The effort by Minnesota’s Indigenous communities to achieve energy sovereignty is gathering pace.

In the shadow of Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island nuclear power plant, the Prairie Island Indian Community now generates much of its electricity from onsite solar installations.

Near the headwaters of the Mississippi, the White Earth Nation oversees one of the country’s only tribal utility commissions, giving it real leverage over local, non-Native utilities.

The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe is arguably the most important customer of — and a key decision-making authority for — Minnesota’s third biggest rural electric cooperative.

The tribes seeking energy sovereignty face a stiff challenge, however, in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back clean energy progress, as well as the White House’s apparent disregard for Indigenous communities.

Still, the work goes on: Bob Blake, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and owner of a Minneapolis energy development company, helped secure a pre-Trump federal grant to set up a “tribal virtual utility” on the Red Lake Reservation in far northern Minnesota. He retained a blue-chip “tax and assurance firm” to lay the legal groundwork for a new electric provider in a strictly regulated state where utility territories are set more or less in stone. The utility would purchase cheap, renewable power and deliver it to customers without spending huge sums on its own power plants.