South Dakota School of Mines and Techbnology is hosting a green energy conference on April 27, 2010. The keynote speaker will be Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth. Read more:
Winona LaDuke (Anishnaabe) is an internationally acclaimed author, orator and activist. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities with advanced degrees in rural economic development, LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. In 1994, Time magazine named her one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1997 she was named Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and the prestigious International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (children’s non-fiction), and The Winona LaDuke Reader. Her most recent book is Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press). An enrolled member of the Mississippi band of Anishnaabe, LaDuke lives with her family on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She is the Founding Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a reservation based non-profit devoted to restoring the land-base and culture of the White Earth Anishnaabeg. She helped found Honor the Earth in 1993 and has served in a leadership position since the organization’s inception.
Plenary Session: Henry Red Cloud, Pine Ridge
“Green Jobs: Building Solar Technicians”
Henry Red Cloud Selected as 2009 Innovative Idea Champion
Henry Red Cloud, founder of Lakota Solar Enterprises (LSE) and partner of Trees, Water & People (TWP), has been recognized as a 2009 Innovative Idea Champion by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED). As an Innovative Idea Champion, Henry will have the opportunity to present his concept of renewable energy on tribal lands at the 2009 Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C. in October.
Building on the foundation of Lakota Solar Enterprises, one of the nation’s first 100% Native American owned and operated renewable energy companies; Henry is now developing the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center (RCREC). Located on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, RCREC is a training facility for tribes to learn about renewable energy applications from fellow Native Americans. RCREC returns newly certified Solar Technicians to their communities with the expertise to start their own renewable energy programs. By incorporating small-scale applications, such as solar air heating, into their tribe’s housing, energy and employment policies, tribal leaders will be able to provide new green jobs, save money on home heating costs, and combat global climate change.
Lunch Break
SDSMT Interim Provost, VP Academic Affairs – Duane C. Hrncir:
“Breakthroughs in support of a Green Campus”
Introduction of Leading Mines Voices: Lance Roberts, Damon Fick – The School of Mines
Plenary Session: PAT SPEARS, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe & Robert Gough, consultant to the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Utility Commission
“Windustry: Tribal Wind Powering” – COUP Intertribal Wind Project and Policy Issues, KILI Wind Turbine, and Strawbale Housing Construction Training. Including a break-out demonstration project involving students on the SDSMT Campus.
Pat Spears, tribal leader from the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, is a member of NativeEnergy’s Board of Directors and co-founder and President of the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy (COUP), representing eleven Tribes in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Intertribal COUP is involved in policy issues and outreach education to Tribal governments, Tribal Colleges, and indigenous environmental organizations on telecommunications, climate change, energy planning, energy efficiency and renewable energy development. The policy work includes specific proposals to support renewable energy development, energy efficiency, and as team member of the Intertribal Energy Network. Mr. Spears has worked in tribal government and Indian programs in various capacities over the past 30 years.
As a member of the development team, he assisted in the first commercial, utility scale wind turbine project (750 kW) at the Rosebud Casino and on feasibility and development of the 30 MW project for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. He has provided consultant services for the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe on feasibility for community and wind-hydro pump storage projects and is currently consulting with the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe on community and rural wind projects. Spears also manages the wind energy feasibility and development for community and commercial wind power for the eight COUP Tribes in the 80 MW Intertribal Wind Project.
Intertribal COUP represents Tribal energy interests from regulatory and economic perspectives at regional and national levels on regulatory issues, policy analysis, energy development plans, and legislative proposals. Mr. Spears views energy as a key component of sustainable development and economic restoration. The energy interests range from utility regulation policy, energy planning, energy efficiency, and renewable energy with emphasis on wind energy development.
Mr. Spears is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and completed undergraduate work in Sociology with emphases in Anthropology and Indian Studies from the University of South Dakota, and graduate study in Public Administration at the Washington D.C. Public Affairs Center, University of Southern California.
Robert Gough, is an attorney with graduate degrees in sociology and cultural ecology, with over 30 years experience and two fellowships on tribal cultural and natural resource issues.
The first director and now a consultant to the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Utility Commission, Gough participated in WAPA negotiations for tribal allocations of federal hydroelectric power. He is the secretary of the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, an organization composed of federally recognized Indian tribes in the Northern Great Plains providing a forum on rights and resources for utility services on tribal lands, and co-chairs the national assessment’s Native Peoples/Native Homelands Climate Change Workshop.
Gough contracts with the DOE -Wind Powering America program’s Wind Powering Native America Initiative, and co-directs the NativeWind.org and EnergyIndependenceDay.org campaigns supporting partnerships between ICLEI-Cities for Climate Protection and the Intertribal COUP tribes interested in building sustainable homeland economies based upon renewable energy.
Panel with Pat, Bob, Winona, Henry and SDSMT Damon Fick, Lance Roberts
Summary of Current Actions on Green Energies, Future Projects & Audience Q&A
Current Co-Sponsors: Dakota Charitable Foundation, Inc.; Trees, Water, and People; SDSMT Office of Multicultural Affairs; SDSMT AISES; SDSMT Youth Programs & Continuing Education
