Why Indigenous women are risking arrest to fight Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline through Minnesota
Atquetzali Quiroz with Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dances at a Stop Line 3 Rally in St. Paul, MN during the summer of 2017. (Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle)
Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline construction is running into tribal resistance over fears of water pollution, wild rice impacts, climate change, and exploitation of Native women.
An extensive and beautiful piece written by Hilary Beaumont with photos by Jaida Grey Eagle
QUOTED HERE FROM SOURCE
On Dec. 14, Simone Senogles of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota watched as machines chewed up the forest to clear a path to the Mississippi River where Enbridge plans to bury the Line 3 pipeline.
Weeks earlier, the state and federal government granted its final permits. Her friend's nephew sat 30 feet above in a tree. A cherry picker rolled forward to extract him.
Senogles, a leadership team member for the Indigenous Environmental Network who fought the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, knew the Line 3 opposition had other strategies in place — court challenges, divestment campaigns — but in that moment she felt "a tremendous sense of responsibility." She said she locked arms with about 20 other water protectors, hoping to slow the cherry picker, but dozens of police wrestled them to the frozen ground and arrested them.
Senogles was charged with unlawful assembly and trespassing. She said it felt insulting. "It's Anishinaabe land," she told EHN, referring to a group of Indigenous people whose traditional homeland stretches from the East Coast through the Great Lakes to the Midwest. "Enbridge is the trespasser, they are the criminal, and they were aided by law enforcement who are supposed to be protecting us, but instead they were protecting a corporation."
After a six-year-long permitting process, Enbridge contractors in Minnesota are building Line 3, the largest project in the company's history. If completed, it will carry 760,000 barrels of oil per day from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin, at the tip of Lake Superior, the planet's largest freshwater lake by surface area. Police from the Northern Lights Task Force, Minnesota police officers funded by Enbridge as a condition of state permits, have arrested 72 Indigenous people and allies since construction began Dec. 1, according to task force press releases. Water protectors have put their bodies on the line, building six resistance camps along the pipeline route, chaining themselves to equipment and camping in trees.
Opponents say the threats from the pipeline are many: thousands of construction workers, many from out-of-state, are building the pipeline, posing potential violence to Indigenous women. The pipeline will also contribute to climate change, emitting the equivalent greenhouse gases of 50 coal power plants or 38 million vehicles, according to a report by climate action group MN350. In Minnesota, the pipeline would cross under 200 bodies of water, passing through wetlands where wild rice, a traditional Ojibwe food, grows. The pipeline will carry diluted bitumen, a heavy oil that sinks in water, making it harder to clean up.
At a pivotal moment for global climate action, Line 3 opponents are privately meeting with President Joe Biden administration officials via video calls and publicly demanding they cancel the project. In his first week as president, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and signed an executive order vowing to address the climate crisis as part of domestic and foreign policy. Biden also promised to respect tribal rights. However, his administration has remained silent on Line 3.
Line 3 construction is paused due to muddy spring conditions, but Enbridge told EHN work will resume in June. At an April energy symposium, Enbridge CEO Al Monaco said Line 3 is on schedule to be completed by the end of the year.
After a six-year-long permitting process, Enbridge contractors in Minnesota are building Line 3, the largest project in the company's history. If completed, it will carry 760,000 barrels of oil per day from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin, at the tip of Lake Superior, the planet's largest freshwater lake by surface area. Police from the Northern Lights Task Force, Minnesota police officers funded by Enbridge as a condition of state permits, have arrested 72 Indigenous people and allies since construction began Dec. 1, according to task force press releases. Water protectors have put their bodies on the line, building six resistance camps along the pipeline route, chaining themselves to equipment and camping in trees.
Opponents say the threats from the pipeline are many: thousands of construction workers, many from out-of-state, are building the pipeline, posing potential violence to Indigenous women. The pipeline will also contribute to climate change, emitting the equivalent greenhouse gases of 50 coal power plants or 38 million vehicles, according to a report by climate action group MN350. In Minnesota, the pipeline would cross under 200 bodies of water, passing through wetlands where wild rice, a traditional Ojibwe food, grows. The pipeline will carry diluted bitumen, a heavy oil that sinks in water, making it harder to clean up.
At a pivotal moment for global climate action, Line 3 opponents are privately meeting with President Joe Biden administration officials via video calls and publicly demanding they cancel the project. In his first week as president, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and signed an executive order vowing to address the climate crisis as part of domestic and foreign policy. Biden also promised to respect tribal rights. However, his administration has remained silent on Line 3.
Line 3 construction is paused due to muddy spring conditions, but Enbridge told EHN work will resume in June. At an April energy symposium, Enbridge CEO Al Monaco said Line 3 is on schedule to be completed by the end of the year.
