6 Safe, Eco-Friendly Homes for Pine Ridge Lakota

With the construction of the Multipurpose Training and Demonstration Center well underway, project leader Chrisitinia Eala is undertaking a strategic planning conference to optimize the center's use for mitigating the effects of climate change on the vulnerable poplulation on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation. 

Over the past decade, the indigenous people of Turtle Island have joined with allies in the knowledge that humanity’s survival on a fragile planet depends on critical decisions we make today. Individual and small group efforts have grown into a movement dedicated to restoring wicosani (Lakota word for harmony) to water, earth and people by walking a path of traditional wisdom in concert with the most advanced practices emerging from the fields of environmental and physical science.

Collaborators on this conference share this holistic vision, and have been actively engaged over the past 18 years through the small Colorado nonprofit Tiyospaye Winyan Maka (TWM) in a mission to mitigate environmental degradation on native lands of the Pine Ridge Reservation and to restore wicosani among women and families through a variety of homesteading projects on recovered ancestral lands. TWM projects seek to combine state-of-the-art sustainable building techniques (i.e. eco-domes and earth-ship style construction), and permaculture and conservation practices with sacred traditions of stewardship from Lakota culture.

One of the most exciting outcomes of these ongoing efforts is the designation of Tiyospaye Winyan Maka as a community partner with the Community Engineering Corps, the domestic arm of Engineers Without Borders. As a result of this designation, the Colorado State University chapter of Engineers Without Borders is actively involved in the design and construction of a Multipurpose Training and Demonstration Center located on the land of Bryan Deans in the Slim Butte region of Pine Ridge.

Bryan Deans, a former military engineer and certified permaculture instructor, is the Director of OLCERI, the Oglala Lakota Cultural and Economic Revitalization Initiative. OLCERI, like TWM, has been actively involved in the environmental movement for more than 17 years. Most recently, in July of 2017, OLCERI hosted the Indigenous Wisdom and Permaculture Skills Convergence which brought together more than 100 participants over the course of six days to participate in workshops highlighting climate-friendly, low-tech, and accessible solutions to challenges on the Pine Ridge reservation such as food scarcity, lack of adequate housing and extreme poverty

With the completion of the Multipurpose Training and Demonstration Center, the impact of programs of this nature can be expanded. The underlying intention for the Center is to establish a staging area on the Pine Ridge reservation where tribe and community members and others can continue coming together in demonstration projects, learning best practices and techniques, and applying these on their own lands for the benefit of their families and communities.

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