It was at Standing Rock, as 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, decided he would build a solar farm.
"I realised I didn't want to just talk about it, protest about it," he says, reflecting on the months-long protests that took place in 2016, to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline from being built on sacred tribal land. "I wanted to be about it."
At the time, Two Bears was on the tribal council of the Cannon Ball community of Standing Rock. He was a key member in organising the pipeline protests, which had hoped to prevent a 1,172 mile (1,886km) long underground pipe to transport crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The pipeline was eventually built despite multiple appeals to have the line shut down. However, a lawsuit brought by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was successful, requiring a complete environmental review of the pipeline.
"I learned about the impacts of fossil fuels on communities like ours, who don't really have a voice," says Two Bears. "And it seems these large infrastructural projects always happen in places of low-status communities. And one came to my back yard."
When Two Bears left politics in 2017, he formed Indigenized Energy – a native-led energy company installing solar farms for tribal nations – free of charge. Not only have tribes struggled to tap into the billions in renewable energy incentives offered by the government, they've struggled to have access to any electricity at all.