Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images
Line 3 Protest
Climate activists and Indigenous community members gather on top of a bridge after taking part in a traditional water ceremony during a rally and march to protest the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Solvay, Minnesota on June 7, 2021.
Thousands of people from around the country traveled to northern Minnesota for the Treaty People Gathering this week, for four days of coordinated resistance to the $9 billion Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline under construction across the state. The 340-mile rerouting project received final permits under President Trump, and would transport 760,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada, crossing more than 200 bodies of water in Minnesota, into Wisconsin to Lake Superior's tip.
Nearly 250 people were arrested on Monday, as activists were zip-tied and bussed away from the Enbridge pumping station where they’d halted operations by chaining themselves to construction equipment. But Sunday, things were calmer. Winona LaDuke was giving a press conference at Shell City Campground near Menagha, Minn., her feet bare on the fragrant, sandy earth.
“We didn’t miss a beat. We attended every hearing,” said LaDuke. She wore a tank top and ribbon skirt, her hair loose around her face. She paced in the press circle. “Our people tried. We drove thousands of miles. We tried to do our best to stop this pipeline. It puzzles us why the state did not.” A renowned Ojibwe activist and writer, LaDuke and her organization Honor the Earth have been at the heart of the Indigenous-led, seven-year fight to stop the Line 3 replacement project. As activists gathered along its route last weekend, Enbridge was accelerating construction after pausing for the spring thaw.
The Shell City Campground where LaDuke was speaking is an old village site, where Ojibwe people lived for many years, eating and trading the fat clams of the Shell River. But this year, LaDuke told us, the water was two feet low. The rivers were warming, threatening the clams and the fish. In an early summer heat wave, this was a changing northern Minnesota, one where wildfires burned in May. Where drought was setting in to the west. Where warming temps mean that the loons may soon leave us.
“This is the remaining biodiversity. This is where the wild things live,” said LaDuke. Her voice, usually unwavering, broke. “Between the industrial agriculture and the fracturing of corridors by Enbridge, this ecosystem is in a really, really precarious position.”
LaDuke lives on the White Earth Reservation, one of several Ojibwe reservations near or on Line 3’s path. The pipeline also cuts across vast swaths of Ojibwe treaty land ceded to the U.S. in the 19th century, but upon which the Ojibwe have rights to hunt, fish, and gather. She and tribal leaders from White Earth and Red Lake say that Line 3 threatens hundreds of square miles of traditional cultural properties, pristine waters, and critical habitat, including that of the manoomin, wild rice.
Wild rice grows on lakes across Minnesota—it’s been hybridized by the University of Minnesota, and copycatted in California patties, but what grows up north is unique. (As LaDuke has said in the past, it tastes like a lake.) Different waters yield different varieties: some longer, some shorter, of different textures and flavors. Manoomin is sacred to tribes in Minnesota, and crucial to their economic and food sovereignty. Among other wild foods like whitefish, walleye, maple syrup, and berries, it’s eaten and sold all across the north. Enbridge has said their new pipeline, made from stronger steel, will be safer than the old one. The original pipeline, built about 60 years ago, is deteriorating and can only run at about half its original capacity. But Line 3’s route cuts through more than 40 wild rice watersheds. A leak, tribal leaders say, would be devastating.
Eventually, LaDuke passed the mic to Frank Bibeau, White Earth’s tribal attorney. Bibeau is a tall, bearded, soft-spoken man with a commanding license plate: NDN LAW. He’s been working to fortify treaty rights—often contested by the state, which has cited tribal members for fishing and ricing on treaty lands—as they relate to the Line 3 conflict.
“Treaty rights are still basic for us. But they’re so basic they may be the one thing that allows us to regulate our own rights by simply using our rights to travel, use, and occupy, our rights to protect manoomin,” said Bibeau. “Those are your simple, civil rights that those old guys, Ben Franklin, George Washington, you know—” “Is that our pursuit of happiness?” asked LaDuke, cutting him off. They laughed. LaDuke was going to take us on a road trip, she said. We’d see what a pipeline burrowing through treaty land actually looked like.
Two dozen press caravanned behind LaDuke’s rental car. (Her fifteenth of the year, she quipped.) We drove north to an Enbridge construction yard near Park Rapids, through the industrial potato fields that blanket this part of north-central Minnesota. “Last week it was very dry, they were plowing. It looked like the Dust Bowl,” said LaDuke, and it was true—dust hung in the air and coated our car windows. These irrigation-intensive farms draw heavily on local water supply, as does Enbridge, she reminded us. The DNR initially permitted them 510.5 million gallons of water per year for construction, but a recent amendment raised it up to 4.98 billion gallons.
