Indigenous Activists Are Trying to Save Our Planet. We Have to Listen

My father, the actor Henry Fonda, starred in many cowboy and Indian films. When I was a young girl, I dreamed of being an Indian galloping bareback across the prairie and gliding silently through forests, leaving no trace. My film favorites were any Westerns that had Indians in them, and yet I knew nothing about the history of North America’s Indigenous peoples.

That began to change in 1970, when Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz Island. I visited with them, and soon I was learning more and more. During a cross-country drive to New York to begin filming Klute, I visited reservations across the country, from South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona. For most of my life, building those relationships and hearing those stories has been a crucial part of my education.

And in 2016 it culminated when I traveled to the Standing Rock reservation, home of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, joining with hundreds of different Indian nations who had come together in the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline, in an effort to protect sacred lands and clean water.

While visiting with younger Indigenous peoples encamped there, I was thrilled to hear stories about how ceremony — the sweat lodges, chanting, and prayers — had helped them kick alcohol and drug addictions. It didn’t surprise me that their healing came from these old ways that connected them to the earth, to nature and the stars and the ancestors and away from greed and consumerism.

In all the time I have spent in the company of Indigenous peoples of North America, I’ve been especially struck by their ongoing desire to try and help us, the descendants of those European colonist/settlers who unleashed such cruelty on their forebears. They have tried to teach us how to protect our natural resources; how to prevent out-of-control wildfires; about the concept of thinking seven generations into the future before making decisions. 

When I think of what has been done to them, I can feel my anger rising, yet these people continue trying to help us. One critical thing they know that we descendants of white settlers have forgotten at our peril: We are part of nature. We depend on the natural world for our lives. Yet we are destroying that world, fools that we are. Indigenous teachings remind us that every living thing is interconnected. The Earth is an intricate network of interdependence.

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Under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, a $135 million dollar grant was awarded to a 14-tribe coalition from the Solar for All program. The funds would have created financially sustainable programs and many sorely needed jobs to provide energy upgrades, solar installations, and batteries to thousands of native homes, saving money for low-income households, saving lives when winters bring the temperature often below zero. and building community resilience. If you’ve never spent time on an Indian Reservation, you cannot imagine what this meant. It created hope for lasting economic impacts of jobs and reduced energy bills in the communities that need them the most. The program has been cancelled by the Trump administration.

My friend Cody Two Bears did not need to imagine. He lived it. He will tell us now what energy insecurity looked like in Native communities where he grew up:

That Solar for All grant didn’t happen by accident. After Standing Rock, I knew we couldn’t just protest, we had to fight for something. That’s why I formed Indigenized Energy — to help tribes pursue energy sovereignty and put climate solutions in the hands of tribal communities.

Across Indian Country, many communities pay some of the highest energy costs in the nation while living at the ends of fragile utility systems. Elders still literally freeze in winter because energy is unreliable or unaffordable. Meanwhile, energy prices continue rising everywhere due to war, instability, and rapidly growing demand from AI data centers.
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Tribal communities are not waiting to be rescued. They are building solutions. The people who hold many of the solutions are Indigenous people. 

Our 14-tribe coalition had a clear plan to put solar and battery storage on thousands of homes to provide relief from crushing utility bills, sub-zero cold, and clean energy jobs for young people. This would have represented true tribal ownership of power systems. It was about more than electricity. It was about dignity and self-determination.

But now, the Solar for All program has been terminated by the Trump Administration before our vision could fully take shape.

But the tribes are not stopping. The work continues.

This September, we return to Standing Rock for the People of the Sun gathering. It will not be to relive a protest, but to build what comes next.

People of the Sun will not be a typical conference. It is a gathering rooted in place, culture, and purpose. You will experience Native music and artists, hear directly from tribal leaders and innovators who are building real solutions, and take part in conversations designed to move beyond ideas into action. It is a space where investors, creators, and community leaders come together — not as spectators, but as participants in shaping what comes next.

We will celebrate how far we’ve come. We will have honest conversations about what stands in the way. And most importantly, we will create the connections and commitments needed to move this work forward together.

I believe the People of the Sun event, at Standing Rock in North Dakota Sept. 16 to 18, is just the kind of conversation we need more of right now. It will celebrate the great accomplishments of tribes and feature important discussion about the work that remains. Climate activists, philanthropists, and anyone seeking to experience the wisdom of Native people should attend if they possibly can. Around the world, solar energy is growing faster than any energy source in history. People from Pakistan to Africa to Cuba to Germany are using it to make themselves more independent, to cut their costs, and to help protect the planet; there’s no place it fits more naturally than in Indian Country, where people have such a deep and direct connection to the sun.

If you believe Indigenous leadership is essential to confronting the climate crisis, and that tribal nations deserve the autonomy to shape their own economic futures, I ask you to support this work. We are all people of the sun.
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I have spent over 50 years learning from Indigenous communities. They continue to try to help us. The least we can do is stand beside them.

Stay strong. Stay engaged. And remember: we belong to the earth. Not the other way around.