Native Americans living on reservations continually face a poverty rate nearly double the national average of all races and ongoing business obstacles that hinder economic growth.
The U.S. government pushed Native Americans onto reservation land in 1820-50. Indigenous groups were deprived of natural resources like oil and gold that could be used to build capital. A recent study by University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Dominic Parker and Sarah Johnston found that extracting energy from renewable sources like the sun or the wind with little environmental impact could be the force that changes this long standing problem.
European settlers pushed Indigenous people onto poor farmland when creating reservations, which tends to be windier, more arid and more suited for modern wind and solar energy, the Nature Energy study said.
Green energy accounted for 6% of U.S. GDP growth in 2023 and has employed more people than the fossil fuel industry since 2021, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency. Still, the road to developing these resources for Native American tribes is fraught with difficulty.
To drill oil on Native American land requires 49 permitting steps, and the approval process can take over three years due to intense federal regulations governing tribes. By contrast, developing oil on state land only requires four permitting steps and typically takes three months.
And developing a plan for solar or wind power generation on tribal lands requires both a coordination of internal power with the federal government. This poses a particular challenge for tribal companies who, due to federal policies that have divided tribal land into hundreds of parcels, must get approval from each of the parcels’ owners before starting an energy project.
“This regulatory jumble makes energy projects almost as uncommon as where they are forbidden, such as in public parks, forests and wildlife refuges,” Parker told UW-Madison.
The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $14 billion in subsidies and incentives for developing wind and solar power on tribal lands before 2026, but those incentives are often locked behind the condition that tribes connect to a regional electrical grid. For many tribes, this process is time-consuming and requires legal resources that they do not possess.
The U.S. Department of Energy has issued resource guides for Native American communities, emphasizing that they wish to respect tribal sovereignty when issuing resources for energy development on tribal lands.
