Minnesota’s Lower Sioux Indian Community is pioneering green building with its fully integrated hempcrete facility – a first in the country
To start, it was still illegal to grow hemp – the non-psychoactive strain of Cannabis sativa – in the US. Importing it from overseas was prohibitively expensive. But Pendleton, a member of the Lower Sioux Indian Community, was intrigued by early research that showed hemp could be transformed into non-toxic construction materials that allow for faster build times and result in low-carbon, energy-efficient houses.
“A roof over our people’s heads’: the Indigenous US tribe building hempcrete homes”
Which was exactly what he saw his tribe needed at the time. Roughly half of the tribal nation’s enrolled members – about 1,120 people – are currently in need of housing. With his encouragement, the community started experimenting with hemp as a housing construction material – also known as hempcrete – back in 2016, even before it was decriminalized in the US. This month, the tribal nation is set to open the first vertically integrated hempcrete facility in the nation, complete with its own growing operation.
Although the concept of creating affordable, environmentally responsible homes – and in turn, jobs – for the Lower Sioux seemed like a no-brainer, getting things off the ground was quite the undertaking. The tribal nation first needed to develop an agricultural program, invest in equipment and set up a basic processing facility without many strong models out there to emulate.
When the Lower Sioux’s 20,000-sq-ft, $6.2m onsite facility opens in April, the tribal nation will become a leader in the growing green building movement.
