EnerTribe is a 15-year-old consulting firm with the tagline, “Built by Indian Country for Indian Country.” It specializes in assisting tribal governments and businesses with planning, funding, permitting, engineering, and construction of infrastructure projects of all types. Though a key focus has been on telecommunications and broadband, it has also spearheaded projects for water, sustainable and renewable energy, etc. Its services have funded over $950 million for infrastructure projects exclusive to Indigenous people.
“EnerTribe was founded from a need of just solving problems,” says Forest James, founder and CEO, an enrolled citizen of the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation. “The services we provide have three audiences: Indigenous governments and businesses – so Native American governments in the U.S. and First Nations, which spans aboriginal territories and Indigenous communities in Canada. The second is state and federal agencies that utilize us as a resource, and then nonprofit and for-profit companies and investment firms that also use us as a resource. You can summarize what we do by saying ‘We help plan, fund, engineer, permit to construct and operate infrastructure projects.’”
The Ashland, Oregon-based consultancy is divided into three companies, with the employees working mostly remotely. EnerTribe Infrastructure is the largest, with 18 full-time employees and about 36 subcontractors. Its primary focus is telecommunications, mainly broadband but it also works with power and water systems.
“Broadband is where we got our start,” says James. “Our name comes from when we got a couple of million dollars from the USDA for a waste biomass conversion project. We went with Energy plus Tribe, and then we got started in agriculture and sustainable energy.”
Early on, EnerTribe staff traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada and met with Indigenous leaders to learn their needs up close. James says they were originally hyper-focused on telecommunications, but they really focused on tribes.
“They were our customers,” he says. “My cofounder, Ron Flavin, was an Apache native who sadly passed away from COVID-19 several years ago, but he had brought in just under a half a billion dollars in infrastructure funding for tribes and he said, ‘Forest, you know we bring in funding for telecommunications projects and that’s great but we can bring in a lot more if we help tribes complete what’s called a ‘comprehensive economic development strategy.’ That’s the complicated way of saying their ‘five-year plan, top to bottom.’”
This includes not just telecommunications but energy, education, law enforcement, government, and enterprise.
“When we changed our perspective, it changed our customers. Suddenly, state and federal agencies recognized our new focus and brought us in for project stabilization. Then, for-profit companies, providers like fiberoptic and cellular providers, and utilities brought us in for project stabilization – permitting, tribal outreach and engagement, etc. It’s a little complicated, but we explain it by saying, “We’re the guys who do all the boring paperwork.”
About one-fifth of tribal residents lack broadband access, and thus, remote areas often stay disconnected. Why is it so difficult to get much-needed infrastructure to those areas? The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) cites the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), “Geographic remoteness, a lack of necessary infrastructure, complex permitting processes on tribal lands, and jurisdictional conflicts between state governments and sovereign tribal governments create additional burdens to broadband deployment that are unique to Indian Country.”
“You can go 45 minutes outside of San Diego and find tribes with no cell phone service,” says James. “Some don’t have water, and some don’t have internet, and COVID-19 showed us how detrimental it was to our communities to not have internet. Healthcare was out the window because you couldn’t do telehealth. There was no distance learning, so our kids were missing school, and teachers were driving sometimes an hour and a half each way just to drop off homework at their students’ homes. Updating COVID-19 statistics during the pandemic. I’m from the Talawade Nation, which straddles the Oregon/California border. My cousins are the Yurok and the Hoopa. Some Yurok members drove two hours each way to update physical signs with the latest COVID statistics.”
Operating a government during the pandemic was extremely difficult, and without internet connectivity, even more so. EnerTribe staff was brought in as essential workers and worked through the pandemic throughout the U.S.
“I like to say we made it because I hired people a lot smarter than me,” says James. “Throughout my career, I’ve had a lot of great mentors. I spent 12 years in the film and entertainment industry and it was those mentors who led me to this. My former business partner Bill McDonald wrote and produced the TV show Rome on HBO, and he always brought me under his wing for business opportunities. My buddy had just purchased Steven Spielberg’s old company, DTS. Together we built a product and a company that solved wireless communications problems throughout the world.”
He traveled the country to survey tribal nations to determine their needs and began to focus on the most urgent needs, such as telecommunications. All infrastructure quickly followed, including fiber optics, wireless, water, and power.
“It’s great to get water to a community, but you truly see the value when you wash your hands, you cook a meal, you water your garden,” he says. “It’s the same thing with broadband. It’s how it’s used that makes it so valuable. I found those mentors, and then I found more skilled people, and we hired them. Today, it’s why we’re successful. I have little to do with why we’ve done quite well and brought in just about a billion dollars this year in infrastructure funding because of my team.”
Economic development is imperative not just for those living on tribal lands but for all the citizens who would like to return to their communities. Many move away to get an education or pursue a professional career. Economic development empowers businesses large and small, which means jobs and economic independence.
“We want to bring our tribal citizens home but to do that, we have to have the opportunities,” he says. “We can’t bring them home without offering these basic resources. The Internet opens the world to them. I mean, I watched a woman who traveled to school 60-70 miles each way, 3-4 days a week. She had to hire a babysitter for her kids. Suddenly, when we brought the internet to the community, she could do it online. Immediately, her quality of life improved immediately.”
One of the greatest challenges for EnerTribe is navigating and bridging the vastly different structures of tribal governments. They have different rules, bylaws, and priorities, so what worked for one may be a difficult obstacle for another.
“For indigenous leaders, ‘profitable’ doesn’t just mean you’re in the black, it also means there’s jobs created and that there’s education,” says James. “I grew up on a reservation and wanted to be exposed to an industry to learn. We’re very tactile learners. If we can see and do someone doing a profession, we soak it up and learn very quickly. One industry that has created tribal jobs is mobile units that remove microplastics from water.”
Another project the company is facilitating is a wind farm outside of Manhattan and micro-battery factories on reservations where the tribes have ownership. Tribal members do the assembly, and then they sell them to industries such as solar farms and wind farms. They can also be used for energy storage for their sustainable power projects.
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