Green is definitely “in” this season. In this case, green refers not to fashion but the philosophy of environmental protection, stewardship, and social justice. Like most hot, new concepts in our instant-message world, green seems to be everywhere – from advertising and lifestyles to curriculum and building practices.

There is nothing new, however, about the green philosophy for tribal colleges and universities (TCU’s) and the Native communities they serve. Responsible stewardship of Mother Earth is a natural outgrowth of TCU’s missions and speaks to the worldview of most tribal peoples: recognizing and valuing the inter-relationship of all living things on earth.

Green practices in the tribal college community vary as much as the institutions themselves. The examples discussed here demonstrate the potential, the challenges, and how the tribal colleges’ approach differs from most mainstream colleges’ approach. Colleges with enough money to build new campuses obviously have advantages over colleges that must use older, existing buildings, but these examples demonstrate that every one can implement a strategy.

College of Menominee Nation Focuses on Sustainability

As a young woman growing up on the Menominee Reservation, Dr. Verna Fowler (Menominee) always knew that the forest supported the community. “Our forefathers set the pace for us when we adopted the forest management system,” she says. The tribe focused on being good stewards of its forest, maintaining the forest on a sustainable yield basis for over 140 years. The Menominee Nation has won international attention and acclaim for its green practices, Fowler says.

When Fowler became president of the College of Menominee Nation (CMN, Keshena, WI) in 1992, she made sure that the tribal college reflected the tribe’s philosophy of responsible sustainability in everything, including building practices, curriculum, product sourcing, and labor practices.

The college’s motto is “Sustaining the Forest, Sustaining the Nation, Sustaining the Spirit.” The CMN Sustainable Development Institute represents the centerpiece of the college’s mission and curriculum. The research and extension mission of the college is housed within the SDI, which collaborates with the USDA Forest Service.

The newly built CMN Library was certified at the LEED Silver Level. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the nationally accepted benchmark for green building and development practices. Points are awarded in five areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. LEED certification is awarded through the national U. S. Green Building Council, which is a non-profit organization composed of more than 15,000 building industry organizations.

The Menominee Library building uses geothermal heat and captures water from roof run-off to maintain landscape plants. The building is 26% more energy efficient than required by the Wisconsin state building code, according to Joel Kroenke, campus planner.

“We even moved a grove of trees and some native plants from the site before beginning construction. Mainstream construction efforts would have trashed them,” notes Fowler. Building green is not cheap, admits Fowler. A fund shortage made the effort especially challenging. “Fortunately, we planned well,” she says.

Green practices go far beyond building techniques at the Menominee college. CMN Sustainability Coordinator Beau Mitchell (Chippewa Cree) is gathering data on the college’s sustainability indicators and will create a template for use by other TCU’s. Indicators include quantitative data such as energy efficiency but also often overlooked equity issues, such as the percentage of females at the college and access to resources such as health care.

When Mitchell looked at other college’s sustainability indicators, he noted that they did not include health and culture. The idea of including social justice issues such as health and culture is uniquely native, according to Mitchell. The college plans to use voice recorders to determine how many people still speak the Menominee language and to gather information from elders about how they incorporate Menominee values in their sustainability efforts.

The Menominee model assumes that an unhealthy person cannot practice a sustainable, green lifestyle. Health and mental wellness are tied directly to tribal culture, reports Mitchell. In order to have an understanding of and good relationship with one’s culture, one must have an understanding of the language. This understanding, says Mitchell, brings the Menominee culture to life. In Menominee culture, for instance, rocks have spirits, too. Culture brings a spiritual component to resource management that other approaches sometimes lack, he says.

The report’s underlying goal, according to Mitchell, is to benchmark the college’s position so resources for future sustainability efforts can be used effectively.

The Menominee tribal college also goes green in daily life. Students in the college’s sustainable development program have a group known as SEEDS (Strategies for Ecology Education Development and Sustainability). They created “Just Coffee,” a campus coffee house that serves fair trade coffee.

“We learned that sustainability is about making choices that affect yourself and others,” says Patrick Waukau (Menominee), former vice president of SEEDS. Fair trade coffee is sourced from small farmers, taking large corporation out of the loop, according to Waukau.

The college’s sustainable business model emphasizes a triple bottom line to make decisions: environment, equity, as well as economics. The typical model weighs only economics in decision making.

Each student must take at least one sustainable development class in order to graduate. The college wants this philosophy to be a thread throughout the curriculum, according to SDI Academic Program Coordinator Dr. William Van Lopik.

The goal is for students to understand the wholeness of sustainability as it relates to education, job, culture, and life. The college is considering asking its graduates to sign a pledge that they will engage in work that won’t hurt the planet. “It comes down to the survival of a people and culture. We hope that students will weave these things into all aspects of their lives.”

TMCC Strives for 100% Energy Efficiency

Turtle Mountain Community College (TMCC, Belcourt, ND) continues to work toward its goal of being 100% energy self-sufficient. The college has just finished installing a 660-kilowatt wind turbine that will provide 30-50% of the campuses’ energy needs, according to Wind Turbine Project Director Kris DeLorme (Turtle Mountain Chippewa). The college hopes to install another turbine in the near future, contingent upon funding.

TMCC President Dr. James Davis (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) notes that green practices are a natural outgrowth of the college’s mission and the cultural and social heritage of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

The college has three campuses. The center of the main campus is a 145,000-square-foot building designed around the Four Directions and the Seven Teachings of the Ojibwe. The building utilizes geothermal energy from 560 wells, 160 feet deep, under the parking lot. Using the moderate temperatures of the earth, circulating liquids heat the building in the winter and cool it in the summer, reducing utility costs by 40%. TMCC also utilizes high-efficiency LED lighting. Its second location is the older campus in Belcourt.

