- Thanks for joining us on the premiere of Native Report's 17th season.

I'm Ernie Stevens.

- Thanks, Ernie.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

We're taking you to the start of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa's stand against the commercial sale of the largest of the great lakes.

- If you love the land, you're going to protect it.

- [Ernie] Plus, a native led company in Minnesota wants society to take a new path away from fossil fuels and towards solar heating solutions.

- [Rita] And over in Oklahoma, a native-run meat processing plant, honors traditional values and provides a model for indigenous self-sufficiency.

- We also learn what we can do to lead healthier lives and hear from our elders.

(flute playing) - [Man] Production for Native Report is made possible by grants from the Blandin Foundation.

Anishinabe Fund and Alexandra Smith fund, in support of Native American Treaty Rights administered through the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.

(flute and guitar music playing) - Welcome to Native Report and thanks for tuning in.

- This is the 17th season of Native Report.

In this episode, we're exploring energy and natural resource operations, led by natives that align and honor traditional ways.

As well as efforts to protect natural resources in the name of stewardship responsibilities.

- We're starting with a story about one tribal nation's stand to protect the water around them.

We take you to the Red Cliff Reservation at the start of their stand against any commercial sale of Lake Superior water.

After a private company's efforts to sell water from an artesian well in Herbster, Wisconsin surfaced.

(soft music) - [Bryan] My initial thoughts when I heard of someone wanting to create a water bottling company, you know, not too far down the shore from us.

I deemed that as a threat.

As I would, if someone were to say, we're going to come into your community and for no reason, take elder out of your community, or one of your children, and you want to protect it.

You want to make sure you get your arms around that, those beans, or the resources and that's just the way that we are.

I'm Bryan Bainbridge, a at-large council member.

Here at Red Cliff Band Lake Superior Chippewa.

There's a company that wants to, to come in and extract water within the basin and right along the shores of gichi-gami, Lake Superior.

And we deemed that as a threat.

- I remember talking to elders way older than me.

Talking to elders and they talk about places that are sacred all along this lake.

The land that I live on, we call Miskwaabikaang.

And Miskwaabikaang means they got a place that's red.

So if you go out in Lake Superior and the sunrises, and your looking back at Red Cliff, it's all red.

I'm Marvin Defoe from Red Cliff Band Lake Superior Chippewa My Anishinaabe name is Shingway Banase.

The reason why I'm against bottling the water, is because I love water.

And there are certain unforeseen hazards of taking water out of the soil, taking water out of the land, taking water, 'cause you're taking water right from Lake Superior.

You're taking the aquifer.

It's going to set a precedence that's gonna keep going and going and going.

And pretty soon the homeowners, the land owners, are going to turn their faucet on, ain't gonna be no water.

Our ancestors never gave up the water rights, (soft music) If you will.

Never gave it up.

You look in the treaties, there is no mention of water.

There ain't no mention.

The Chippewa people has never, has never gave up the right to voice and to protect water.

We have never.

We have never made those agreements with the federal government.

We still haven't them rights.

See our ancestors were pretty smart back in then.

And we're pretty smart today too.

- [Bryan] You know I sit here, well over 160 years past the last agreement that was signed in 1854.

(soft music playing) And if that thought wasn't put forth with that seventh generation, we would not even be having this conversation.

- It's going to set precedence, my initial thought.

I'm thinking of the drought that's taking place in California.

The drought that's taken place throughout different places.

This lake, that water, to us is very valuable.

Freshest lake, clean water in the world.

We need to have a talk about the protection, the protection of Lake Superior, the protection of Michigan.

- I'm a commercial fisherman.

Right now our nets are just a couple miles away from Herbster.

Those are resources that we've retained.

And any threat to that has an impact.

Not only to me as a commercial fishermen, for our provider, for our community, but as a nation.

People have to understand that as sovereigns.

We have an obligation.

An obligation to, not only the people, but to our land and water, gichi-gami, Lake Superior.

If there's any type of threat, you know, we take that.

That's our lifeblood.

If we don't maintain that way of thinking and that thought process, thinking forward, and we allow certain things to happen, whether it be water extraction, minerals extraction through mining, we lose our spirit.

We lose our culture.

We lose way of life.

We truly lose our being.

And we leave nothing for the ones that come after us.

And if we do that, we lose our existence.

- There's a fear of what might it look like in the future?

I don't know.

50 years down the road, what might it look like?

What happens today is certainly going to have an impact in what's going to happen down the road.

