get through this, too. We always do. And so we draw on that. Our team draws on the strength, especially of the elders. And, yeah, that's what gives us hope, to know that we've survived a lot worse. And then Mother Earth, she is the utmost resilient being. And, um, if we destroy the environment and it's not habitable for humans, she will go on. She will take over and rebound very quickly. So I know that's. That's kind of funny to think about. Well, if humans are so, you know, foolish that we annihilate ourselves, that the Earth will persist, but she will.

Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for that. And I have to say, uh, for myself, I feel a renewed sense of hope to hear about some of these great projects that your team is working on, and I'll be excited to continue to follow them. But thank you so much for your time and attention and thoughtfulness in all that you've shared, and just really appreciate your joining us today.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Gwen. It's our honor and pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker B: This episode of the Energy Optimist was produced and recorded by Gwen Brown and edited by the team at Podcast Engineers. Graphic design was provided by Nicole Wilson and Megan Barry. If you enjoyed this episode of the Energy Optimist, subscribe to our email announcements about new episodes by visiting irec USA.org the Energy Optimist, where you can also also find us on your favorite podcast streaming service.