TMCC has just finished a straw bale building at its Anishinabe campus that houses environmental classes. Straw bale buildings consist of stacked rows of straw bales with moisture barriers between the walls, which are often reinforced with rebar to increase load-bearing capacities. Usually covered in stucco, they provide insulation against heat and cold.

While straw is readily available on most reservations, straw bale construction is not yet as affordable as mainstream construction since few builders are skilled in the technique, according to Davis. The college plans to create a working curriculum within its existing Building Trades Program in which students will prefabricate straw bale buildings on campus. The program would work with the tribe’s housing authority.

The college has adopted a four-day, 10-hour workweek to save fuel, according to Davis. He hopes to have data on the effectiveness and productivity of this effort by summer 2009.

IAIA Buildings Certified Gold

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA, Santa Fe, NM) has registered its latest building complex for LEED certification with a goal in mind. The Lifelong Education and Tribal Conference Center, when built and certified at the gold level, will be the first gold in Indian Country, according to IAIA Facilities Manager/Construction Coordinator David Aigner.

“We will be very, very close to the platinum level,” noted Aigner. Platinum is the highest rating.

The Center for Lifelong Education, Research, and Cultural Exchange was designed as a campus within a campus; it is the overall name for the new building complex. Its first phase, a residence center, has been certified at the silver level. Adobe is used throughout the complex, which helps reduce heating and cooling needs, absorbing heat during the day and radiating it out at night.

Since New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson just signed legislation requiring all building initiatives that receive state funding to be certified at silver LEED levels, IAIA efforts are especially prescient.

White Earth Focuses on Students’ Relationships to Nature

Like many tribal colleges when they began, White Earth Tribal and Community College (WETCC, Mahnomen, MN) utilizes buildings around town for its offices and classes – a grocery store, dentist’s office, beauty salon, doctor’s office, and even a mortuary. Nevertheless, it has many green practices in curriculum and extension programs, according to Extension Office Director Steve Dahlberg.

One of the college’s goals – its “learning outcomes” – is creating an understanding of the inter-relationship of all living things, a major component of the green philosophy. All science classes require students to keep a journal [documenting their] personal relationship with the earth, according to Dahlberg. Students are encouraged to know, not just to know about, the plants and world around them.

“It’s then easier to teach them to care for something they know and love,” he says. He doesn’t believe in a “doom and gloom” approach to encouraging green practices. “Fear mongering them into changing their behavior doesn’t work; they get numb to the doom,” according to Dahlberg.

The college focuses on the positive side of establishing a relationship between the students and the earth. Lessons emphasize using natural food and medicine resources in ways that benefit humans and the resource itself, says Dahlberg. Students are taught a number of “rules of thumb” in using wild plants as food and medicine.

While looking for a specific plant, students must walk by at least three examples of the plant before harvesting. This ensures sufficient quantities of the plant. No more than one-tenth of a plant is harvested so that enough remains to allow the plant to feed and take care of itself, to feed the organisms in the soil, and to feed other herbivores.

It is possible to harvest plants and medicines in a way that enhances their lives, says Dahlberg. For instance some species are invigorated if they are thinned periodically, preventing them from choking on too much growth.

Cankdeska Cikana Students Walk the Ditches

At Cankdeska Cikana Community College (CCCC, Fort Totten, ND), President Cynthia Lindquist (Spirit Lake Dakota) admits that it is sometimes difficult to implement green practices when trying to make do with existing structures. The college president wants to educate students and community members about using sustainable products during feasts and gatherings.

“We are big consumers of Styrofoam products here. Our first goal is to get rid of the cups,” she says.

Lindquist wants students to understand stewardship of the earth. She hopes to incorporate this philosophy into classes this fall to get back to the Dakota way.

Recently students built a large medicine wheel garden on campus. Eighty feet in diameter, the garden contains native plants. (See sidebar.) The effort was coordinated by Jim Garrett (Cheyenne River Lakota), vice president of Land Grant Programs at the college. In the near future, Lindquist envisions an outdoor classroom with a walkway surrounded by native grasses on the 80 acres adjacent to the campus.

“We want to have a roundhouse there as well to serve as a community room, she says.

“Long ago, the prairie used to be the place where the long grass met the wetlands; now it’s the place where the farmlands meet the water,” Garrett says. With no formal ethno-botany classes at the college, he makes do by “walking the ditches” with his students, pointing out native plants and grasses. This form of informal learning, he says, has captured their hearts.

He also coordinates a garden tilling program in which the agriculture sciences and natural resources students till gardens for community members. He encourages students to spend time with the clients. “The gratitude from the people, especially the elders, really lifts the students’ spirits.”

He recalls that an elderly couple served food and refreshments to the students after they had tilled their garden. Clearly touched, the students decided that each spring, that couple – Ambrose Little Ghost and his wife – will always have the first garden.

“We are going green in a whole other way,” notes Garrett.

For tribal colleges, green practices include not only recycling and building practices; they include valuing the culture and spirituality in their communities.

Mary Annette Pember, a member of the Red Cliff Tribe of Wisconsin Ojibwe, is an independent writer and photographer based in Cincinnati, OH. Her work focuses primarily on Native people and issues. She is a past president of the Native American Journalists Association and has worked on the staff of several mainstream newspapers. She currently lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children. For more information about tribal colleges and sustainability, see TCJ, Vol. 17, No. 2.