Photograph by David Scott Smith/RightImage

“Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today; teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.” That’s the philosophy behind the Red Feather Development Group, a nonprofit organization based in Bozeman, Montana, which works with Native Americans to enable them to build straw-bale houses on reservations. Robert Young, once a successful garment industry executive in Seattle, founded the operation in 1994 after reading a newspaper article about three Native elders who froze to death because of substandard housing. record spoke to Young as he and his staff prepared for a build last July on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota.

Q: Why are you using straw-bale construction for your projects?

Straw-bale structures are energy-efficient and cost a fraction to heat compared to typical houses on tribal lands. We try to design the structures in such a way that volunteers and nonskilled labor can handle much of the construction themselves. And the homes also make use of local resources. On the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico, tribal members formed a company called the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry. They’re baling wheat grown on the reservation and selling it for a profit to local builders. We’ll be using bales from this company in our construction project in North Dakota next month.

You’ve built mostly houses, but the North Dakota project is a little different. Can you share some details?

We’ll be working with Turtle Mountain Community College to build an environmental research center. It’s about 1,600 square feet, the largest project we’ve done so far. The center’s going to highlight straw-bale-construction techniques and other environmental concerns that face that community, like water conservation and reducing pesticide use in farming. The project will allow them, hopefully, to teach straw-bale-construction methods at the tribal college. The community has lost about a third of their homes due to black-mold infestation, and they already had significant housing problems to begin with. If all goes as planned, they’ll be able to rebuild their housing stock using straw-bale techniques.

How do you choose which tribes to work with?

Right now we’re focused on assisting the Northern Cheyenne tribes in the Plains states, as well as building a coalition among tribes in the southwestern U.S. Those are locations where the climate makes it feasible to build straw-bale homes—cold and dry or hot and dry. These areas also have the greatest need for new housing. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, for instance, where we did our first project, 40 percent of the homes have no running water, and many lack electricity. Through building these structures, we want to establish programs that can be managed by tribal members themselves, so they can oversee the construction of houses or other buildings for their communities.

What do you find most rewarding about this work?

If we can give tribal members a tool for turning housing into a self-sufficient enterprise, we’re achieving a big part of our goal. Most of these people live in extreme poverty. If they had energy-efficient homes, they’d have more money for food, clothing, education. By fulfilling one need—adequate housing—the ripple effect is enormous.