- The absolute beauty of what you see, the peacefulness, the harmony, this is how I feel about where I live.

We would hike to the mountains because that's where we harvested our berries, that's where we would hunt.

And all we had to do was reciprocate, be fair, be clean.

Don't take everything.

- When electricity finally arrived here at Lummi, there was still a lot of salmon in the Puget Sound and a person could make more than a moderate standard of living.

- And that energy is coming at a cost to the natural environment that we know and love and respect.

- We wiped out all of our salmon.

They don't realize that it's like the canary in the mineshaft that the wiping out of the salmon is also wiping us out.

(light music) - A great chunk of the Western United States is given energy from dams that are on the Columbia River.

With the damning of the rivers, you've killed all our salmon.

You've killed all the water striders.

You're not doing an honorable harvest.

You're taking and you're killing everything else.

You're taking everything without giving back.

- We're at Northwest Indian College and today what we're doing is showing some demonstrations of some of the hands-on kits that we use in our engineering and physics courses related to solar and wind energy.

Energy sovereignty is the ability of the tribes to make the decisions about how energy is being generated, how it's being distributed, what kinds of land impacts are being made.

It's really having that ownership of the process.

The solar kits that we're using are pretty basic.

It's a solar panel that connects directly to a pump that pumps water from one bucket into another.

So, the goal of the program is to train students in engineering, but with a focus on tribal needs that help teach the students how they can work with current technology.

- Here on the reservation, I see our power lines.

All our power lines are above ground and every winter you're going to lose power for some reason or another because the wind has blown down those power lines.

- Some of our Native American nations, many of their citizens live off grid.

The utility hasn't run power to them because they don't wanna spend all that money just for one customer.

But, solar is a great solution for that.

Within a matter of a month, you can now have your own power system.

- Currently at Lummi Nation all the power comes from Puget Sound Energy and the hope is to put a micro grid into place that really can generate initially just backup energy for outages or to connect people who aren't currently connected.

But ultimately, to rebuild that infrastructure to own that energy production, generation, distribution, and be able to manage how it gets to all the residents.

Providing renewables would really help us to be able to conserve our resources better and have a lower impact and hopefully start to restore a lot of what's been destroyed.

- If you are going to do an honorable harvest of energy, you don't make an impact that is going to take life from our relatives.

(light music) You don't want to kill anything around it so that you may have renewable energy is returned to the old ways.

We always had everything returned back.

- The way that we teach our environmental science program at Northwest Indian College is very much grounded in indigenous knowledge.

A lot of tribes, they were put on a reservation.

They were basically told, "Good luck.

Good luck developing your own internet resources, your own energy resources" It's important that our students understand that history.

- I have some sort of duty to help my tribe in whatever way I can.

Like, I didn't ever think I was gonna end up in renewable energy, right?

But it was because I was kind of searching for this idea of how do I help my tribe and in what way?

- Renewable energy is a way to take care of the world around us and really take care of the environmental elements that give us life.

Everything is really connected and we gotta take care of it 'cause it will take care of us if we can create a sustainable future for ourselves, which includes renewable energy.

- In tribal communities we believe that the seven generations that came before us really paved the way for us and that it's our job to pave the way for the next seven generations.

And so, these are skills that students can actually take and incorporate and actually make a better future for their communities.

(light music) - [Commentator] This series is made possible by the generous support of the Port of Seattle.