Hydropanels Bring Water to Navajo Nation

In the Navajo Nation, sometimes a single spigot on an empty road is the only water source around for hundreds of residents. Others have to drive from their rural homes into towns miles away to buy all the water they need for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and livestock, because there's no infrastructure to bring it through pipes. About 40% of households in the Navajo Nation live without running water. But now, at a few houses, panels positioned on the ground pull moisture from the air, connecting to a tap inside the home and providing up to 10 liters of water -- or about 20 16-ounce bottles -- a day, at no cost to the family.

The panels come from Zero Mass Water; the company's Source hydropanels use sunlight to absorb water vapor from the air, even in arid climates. Zero Mass Water partnered with local Navajo governments and Navajo Power, a public benefit corporation working to install solar panels on tribal lands, for an initial demonstration project in which 15 homes received two Source panels each, for a total of 30 panels. Those initial panels were funded by Barclays and The Unreasonable Group, an accelerator for socially minded startups.

Each Source hydropanel can make up to 3 to 5 liters of water a day; with two panels, a home can get up to 10 liters a day, and each panel can store 30 liters of water, or 60 16-ounce bottles of water, for when cloud cover may affect production. The panels last for 15 years.

The Navajo Nation has at points during the pandemic had the highest COVID-19 infection rate per capita in the U.S., worsened by the fact that residents can't easily access water to wash their hands and have to make frequent trips into town to buy water. Zero Mass Water first started communicating with the Navajo Nation about three years ago, but the pandemic has heightened the urgency for this partnership. The company worked with chapter leaders -- the Navajo Nation has 110 chapters, which are geographical divisions like counties -- to find the people most in need.

"Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream"

"Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream" is the latest music release from Native American artist Louie Gonnie. Gonnie is Dine from the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Gonnie admired his father and uncles and wanted to be like them so he began to sing in the Native American Church. He is also a well rounded artist, expressing himself in music, art and writing.

Gonnie started singing for family and friends. Eventually, people were recording his music and he realized that he could have a career as a recording artist. His albums started out as Peyote songs of the Native American Church. Since then he has created a more contemporary style.

Gonnie is the exemplar of a creative artist. While very much a part of Dine traditions and very much living its values, Gonnie has an artist's desire to find personal expression within the world of his community. His first two recordings -- Sacred Mountains and Elements (my personal favorite) -- were explorations of the music of the Navajo people in which traditional experience was the foundation for this artist's unique music.

Gonnie's latest album, "Rhythms Within A Turquoise Dream," is a direct return to his roots in the Native American Church. The recording of peyote songs is always a controversial issue within the Native American Church. Some practitioners feel that the songs, as they are intrinsic to a sacred ritual, should never be recorded, while many others feel that recordings are important for disseminating their songs throughout the community.

Even as he lives in respect for NAC values, Gonnie takes the songs for the peyote ritual to a new place. While his song forms are very traditional, the means of producing those songs (extensive studio multi-tracking) is not. Nonetheless Gonnie's compositions and layered harmonies are reverent, spiritual, and achieve transcendence. Anchored by a water drum and sustained by waves of his flowing vocals, Gonnie leads an inner voyage from dreams to actuality, from earth to sky and from the past to eternity.