"The day the Golden Acorn casino opened in August 2001, Monique LaChappa stood right near the sliding glass doors and watched as members of her tribe came in for their first look.

"I just watched everyone come in and I just — just the look on the tribal members' faces that day — it was so exciting," she said.

The casino changed everything for the Campo Kumeyaay Nation, a small tribe in the desert mountains east of San Diego. It bought a fire department, educational programs and jobs. But in a slumped economy, one modest casino isn’t enough to sustain the Campo, especially when about half of the 329 tribal members are unemployed.

So the Campo Kuemyaay Nation has turned to a new source of income: generating electricity.

The Campo reservation is home to what locals call Kumeyaay 1. It's a wind farm, the only large-scale renewable energy plant on Indian land in the country. The 25 turbines, which went online in 2005, provide electricity to up to 35,000 homes in San Diego County. LaChappa, who serves as tribal chairwoman, says the wind farm has changed the way tribal members think about their reservation.

The wind farm is an enormous source of pride for the Campo, but monetarily, it hasn’t changed much, in part because the Campo don’t own it — they just lease the land.

Now the tribe is in negotiations to build another wind project — three times the size of Kumeyaay 1. This time, they plan to go in as investors, along with a private energy firm and the local utility. While all sides are tight-lipped about the numbers, the electricity produced by that plant would be worth about $24 million a year on today’s market. Whatever the tribe's cut, members say it would be considerably more than they make now as leaseholders."

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Tribal Lands Struggle To Bring Clean Power Online (NPR 8/20)