A Green Guide for Native Americans
Mesa Verde, in the southwest corner of what is now Colorado, was home to the Pueblo people for 700 years. It's an example of sustainable building practices in which a native people produced durable and comfortable housing with locally sourced materials--goals the new green housing toolkit would try to revive in tribal housing.
Representatives of tribal nations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have produced a guide designed to help tribal nations recreate the sustainable-building practices that once were a hallmark of tribal housing.
Native Americans were the first green architects and builders on the continent, the toolkit's introduction points out, basing their designs for housing on cultural values informed by an "intimate knowledge" of place, climate, resources, and technology.
"Traditionally, tribes built structures from local resources and without written codes," the document continues. "These structures were safe, healthy, and energy and water efficient."
Modern tribal housing, however, often isn't as successful, in part because tribal nations are sovereign, and not subject to state or local building codes, and typically don't have the resources to develop green-building codes of their own.
There are some 2.1 million tribal housing units in the U.S., according to the Toolkit, more than 8% of which are considered overcrowded. Nearly 3% of all tribal households lack plumbing facilities (five times the proportion of all U.S. households), with a similar share of tribal housing lacking complete kitchen facilities.