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A
decades-old pipeline called Line 3, run by the Canadian company
Enbridge,
is in the midst of a controversial upgrade sparking fierce resistance
from Indigenous communities living along the route. Line 3 is being
replaced to enable the transport of nearly
800,000 barrels
of dirty tar sands crude oil per day from Calgary, Canada, to
Wisconsin. The majority of the pipeline cuts across northern
Minnesota through the heart
of lands where the Anishinaabe people
have treaty rights to hunt, fish and harvest wild rice and maple
syrup.
Line
3 joins a growing list of controversial oil pipeline projects
targeted by the burgeoning Indigenous-led climate justice movement.
In his last year in office, President Barack Obama responded to the
powerful
and internationally hailed convergence
at Standing Rock in South Dakota by halting
work on the Dakota Access Pipeline project.
Almost a year earlier, he had canceled the Keystone
XL pipeline—which
was another major target of climate protesters. Entering office in
January 2017, President Donald Trump promptly revived
both projects
and eventually greenlit the Line 3 pipeline. Once Joe Biden entered
the White House in early 2021, he canceled the doomed Keystone
Pipeline
but has yet to take action on reversing Trump’s approval of
DAPL
or canceling the Line
3 project.
Indigenous
leaders, embodying the spirit of Standing Rock five years ago, have
been resisting the Line 3 replacement project and are now calling on
all Americans, including those who are not Indigenous, to join them
for what is being called a “Treaty
People Gathering”
from June 5 through 8 to demand an end to the project. One of them is
Nancy Beaulieu, co-founder of the Resilient
Indigenous Sisters Engaging
(RISE) Coalition, and the northern Minnesota organizer for 350.org.
Beaulieu explained to me in an interview
that, “as Indigenous people, we have the inherent
responsibility to protect the waters and all that is sacred. And as
settlers—people who signed those treaties with our
ancestors—they have an obligation to uphold those treaties.”
In other words, “everyone has a responsibility to the treaties”
signed with tribal nations.
Non-Indigenous
Americans have largely forgotten not only that we have treaty
obligations, but also that we live in a nation with a bloody history
of settler colonialism. Former Republican Senator Rick
Santorum
demonstrated that ignorance in his tone-deaf comments on CNN—which
later got him fired—when he said, “We birthed a nation
from nothing. Yes, there were Native Americans, but there isn’t
much Native American culture in American culture.”
Leaders
like Beaulieu are determined to fight such erasure by reviving the
conversations around treaty obligations and how the fight against
pipelines and climate change is central to Indigenous stewardship of
the natural world. She sees the June gathering as building on the
Standing Rock mobilization and the Keystone pipeline activism, saying
it is “the same exact thing but with different tribes.”
According
to Beaulieu, President Biden could cancel the Line 3 project with
“the stroke of a pen,” and she is perplexed about why he
doesn’t just do so. When the president convened a virtual
climate summit in April with dozens of world leaders, he pledged
to slash the U.S.'s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in less
than a decade. That is an enormously ambitious goal—one that
would only be helped by cancelation of the Line 3 pipeline project.
“Not
only should Biden stop Line 3 but he should also step in and stop
these corporate giants responsible for the mess they're leaving us in
this beautiful country of ours," said Beaulieu. Instead, she
worries that "corporations are just buying their way through
lobbying our politicians."
When
politicians do stand in their way, companies like Enbridge respond
with shocking impunity. Take the case of Michigan
where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year demanded the closure of another
decades-old pipeline run by Enbridge called Line 5. That pipeline,
first
built in 1953,
carries more than half a million barrels of crude oil per day under
the Great Lakes and has had dozens of leaks over the years, spilling
more than a million barrels across its length. Michigan’s Great
Lakes hold more than a fifth of the entire world’s fresh
surface water and remain in jeopardy as the aging Line 5 pipeline
continues to operate. Rather than comply with Gov. Whitmer’s
order, Enbridge, backed by the Canadian government, simply refused to
shut it down.
Enbridge
is taking a similarly defiant position in northern Minnesota with its
continuation of the Line 3 replacement project in the face of mass
opposition. Shockingly, the company is even going as far as
anticipating police responses to protesters by paying
into an escrow account
to reimburse local Minnesota law enforcement departments for costs
related to policing the resistance. In other words, a Canadian fossil
fuel corporation is essentially hiring public servants to protect
their private financial interests against the public.
Pipelines
leak. That fact is as inevitable as greenhouse gas emissions fueling
climate change. The United States has the largest
number of pipelines,
both existing and planned, than any other nation on the planet.
According to Greenpeace,
Enbridge’s pipelines have leaked hundreds of times, spilled
millions of gallons of hazardous material, and contaminated water at
least 30 times. The original Line 3 project suffered the largest
inland oil spill in the nation’s history in Minnesota in 1991,
and Enbridge’s Michigan Line 5 pipeline dumped hundreds of
thousands of barrels of tar sands into the Kalamazoo River in 2010.
So, when Indigenous leaders like Beaulieu say their treaty rights to
pristine land and water are threatened by Line 3, the facts are on
their side.
While
the fate of our planet and human life remains precarious in the face
of ongoing emissions and a changing climate, fossil fuel companies
have been laughing all the way to the bank. According to one
analysis, since 1990, when the impact of emissions on the climate was
well established, the top four largest oil and gas companies on the
planet accumulated
nearly $2 trillion in profits.
“It’s about power,” said Beaulieu. “It’s
about the 1 percent and who’s going to be in charge of our
government.”
However,
the climate justice movement is slowly winning. A Dutch
court
recently ordered Royal Dutch Shell—one of those top four
profitable companies—to slash its emissions by 45 percent by
the year 2030 in a remarkable and historic case that could inspire
similar legal challenges to other oil and gas companies. Another one
of the big four—ExxonMobil,
which is the U.S.’s most profitable oil corporation—is
being challenged internally by an investor shareholder who ousted two
board members over the company’s climate policies. It was the
first time such a thing happened, prompting one analyst to exclaim,
“Investors have sent a shot across the bow of Exxon, but its
impact will ricochet across the boards of every major fossil fuel
company.”
Joining
such efforts are on-the-ground movements like the one opposing the
Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. As she prepares for the mass gathering
in June, Beaulieu told me, “we are going to peacefully resist
this pipeline, and we’re calling on all our allies across
Turtle Island to come here to northern Minnesota,” using the
Native
American term
for North America. “Treaties don’t only protect us as
Native people. They protect those people that signed the treaties as
well,” she added.
This
article was produced by Economy
for All,
a
project of the Independent Media Institute.
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