Atquetzali Quiroz during the Paddle to Protect, a youth led canoe 250 mile journey to raise awareness on Enbridge's Line 3 and it's impacts on the land, water and culture. (Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle)
If you ask Ojibwe people on the frontlines, the story begins thousands of years ago, when they migrated to the land now called Minnesota.
"The Creator told our people to come here, where the food grows on the water, which is wild rice," Tara Houska, Ojibwe tribal attorney from Couchiching First Nation and founder of frontline resistance group Giniw Collective, told EHN.
Called "manoomin" in Ojibwe, wild rice grows in shallow water with tall reed-like stems ending in flowers that ripen into grains. Harvesting is a two-person job, explained Tania Aubid from Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe: one steers the canoe while the other uses wood tools called "knockers" to gently tap the plants so rice grains fall into the boat.
In the 1800s, as settlers entered Ojibwe territory seeking resources, chiefs signed 44 treaties with the federal government that ceded the land and created reservations. They signed some treaties under threat of starvation, and others because they saw the value of trade and peace, Ojibwe tribal attorney Frank Bibeau told EHN. The treaties are contracts that created the state of Minnesota, and also guaranteed rights to Ojibwe people, including hunting, gathering and fishing. The right to harvest wild rice is enshrined in the White Pine Treaty of 1837. In 1999, a Supreme Court affirmed the state must respect Ojibwe treaty rights.
Chinoodin Goodsky during the Paddle to Protect, a youth led canoe 250 mile journey to raise awareness on Enbridge's Line 3 and it's impacts on the land, water and culture. (Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle)
The original Line 3 pipeline was built in the 1960s, decades before the court ordered the state to honor the treaties, Bibeau said. The pipeline pumped 760,000 barrels of oil per day, but over the decades, Line 3 corroded, cracked, and leaked. In 2008, following dangerous incidents including oil spills into wetlands and an explosion that killed two Enbridge workers, the company reduced its capacity by half, to 390,000 barrels per day.
In 2015, Enbridge announced that, because Line 3 required too much maintenance, it would replace the pipeline to restore its original capacity of 760,000 barrels per day. Although the company calls it a replacement project, the new Line 3 does not trace the same path as the original — it takes a detour south through untouched lands, waters, and wild rice habitat.
For example, the new route will cross under Shell River four times, according to Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor The Earth. Shell River is one of a handful of waterways the new Line 3 will cross that are home to wild rice, according to opponents.
Wild rice grows differently from one body of water to another, Houska explained, and major environmental changes will affect the sensitive plant. To build Line 3, Enbridge plans to dredge and fill wetlands where wild rice grows. Introducing fill material will dramatically change its habitat, Houska said. The state's environmental review acknowledged wild rice "is extremely sensitive to chemical pollutants" such as oil spills.
Already, Ojibwe people are noticing climate impacts on wild rice. Dawn Goodwin, from the White Earth Reservation, said wild rice needs consistent water levels in the spring, but Minnesota has seen an increase in storms and torrential rain. "Two years ago we got so much water that it didn't ripen well," she told EHN. "That puts our life ways in danger because it's all connected."
First, environmental groups and tribes have filed another appeal of the EIS. In a twist, the Minnesota Commerce Department has also appealed the commission's decision, arguing the EIS didn't investigate whether there is enough long-term demand for oil through Line 3.
"What they did was absurdly thin," Nasmith, who is not involved in the case, said of the EIS. "So the parties have sued them again for not actually doing what the court told them to do the first time." She said a judge is expected to issue a decision in June.
Enbridge told EHN the review process was "robust and thorough," with 70 public hearings, a 13,500 page EIS, four reviews by administrative law judges, and 320 route changes. "The regulatory process was transparent and inclusive of thousands of Minnesotans, including the same parties who are appealing our permits," Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner wrote in an email.
EarthJustice, representing environmental groups and tribes, has also filed two other court challenges, one in state court and one in federal court, in an attempt to overturn permits under the Clean Water Act. Both the state and the federal Army Corps of Engineers reviewed whether Line 3 would comply with water quality regulations under the Clean Water Act, and in November, they issued permits to Enbridge. The company said the Army Corps of Engineers review included consultation with 30 tribes. But Nasmith argues the state and federal reviews failed to consider how a bitumen spill would affect the Lake Superior watershed, including the fish and the tribes who rely on them for survival.
She pointed to the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill from an Enbridge pipeline in Michigan — one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history. "If [a spill] were to happen, what does that mean?" she asked. "Answering that question of what that means hasn't been done here — at all."
A decision in the state Clean Water Act case is months away, she said, and the federal case won't be decided before fall.
Scenes from a campsite at the headwaters of the Mississippi River the day before the kick off of the Paddle to Protect summer of 2017. (Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle)