New York City - The Nuclear-Free Future Award

“Metake Oyasin” say the Red Clouds when they crowd together
with their friends and neighbors in the darkness of the
sweat lodge on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “Metake Oyasin”
is the greeting as the water evaporates on the red hot lava rocks
and the ancient purification ritual of the Great Plains begins.
“Metake Oyasin” is the universal formula of the Lakota, the
essence of their culture; it means “all my rela-tives”. To the
Lakota, we are all related – the frog and the grass, man, the
earth and the sun. Nowadays, biochemistry supports this philosophy
or world view: frog, grass and human beings have a
considerable portion of DNA in common, and they share minerals
with our planet
and the stars.
“Metake Oyasin”
is the principle of
Lakota education, underlaying both the decision of the Red
Cloud Tiospaye (extended family) to raise a herd of bison
and that of Henry Red Cloud to establish his own company,
“Lakota Solar Enterproses.” His people had always venerated
the sun, dedicating the sun dance ceremony to it at the summer
solstice, so it made sense to him to turn this power source into
a source of electricity. He started his small company in 2003,
and by now he has put solar panels on 300 roofs, not just on
Pine Ridge, but also on the nearby reservations Rosebud und
Cheyenne River. By cooperating with organization such as
“Honor the Earth” and “Village Earth”, he has extended his
reach to four more reservations: Yankton in South Dakota,
Fort Berthold in North Dakota, White Earth in Minnesota und
Northern Cheyenne in Montana. In 2008 he established the
“Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center”, whose mission it is
to train solar experts who can then take their know-how back
to their tribal communities. The same approach is used at the
Barefoot College in Tilonia in Rajastan in northwestern India,
recipient of the Nuclear-Free Future Award in 2000.
To Henry Red Cloud tapping the power of the sun and
raising bison are related endeavors. He wants to enable the
Lakota, the Dakota and the Nakota (the nations we know under
the colonial name Sioux) to live self-sufficiently – including
food and energy. In the winter months, all too often people
on reservations freeze to death in their flimsy abodes due to
lack of heating fuel. Getting rid of fossil fuels is a liberation
in yet another sense: The Lakota are fully aware of the fact
Special Recognition
14
that oil drilling in South America takes place at the expense
of the indigenous population.
The man who puts his money on bison and solar power
is a direct descendant of the great Oglala Chief Red Cloud.
When Henry Red Cloud steps up to the lectern in the Great
Hall of Cooper Union, the spot from which Abraham Lincoln
gave his famous "Might Makes Right" address, the appeal that
propelled him to the presidency, the circle will be completed:
140 years before him, his great-great-great-grandfather Chief
Red Cloud gave a speech from the very same lectern.
Henry Red Cloud, Lakota Nation
...No one who listened to Red Cloud’s remarkable speech
yesterday can doubt that he is a man of very great talents...
Although the audience labored under the disadvantage of not
knowing what Red Cloud said, until his words were filtered
through an interpreter – and no doubt greatly weakened in the
process – still his earnest manner, his impassioned gestures, the
eloquence of his hands, and the magnetism which he evidently
exercises over an audience, produced a vast effect on the dense
throng which listened to him yesterday. His speech was like a
poem... “You have children, and so have we. We want to rear our
children well, and ask you to help us in doing so.”
− From the June 17, 1870, New York Times