If we don't address that, the fear for me is that it's going to be very desolate down the road.

If you love the land, (soft music) you're going to protect it.

If you love your family, you're going to protect your family.

- [Bryan] We passed resolution as a governing body, as a sovereign, as a sovereign nation, here within what is called Wisconsin.

And we have an obligation to make sure that we protect that for the next seven generations.

- The Red Cliff Band fears the precedence it could set If the company were to be allowed to bottle Lake Superior water.

(flute music playing) (water trickling sound) (camera person climbing into the boat) (speaking native language) - I riced this lake with my grandfather.

Years and years ago he died.

When I started medical school, before I started medical school.

But we riced out here and it's, sometimes you can hear flocks of geese out here, huge flocks of Redwing blackbirds.

The sounds of other people far away poling canoes.

And otherwise, it's just me and Ivy gathering food.

The way our people have always done it.

This is manoomin, this is wild rice.

And it needs to be harvested respectfully and gently.

And we're just starting, so hopefully we get a lot of rice.

But we'll get what we get.

We'll parch it in the kettle I got from my mother that was from her aunt and has been in the family forever.

It's a treaty kettle.

And this is healthy food.

This is a healthy way to gather food.

It's a healthy way to remember our relatives.

I rice the same way my grandfather riced.

If you have things that your grandparents did, or your aunts and uncles did, or family did, those things are important.

And they're important to who you are.

And they're important to share with other people.

So, we'll get back to ricing.

And remember to call an elder.

They've been waiting for your call.

I'm Dr. Arne Vainio and this is Health Matters.

(upbeat music playing) - A growing native business called 8th Fire Solar, near the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota, is competing with industry giants to heat your home using cutting edge solar technology.

The company says they're the only business specializing in this technique currently in the U.S. (soft music) (upbeat music) - I'm Winona Laduke and I'm part of the management collective of 8th Fire Solar, which emerged from Honor the Earth Akiing.

This is our production facility in Ponsford, Minnesota, which we put up about three years ago.

We've been adding to it and we make solar thermal panels here for houses, south facing walls of houses.

And it'll keep you warm in the winter time.

It could save up to 20% of your heating bill.

That's a really significant thing in the southern winters.

- The word is getting out that, it's free heat from the sun.

- (upbeat music) - [Winona] The south facing solar panel gets hot.

And when the thermostat hits about 90 degrees, it turns on a blower fan that blows the hot air in your house.

- My name is Ron Chilton, I am the Project Manager at 8th Fire Solar.

That will be the back of your solar panel when we get to the final assembly over there.

Then from there, it goes to this assembly table right here.

- Native people know how to take care of community.

That's really our responsibility and I'm a matriarch in my community.

And my job is to take care of my community's wellbeing.

And one of the ways you take care of community wellbeing is ensuring that your people are warm.

And so if 8th Fire Solar gives us a chance to reaffirm heat security or warmth in our community, and then to share that with other communities and build income, you know, employ local people, train more local people in both installing and manufacturing.

So we kind of rebuild some economic systems in our community and as well you are able to offer a way to warm your house for our people.

- We've been to different reservations, Leech Lake, Bois Forte, on solar installation trainings.

And what we're doing out there is we're heating somebody's house.

And we're also teaching the community tribal members out there, how to put these solar panels on, so whenever that tribe wants to buy some solar panels, they'll have the installers right there in their community.

If you're going to put one solar panel on, you're looking at $5,000 and that's going to pay for itself in five, seven years It's gonna cost you for the solar panel, it's gonna cost you for the fan, controller, thermostat and then the installation and that's about it.

You never have to pay again, you know.

You'll have to buy a filter once in a while and change your filter, but there ain't really no maintenance on 'em.

Takes about $8 a year to run that fan.

And then over here, we have a table saw.

This table saw here is for cutting our polyiso.

And that is that expensive aluminum sheets up there.

- The White Earth Reservation, like many other communities in the north, suffers from a lot of cold in the winter time.

And over the past 20 years, most of the wood-fired heat has been moved to fossil fuels.

There's a lot of problems associated with that, you know, as we recently saw in Texas with the grid breakdowns.

You could lose power in your house if you have an electric heat.

And then you're kind of in trouble.

We're really interested in how you reduce stress in these times of climate change.

And in that, as the winters go between different heat temperatures and we don't know what's going on, we want to relocalize and build resilient housing.

So the White Earth Reservation suffers from what's called fuel poverty.

