Overview:

  • The Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association (MTERA) unites 33 Tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to plan, finance, and operate energy projects on their own terms.
  • After the Solar for All program was terminated in August 2025, cutting more than $500 million for Tribal clean energy nationwide, member Tribes deepened collaboration instead of retreating, says Daniel Wiggins Jr.
  • Wiggins asks non-Native readers to learn whose homelands they live on and to ask whether Tribal Nations are invited to energy proceedings early enough to shape the outcome.

Tribal Nations have long understood that a community’s strength is not measured by what one member can do alone, but by what the whole is willing to build together. That principle now connects Tribal energy projects across Michigan and the Midwest.

Collective action is the idea behind the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association (MTERA). Founded in 2014 by a small group of Tribes facing similar challenges, today MTERA brings together 33 Tribes across Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We are a group of Tribes helping Tribes build the capacity to plan, finance, and operate energy projects on their own terms.

What’s possible together is real. In 2024, we aligned more than $62 million in federal funding to bring residential solar to Tribal Nations across EPA Region 5, with a plan in place to reach every reservation. In August 2025, the Solar for All program was terminated, cutting more than $500 million earmarked for Tribal clean energy nationwide.

While this termination decision is still being challenged in federal court, this was not the first reversal Indigenous peoples have absorbed in this country. What happened next is the part worth paying attention to. Rather than seeing the loss of funding as a failure, our Member Tribes used it as a catalyst to deepen collaboration, strengthen resolve, and innovate new paths forward together.

Energy work is unfolding faster than ever. Utilities are building new infrastructure, data centers are driving record-high electricity demand, and the grid is transforming in ways not seen for generations. In this environment, Tribal Nations face complex technical, regulatory, and financial decisions; not just to keep up, but to grow and secure their own energy sovereignty.

“Energy sovereignty means every Tribal Nation has the right to determine its own energy future based on its priorities, values, and the needs of its community,” said Bill Bernier, Environmental Services Director for the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan. “Working together doesn’t diminish that sovereignty. It strengthens our collective ability to exercise it.”

For some Tribes, those decisions are urgent. “Energy sovereignty is no longer a theoretical concern for rural Tribal Nations like Bay Mills. It’s a daily reality,” said Whitney B. Gravelle, President of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “Stronger storms, high winds, ice events, and flooding are causing more frequent and longer outages that put our most vulnerable citizens at risk.

“The ongoing risks posed by the Line 5 dual pipelines make it clear that we cannot depend on aging external systems that threaten our homelands. Building our own energy systems, like our solar farm, allows us to create power that is stable, local, and designed for the conditions we actually live in.”

A few Tribes have been doing this work for decades. Others are just beginning. No single blueprint exists, and there shouldn’t be. What we share is the goal: that every Tribal Nation has the knowledge, capacity, and resources to decide its own energy future.

Long before anyone called this energy policy, our Nations moved knowledge the way we always have: through story. Stories carried instruction, warning, wisdom, and memory.

They still do. That is why MTERA is launching Tribal Energy Voices, a dedicated space for Tribal Nations to tell their own energy stories in their own words. Not case studies written about us, but firsthand accounts of what we tried, what failed, what held, and who stood beside us when it did.

Those stories deserve an audience beyond our own communities, and I believe every single one of us, including newsrooms, has a part to play in carrying them forward, because the decisions Tribal Nations are making about energy are shaping policy at the state, regional, and federal level.

Which brings me to what I would ask of you.

If you are non-Native, and you have never set foot on a reservation, and you are not certain which Tribal Nations reside in your state or what sovereignty actually means, that is not something to be embarrassed about.

The problem was never not knowing. The problem is allowing unfamiliarity to become a barrier to connection and understanding. Not knowing is natural; choosing not to learn or engage is how perspective and progress are lost.

Start somewhere. Learn whose ancestral homelands you reside on. Michigan is home to 12 federally recognized Tribal Nations, each with its own government, history, and cultural traditions.

Each is making its own decisions right now. When your utility, your employer, or your municipality holds a proceeding on energy, ask whether Tribal Nations were invited, and ask early enough that the answer can still change. And when you find a Tribal Nation already doing what your community is still debating, ask how it was done.

If you are Native and wondering where this work begins in your tribal community, it begins with a conversation. Reach out to your Tribal Council, ask how your community is approaching energy.

You can even reach out to us. We’d be happy to share how we created a coalition of Tribal Energy Leaders and partners working together to empower Tribes to manage their energy resources.

You could even share your story of how energy has impacted your life through our Tribal Energy Voices initiative.

The future of Tribal energy will not be built by one project or one funding cycle. We will build it through relationships that hold when funding does not. That is the power of collective action, and it is how we will keep building for our future generations.

Planet Detroit’s Voices column includes opinion pieces from our community of partners and readers. These pieces express the voices of the authors and not necessarily those of the publication.

MORE PLANET DETROIT VOICES

Daniel Wiggins Jr. is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe/Chippewa and currently serves as the executive director of the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association (MTERA).