Native Sun News Today: Lakota visionary honors traditions with new technology

Monday, July 8, 2019  

OGLALA— On every reservation there is a visionary, a person who tries to create something new and promising, to protect something old and important. Born in 1960, Henry Red Cloud is old enough to have spent vital years with elders born in the 19th Century, and young enough to embrace the modern technology of the 21st Century.

Over a decade back, Red Cloud started up his own company, Lakota Solar Enterprises (LSE), on Red Cloud Family allotment land just east of Oglala, which his website describes as “one of the nation’s first 100% Native-owned and operated renewable energy companies.” He started out in a tipi, located in a grove of trees, and from that most traditional and basic of beginnings, the company gradually formed around him. It doesn’t look like any company a person pictures when he thinks of Wacisu business.

On the surface, it is just a collection of buildings not much different than similar locations anywhere on any reservation. But there is a unique partnership happening here, a melding of the best of who the Lakota were and still are, with the promise of a future freed from the yoke of traditional energy dependence.

In 2008, LSE expanded, with the opening of the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center (RCREC), at the same location. All of these enterprises have one goal in mind: “…reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is important. And on tribal lands, it is imperative. We hope you will join us in helping tribes achieve energy sovereignty.” The company’s mission statement is simple: “Renewable energy: a new way to honor old ways.”

“When Lakota College was just new, I took courses in range management,” Red Cloud said, “to become a forest ranger, to live out in the forest, hunt and all that. That was my thing then, but then I found, geez, I need a job. Had part time jobs here, but not too much.”

This forced Red Cloud to go out and seek work, and he left the reservation, “just working across the country,” coming home in 1995.

“When I came home,” Red Cloud said, “I started spending time with the relatives, parents getting older.” Being reconnected with traditional ways and perspectives prompted Red Cloud to ask people if there was “a wish they could have happen” what would it be, and that answer was “a return to the old ways.” Five generations removed from his ancestor, the original Red Cloud, Henry felt a responsibility to prepare the Tribe for the coming of the Seventh Generation, as prophesied in Black Elk’s sacred vision.

But there is no way to bring back the vast wilderness the Oglala once thrived in and called home, and there is no reestablishing the independent society that battled the Wasicu throughout the 19th Century, but Red Cloud looked to a unique and fresh perspective to help give most people back the traditional world they yearned for. He reasoned that cutting edge technology could free the Tribe from its dependency on nonrenewable, environmentally destructive energy, provide cheap, dependable alternative energy, and help the Tribe achieve a sovereign energy independence, as a foundation for building the social infrastructure necessary to transform the poverty and isolation of the reservation into a vibrant, technologically savvy society and economy, healed and maintained by traditional values.

This idea is not an easy one to process. People consider the technology that Red Cloud embraces as being of an opposite nature from the tradition he wants to protect. But what Red Cloud has demonstrated is simplicity can be found in all things, even new and strange things, and that simple knowledge has the power to transform the Lakota world for the better.

Modern technology “had pulled everybody off the land, broke up the family tiospaye…but their wish was to get back to the old ways, back to the old home.”

James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today