A lot of people suffer from that, Where low income people a re spending a fifth to a quarter of their income on energy.

A lot of it in the winter time, heating your homes.

It's said that it's like eat or heat, is what goes on in some homes.

And, you know, we need to really, in the times of now, and the times ahead with climate chaos, we need to prepare our communities to be more resilient.

And this is how we're going to do it.

In part, different kinds of energy efficiency, retrofitting, and solar thermal.

And the transition from fossil fuels needs to be aggressive.

And it's here and 8th Fire Solar as part of that process, because in manufacturing these, you can reduce the carbon footprint of a house significantly.

And most of the products that we use are made in Minnesota or Wisconsin.

The applications of solar thermal are many.

And one of them is indeed in the farming community, because the fact is, that we're going to need to have more local food security.

We discovered that during the pandemic, when we saw that food systems were collapsing, because there was no local food systems.

And in fact, most of the food was for market and national and international movement.

In the economy of the future, we want to have as much local food as we can.

And in order to extend the growing seasons in Northern Minnesota, particularly in some of our greenhouses, we found that solar thermal can increase the ability of a greenhouse to extend its season, perhaps into the full winter.

- According to 8th Fire Solar, Anishinaabe prophecies, reveal we're in the time of the seventh fire.

The company says at this time, it has said we have a choice between a path that is well worn and scorched and a path that is green and unworn.

If we move toward the green path, the eighth fire will be lit and people will come together to make a better future.

(peaceful music) - There's a lot of challenges with the lure of technology, and it's really hard on the emotional system.

So I'm gonna ask you all, if you can put that down, get your hands in the dirt, spend some time with mother earth.

We are children of this earth and we're all interconnected.

So it's really seductive to want to be really involved in technology, but make sure you're in this world as well.

You know, make sure you're connected with the spirits that are around you, the plants, the animals, the insects.

It's healing, to get your hands into the earth.

It's healing to be around humans that can support you and love you.

And it's a temptation to not do that, 'cause it's easy and it feeds your ego to not do that.

But let's get out of that and remind ourselves who we really are.

(flute music playing) - Now to Oklahoma, the home of a native run meat processing plant called Quapaw Cattle Company.

The company honors traditional values and utilizing all parts of the animals.

Their jerky, steaks and other beef products go to the farmer's market.

- The cattle company is one of Quapaw's food sovereignty efforts, which provide for the entire region, not just the tribe.

And it helped combat food insecurity during the pandemic.

(soft music) (soft music) - [Mitch] The Quapaw Nation has been kind of a forerunner in Indian country, starting off a lot of the ventures that we're in.

I mean, this is to me, a family ranch.

I get to come here every day and do what I love to do.

I wouldn't trade this for the world, I really wouldn't.

I would show up here every day even if I had to do it on my own.

Just something I love to do.

It's in your blood.

As long as you are give 'em space, they'll move from you.

They don't want to be messed with, I don't want to give them the opportunity to charge me.

(laughing) I'm Mitch Albright, Director of Agriculture for The Quapaw Nation.

I am a tribal member.

Starting back in 2012, I think, leadership at that time wanted to start a cattle company to produce proteins and meats for the tribes.

Not only for our elders, but in our youth and also for our agribusinesses and casinos.

So we have the cow calf operation, the bison operation, and we also have a feeding facility.

It's about 400 acres.

We house anywhere from 1500 to 2000 head of yearling cattle for yearling producers year-round.

We actually built the processing facility, the fall of 2017.

25,000 square foot, we opened with seven people.

It's the first USDA inspected tribal facility that's on trust land in the United States.

I think for us, it's just a point of professional pride that a tribe can take care of itself.

It's that food sovereignty aspect that the tribe's pushing for and to be able to produce locally grown hormone-free products to all of its members and its businesses.

The cattle company is a lot bigger than what there's just cattle.

We have a mercantile farmer's market group that takes care of the greenhouse, the farmer's markets, tutorials, you name it.

(soft music) - [Michelle] Yep, snap peas are starting to show up, That's good.

My name's Michelle Bowden, I'm a member of the Quapaw nation.

I also work for the tribe, as the Agriculture Environmental Specialist.

When I came in, we started really doing a lot of brainstorming on some of the things that we can do outside of just our meat processing.

So we decided to add on our gardens, try to teach people.

I do a lot of videos, a lot of workshops that I bring people in and try to teach them either food preservation, or gardening techniques.

