The Siksika Project

An hour east of the Canadian city of Calgary is the Siksika Nation - a First Nations people numbering about 6,000. One tribe in the larger Blackfoot Confederacy, the Siksika ceded their land to Queen Victoria of Britain in Treaty Number 7 on the 22nd of September, 1877.

The treaty reads like an awful, legalese-laden eulogy:

And whereas the said Commissioners have proceeded to negotiate a Treaty with the said Indians; and the same has been finally agreed upon and concluded as follows, that is to say : the Blackfeet, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee, Stony and other Indians inhabiting the district hereinafter more fully described and defined, do hereby cede, release, surrender, and yield up to the Government of Canada for Her Majesty the Queen and her successors for ever, all their rights, titles, and privileges whatsoever to the lands included.

The Siksika Nation did lose the right to its way of life that day. But it was just the signature on an already-issued death certificate. The buffalo economy - the foundation of the Nation's livelihood - was on the verge of collapse, and did soon after the signing. The newly poor Nation turned to farming the reservation allotted in the treaty. It is, tragically, not an atypical history for a Native American people, but let's jump the timeline 130 years ahead.

In 1994, the Canadian Parliament authorized the First Nation Oil and Gas Management initiative (FNOGM); all oil and gas resources on the lands of three First Nation communities, including the Siksika Nation, were to be under Tribal control and management by 2005. In that year, Parliament secured the transfer of control through additional national legislation. An estimate from 2001 put the fair market value of the resources controlled by the Siksika Nation at $25.0 million. Control of these resources and revenues over the past eleven years, and unmatched creativity, has driven the Siksika Nation to invest in ways that have made it a model for communities worldwide.

Immediately upon its entry into the FNOGM, the Siksika Nation formed a private oil and gas company, Siksika Energy Resources Corporation, to generate revenue from the processing of its own natural resources. The Nation also founded a private economic development corporation to oversee business investments, ensuring that decisions were both economically sound and made in the best interest of the Nation's people. The corporation wisely re-invests profits with an eye toward capital to replace the depletion of energy resources over time. A spin-off company from the energy takeover, Siksika Environmental Limited, provides field and consulting services to the community, industry and government, and recently formed a partnership with indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon to assist them in dealing with the repercussions of petroleum development. In 2000, the Nation installed fiber optic cable to supply high-speed internet to the entire community with the goal of generating opportunities for high-tech jobs.

Just this month, the Siksika Nation announced another innovative project: a partnership between the A4 Bar Cattle Company, a limited liability corporation chaired by Alan J. Wolfleg of the Siksika Nation, and Hybrid Fuels (Canada) Inc. Energy of a different sort - the renewable variety - is one goal of this venture. This cutting-edge idea seems to fit flawlessly into the Nation's goals, values and areas of expertise.

Hybrid Fuels' website summarizes the Siksika A4 Bar Farm Operations Project as an attempt to "integrate cattle feeding-to-finish with the production of wet ethanol" (ethanol in liquid form). A shareholder group is financing the facility construction, Hybrid Fuels is supplying the technical expertise and A4 Bar Cattle Company, the livestock.

The facility will have four major parts: a cattle barn, an ethanol plant, a gasifier/burner and a hydroponic barley grass-growing system. The grass growing system is estimated to be the equivalent of 1,600 acres of grasslands. It will be contained in the same unit as the barn, which will be designed to hold 200 livestock at a time and finish the cattle in a 100 to 120-day feeding cycle. The livestock will not be given hormones or antibiotics and, when finished, will be sold at auction.

The cattle will not be made to survive on grass alone. The ethanol production process generates a couple of byproducts, known commonly as distiller's mash and stillage water. The mash has a high protein concentration and will be combined with the stillage water and grass to concoct a delicious bovine casserole. It's an often-cited issue in ethanol production that the energy used to ship the byproducts to where they can be consumed is a wasteful part of the process. When cows and ethanol plants are neighbors, as in this case, this issue disappears.

Another way this operation beats traditional ethanol facilities' efficiency is energy production. Used bedding and manure from the cattle pens will be burned in the gasifier/burner to create the energy necessary to operate both the ethanol plant and the hydroponic grass system reducing fossil fuel usage. The two big inputs into the system are barley - the ethanol feedstock - and cattle. The estimated outputs include: 3,000 liters (about 792 gallons) of ethanol per day, 2,400 finished cattle in a year, and a megawatt of electricity.

As a whole, both the processes and products of this operation appear to be superior to conventional practice. The final fate of the ethanol is as an additive to conventional diesel fuel. Studies show that a mixture with 10% ethanol can reduce diesel emissions of asthma-exacerbating particulate matter by 65%, smog-causing Nitrous Oxide by 22% and poisonous Carbon Monoxide by 20%. By lowering fossil-energy inputs, the operation also allows the ethanol produced to be closer to carbon-neutral and may assist a bit in curbing global warming.

In 1877, the world of the Siksika Nation was inescapably altered by a wave of European settlement they could not control. Soon, the forces of energy scarcity and global warming will put much of the world in a similarly out-of-control situation. This one operation will not, on its own, alter energy and food production markets. But this experiment may show us what's ahead, or what ought to be.

Having lost everything once, the choices of the Siksika Nation seem to have been made with a strong and knowing eye on the distant future. This First Nation's innovations in government, business and environmental management should not be its only contributions. The world would do well to take a look at all that could be gained through adoption of the Nation's self-imposed responsibility as caretaker of the land and of the future.