Falling water, rising wind: seeking answers to problems of drought and economic stagnation, Indian tribes in the American West are listening to the wind.

• Author: Gough, Bob

Water has always been the lifeblood of the arid American West, and electricity--the primary byproduct of U.S. federal government water management in the area--is the current that powers urban and rural life after a century of settlement. But the West is now suffering its sixth year of drought, the longest and harshest in recorded history. Electricity trickles from the six big hydropower dams on the Missouri River at a rate less than two-thirds of the 10 billion kilowatthours produced in a "normal" year. The Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) supplements its hydro shortfalls with coal-fired power using lignite, which is not only the dirtiest form of coal but has increased fivefold in cost since the drought began.

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There is, however, a domestically secure, carbon-free resource that will conserve water, enhance regional air quality, and broaden reservation economies beyond the opportunities offered by casinos and smokeshops.

For the past decade, several Missouri-basin tribes--the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, and the Omaha--have gathered as the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy (Intertribal COUP) to formulate energy and utility policy recommendations, beginning with how best to utilize the hard-won 20-year contract for a WAPA allocation of about 4 percent (65 megawatts) of the river's hydropower capacity. (WAPA manages over 17,000 miles of the high-voltage transmission system stretched across 15 western states. If you live on an Indian reservation, you are 10 times less likely to have electricity than anywhere else in the country, but are far more likely to have a federal transmission line towering overhead.) Federal power began flowing directly to reservation customers in 2001, after 15 years of unprecedented tribal cooperation to secure this modest benefit from the dams that flooded tribal lands 50 years ago.

One condition of the allocation, however, was for tribes to develop integrated resource plans for reservation energy resources. The resulting assessments...