It was at Standing Rock, when he watched a fellow protester be cuffed and manhandled into a police car, that Cody Two Bears, member of the Sioux tribe in North Dakota, determined he would create a solar farm.
He remarks, “I realized I didn’t want to just talk about it, protest about it,” recalling the months-long demonstrations that happened in 2016 to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from being built on ancestral territory of the Native Americans. “I wanted to be about it.”
Two Bears served on the Standing Rock tribe council at the time, representing the Cannon Ball neighborhood. He played a major role in planning the pipeline demonstrations, which aimed to stop the construction of an underground pipeline that would have carried crude oil 1,172 miles (1,886 km).
