Stopping Trump’s Last Pipeline Will Take All of Us to Stop Line 3.
by Winona LaDuke
Photo by Sarah LittleRedfeather - “On the bank of the Mississippi in the pathway of the pipeline, there is a prayer lodge, a waaginoogan, a ceremonial teaching lodge, and we have been praying there. We’ve built lodges like this on the shores of the river for generations. We built the lodge before Enbridge.”
A report from occupied Palisade, where Water Protectors confront a dying, but still deadly, energy behemoth.
The Mississippi River where we are making our stand against one of the largest tar sands pipeline projects in North America. Known as Line 3, it has the potential to carry 915,000 barrels a day of dirty oil over 1000 miles, from Alberta in Canada to Superior, Wis.
Palisade is the kind of place where most people know one another a couple of generations back, a town with a tiny main street and just one café. Now there are about 400 workers here—most from out of state—rolling heavy trucks and equipment down icy, windy unfamiliar roads every day.
This small town is nestled in the deep woods and muskegs of Aitkin County, the lands of the Chippewa of the Mississippi, as my people are known. Akiing, the Anishinaabe word for “the land to which the people belong,” is half land and half water.
Waters deep and shallow filled with wild rice, sturgeon and muskies, and all the mysteries of the deep waters. This is the only place in the world where wild rice grows. Each year in succession the manoomin returns, the only grain native to North America. This is the homeland of the Anishinaabe.
And here Enbridge, the largest pipeline company in the world, is hell-bent on jamming through their Line 3 Pipeline, the company’s most massive project, under the cover of this
Photo by keripickett
From the Water Protector Center at the edge of the pipeline route, Water Protectors gather. We hear the pounding all day long. The constant roar of heavy machinery as it rips through the forest and the wetlands. It’s brutal work, and dangerous as hell. Two weeks ago, Jorge Lopez Villafuerte was killed in the Enbridge Pipeyard, run over by a forklift.
He came here from Utah for work. Instead, he found death. Enbridge halted work in the area for less than four hours— and then the pounding began again.
Photo by Sarah LittleRedfeather - Jan. 9, 2021 at the location where Jorge Lopez Villafuerte was killed.
Then there’s the armed forces, the sheriff’s office, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) who have deployed here. Their wages are paid by Enbridge.
That’s because Minnesota noted the $38 million bill for Standing Rock, and decided just to pay in advance. A Canadian corporation paying for the police in Minnesota.
It looks like an occupation. It feels like an occupation. With all the violence that entails.
First the big dozers came, then the excavators, backhoes, and buncher fellers. That last one just sort of walks through the forest, beheads a tree, drops the top to one side, and then comes back for the rest of the tree. This is how Enbridge rolls through a forest. They are gunning for the rivers now, heading straight for them: the Mississippi, the Willow, the Shell, the Little Shell, the Crow Wing: 22 rivers crossings in all. They are coming with something called a High Directional Drill. So they can drill under the river, just like they did at Standing Rock, at the Cannonball River. It feels a lot like a rape.
Photo by Sarah LittleRedfeather - Jan. 9, 2021 at the location where Jorge Lopez Villafuerte was killed.
They don’t want us to see what they are doing. Last week, they put up a fence around the drill site. They plan to shove in that 36-inch pipe, so it can move 915,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest oil in the world across 330 miles of Northern Minnesota to Lake Superior.
We have been fighting this pipeline for seven years. And so far we’ve held it off in the courts and through the permitting process. The carbon output would be equivalent to opening 50 new coal plants—more carbon emissions than the entire current Minnesota economy. And all this for a dying industry. Energy companies and investors are fleeing the tar sands. Keystone XL is doomed, Dakota Access is in a legal mess (federal courts have ruled that its Environmental
Enbridge would like to start flooding the north country with oil, as quick as it can. The Red Lake and White Earth tribes and even the Minnesota Department of Commerce have filed suit in state courts to overturn all the permits on this pipeline. On Christmas Eve, we filed in Federal court to overturn the Army Corps of Engineers’ permits to cross the rivers. There has been no federal Environmental Impact Statement. We have a pretty good chance of prevailing in court. So Enbridge wants to finish this dirty work before the law comes.
UPDATE: February 8, 2021
Federal Court Allows Harmful Line 3 Oil Project to Continue
Minnesota Tribes press case to halt harm to waterways (read here)
On the bank of the Mississippi in the pathway of the pipeline, there is a prayer lodge, a waaginoogan, a ceremonial teaching lodge, and we have been praying there. We’ve built lodges like this on the shores of the river for generations. We built the lodge before Enbridge.
Photo by Sarah LittleRedfeather
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Tania Aubid and I returned to our lodge and found a stake in it, an Enbridge pipeline right-of-way stake. That was a surprise. One of the conditions of Enbridge’s permits is that they are supposed to have cultural monitors out ahead of the pipeline. But of course they didn’t. They just put a stake in the middle of the lodge.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources issued an “exclusion order” on December 5, excluding Minnesotans from public lands they had given to Enbridge.
Minnesota. We put up a “No Trespassing” sign with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act cited on it—USC 42. The lodge is still there. And so are we.
Not just in Palisade. Indigenous people and our allies are resisting across the whole pathway of this pipeline, from near the Red Lake Reservation in the Northwest, where a new camp just opened, to the Fond du Lac reservation on the eastern end, where Water Protectors have been disrupting the destruction everyday.
This past month we’ve been praying by the river, and asking others to come. And they have answered the call: legislators, friends from the cities, people of all religious faiths, relatives from South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, water protectors from all four directions to sing those Water Songs, as Enbridge drills.
Photo by itsdrw• Follow Saint Paul, Minnesota
The pipeline project is one month in, and already over 50 people have been arrested. Good people who put their bodies on the line because they believe in water more than oil. And more are coming every day.
We are digging in for the winter. After all, we’ve got good genes and warm clothes and being outside during the pandemic is a good idea. But, really, we are looking to Washington now. This is the Pandemic Pipeline Project, and it shouldn’t happen. It’s the end of the tar sands era.
Winona LaDuke Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, is an economist, environmentalist, activist, hemp farmer, author, and former Green Party VP candidate with Ralph Nader. She lives on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota.
To Be A Water Protector
The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers
PAPERBACK $25.00
Winona LaDuke is a leader in cultural-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, sustainable food systems and Indigenous rights. To Be a Water Protector, explores issues that have been central to her activism for many years — sacred Mother Earth, our despoiling of Earth and the activism at Standing Rock and opposing Line 3.
For this book, Winona discusses several elements of a New Green Economy and the lessons we can take from activists outside the US and Canada. In her unique way of storytelling, Winona LaDuke is inspiring, always a teacher and an utterly fearless activist, writer and speaker.
This book is written in the spirit of acknowledging that Water is Life. This book is a testimony of the resistance and defeat of the Wiindigoo. The term, “Water Protector,” became mainstream under a hail of rubber bullets at Standing Rock. This book is about that spirit, and that spirit is forever.
I am pairing this book “To Be a water Protector,” with my Louis Riel Coffee - the coffee of the resistance with a 16 0z Ceramic Travel Mug. Make this a holiday gift for a friend, and I will sign the book. Join me in the reading, and during these times of winter, stay warm, drink coffee, and join the New Green Revolution.