Things like that.

And you know, all of that webbing right there, gives its flavor.

You know, we have a sovereign right, to be able to feed ourselves appropriate foods that our generations have been raised upon.

The bison's always been an integral part of the Native American communities throughout the United States, not just the Quapaws.

We don't ever produce more than we actually need.

We don't slaughter more than we actually need.

I'm so glad to see that we're trying to bring bison back to the plains.

- It takes so much more to raise buffalo, than it does beef cattle.

Buffalo are very territorial.

Don't hurt anybody while we're here and on video.

(people laughing) Stressors are huge on buffalo.

Buffalo by nature are migratory.

They were meant to move.

They were never meant to stay in captivity like we do here.

So we treat 'em like beef, like bovine, but they don't work the same.

Keeping stress down on buffalo, is priority one.

It doesn't matter if they're in pasture, if they're in a handling facility.

They were how our people survived years ago.

I've just kind of take it upon myself to be a part of those that take care of 'em from here on out.

(soft music) The pandemic we've been going through, I think it's opened a lot of folks' is eyes on how are you gonna to feed your people?

How are you gonna feed your family.

(soft music) - [Michelle] Food sovereignty, it's our way of being able to provide for ourselves and make it sustainable for ourselves.

A lot of people these days have gotten away from your traditional gardening.

A lot of people don't know how to grow things from seed and be able to feed themselves.

We're always looking to showcase some of the things that we do, so people can come in and learn from us.

Oh, that one, here we do have one in here that's still going.

Really in this garden, I'm producing mostly stuff to go to our farmer's market.

So I try to get things that are gonna to be marketable.

Whether it be cucumbers, squash, zucchini, I've started strawberries this year.

We have a kid's garden located at our daycare center.

They can go out in the afternoon and be able to pick what they want or go water it.

We're just trying to teach them kind of at a young age, how to grow their own food.

I also have a seed saving garden that we have isolated from a lot of other things.

And we have a Superfund site in Picher, Oklahoma, that has actually been remediated in a certain area.

So, I've used that as my garden for specifically seed saving.

So this here is one of our remediated sites, as you can see in the background.

Those are our chat piles.

It's basically mining waste that they have dug out of the ground, while they were mining lead for bullets for the wars.

I mean, it's obviously something that the United States needed at the time, but when it was left behind, this is what we were left with.

The Quapaw tribe was one of the first tribes in the United States that was able to take over their own remediation projects of a Superfund site.

So, we definitely feel that we are the best stewards of this land, considering it is our territory.

And we feel like we're gonna go above and beyond to make sure that we're putting this back into production and making it safe and healthy for everybody.

(soft music) We are really considered, in a food desert.

There's a long way you'd have to go, very few options for fresh foods.

You can go to a convenience store and get something processed.

But that doesn't necessarily translate into healthy alternatives for people.

The Quapaw Farmer's Market and Food Hub is an excellent place for everybody to gather, for us to all feel a sense of community.

And we're really trying to incorporate this more into an actual store setting, than say an In-N-Out.

There's just not a whole lot here in Quapaw, so we really want to make it accessible for everybody to have fresh vegetables, fruits.

(soft music) Hi, how are y'all doing?

(man talking indistinctly in the background) Good, come on in.

We've got all of our beef products on that left side.

There's a few bratwursts that we got in, in that middle cooler.

And then our bison is on this far right hand side.

- [Man] Bison?

- Yes.

I do believe very strongly in working for my people.

So therefore, when I came to the Quapaw tribe, I know that food's important and it makes me feel just incredible and definitely needed.

I really don't know how else to describe it.

I feel like I have a purpose.

(laughing) - Hopefully this story has inspired some other tribes to do what we're doing to reach out and even in Indian country as a whole, to establish a foothold in Indiana Ag and take it to the next level.

That's the whole point of doing what we're doing.

And then we're just putting a tribal spin on it, and makes everybody feel good.

Everybody in the community, knowing that they're eating products raised here from the ground they live on, the ground that they grew up on.

I think that's the whole point.

(soft music) - Quapaw food initiatives have expanded to include honey and coffee, as well as the beef and bison products.

If you missed a show or want to catch up online, find us at nativereport.org and follow us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, for behind the scenes updates.

And drop a comment on social media if you enjoy the show.

- Thanks for spending time with your friends and neighbors across Indian country.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

- And I'm Ernie Stevens.

We'll see you next time on Native Report.

(flute and guitar music playing)