We traveled to a vast corridor headed toward the Mississippi headwaters, where pipes were staged on top of the marsh. Each section was capped, LaDuke told us, to keep activists from crawling back inside. This was the area where Tara Houska and others were arrested in a traditional prayer lodge in March. Next we saw a pipe storage yard, where art protesting the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women had been installed by activists earlier that year.
Like clockwork, the police arrived at each stop, ready to tell us to disperse. Sweat dried in fine crystals on our faces, and we inhaled granola bars. My head ached in the heat. But Winona LaDuke was giving us a personal tour of one of the continent’s largest tar sands pipelines, and we were staying with her.
At the last stop, LaDuke paused. “It’s kind of cathartic, telling you all this,” she said. She stared at each of us with her urgent, green eyes. “Down in St. Paul, they don’t seem to care.” She had a final message: pipelines were last-century thinking. Extraction jobs in northern Minnesota were disappearing—mines and mills weren’t coming back. The region needed a “just transition,” she said, into an economy that protects the earth.
We drove back to Shell City Campground at the golden hour. Along the road, Enbridge’s barricade-ready, high-voltage entrances dotted the landscape that many of us call up north: wetlands, lakes, lily pads and beaver dams. Red pines, their rose-hued bark glowing in the evening light. Back at camp, LaDuke waded into the Shell River, and invited us in. I dipped in the shallow water and walked upstream, picking up shards of clam shells. The riverbed was soft between my toes, and still. Enbridge plans to drill under it five times. I wondered when the pipes would come.
Winona LaDuke Standing in River
The next day began with an interfaith prayer circle near LaSalle Lake, in a grove of pine and tamarack trees. Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other faith members led prayers, and called on all people of faith to stop Line 3. But Great Grandmother Mary Lyons stole the show. “Just get this good side,” she cracked to the press, turning her cheek. “Waist up.” Lyons is an Ojibwe elder, spiritual advisor, and author. She led us in the Nibi Song—the water song—backed by her daughters, granddaughters, and great granddaughters: Nibi, Giizaage’igoo, Gii miigwetch ahwayn nimiigoo, Giizhaawayn nimiigoo. Water, we love you, we thank you, we respect you.
“The original people are left out of the history books. We don’t need to fight to get into a history that’s not ours—they need to come into ours, because this is our land,” Lyons said.
Later, a march of about two thousand, led by Indigenous people, started down Highway 9. Marchers played drums, sang, chanted, and carried banners and signs: Stop Line 3. We Are All Treaty People. And simply, RISE.
We stopped at the river crossing, where the Mississippi flowed little wider than a creek. Jane Fonda materialized suddenly, her face shaded by a black cowboy hat. She joined Great Grandmother Mary Lyons for a water ceremony. Then, those who were willing to risk arrest gathered on the bridge. Sheriff Darin Halverson of Clearwater stood among the Indigenous singers and drummers, his palms turned upward to the sky. Many people from tribes outside of Minnesota had come to support. I saw the blue, white, red and gold flag of the Standing Rock Sioux. Tom Awanyankapi, a Dakota and Diné elder and leader with Indigenous Environmental Network, was there, guiding people to the river.
People set out across the wetland in a single file line to the large matting platforms Enbridge had placed in preparation for the pipes. They sang quietly: The people and the river are rising. We will stop Line 3. The sun blazed relentlessly, and I kicked up cool, muddy water on the backs of my legs. Out on the platform, Nancy Beaulieu and Everlasting Wind (aka Dawn Goodwin), co-founders of the Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging Coalition (RISE), addressed the crowd. Everlasting Wind reminded us what the treaties had given Minnesota. “We gave the settlers the right to come and live on these lands and make their home—your home—that you all live on today. Businesses, schools, they’re all there because we gave that right.”
The mic was passed to Bill McKibben, the author, activist, and founder of 350.org, a national climate justice organization named for 350 parts per million, a safe level of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. As he later wrote in the New Yorker, Line 3 will be a test of President Biden’s climate leadership. “If it doesn’t spill here, then it’s going to spill into the atmosphere,” said McKibben. According to research by the local chapter MN350, Line 3 produces more annual greenhouse gas emissions than the entire state of Minnesota in years past. “You’ve gotta respect the treaty law, and you’ve gotta respect the laws of physics, too. Because both of them are binding.”
McKibben joked that Enbridge had built a nice tent platform on the riverbank, and he was right: people made offerings of tobacco to the Mississippi, waded in, sang, and prayed. Later, the matting was crowded with tents.
We got word then that another group of activists were at an Enbridge pumping station north of Grand Rapids. They’d chained themselves to construction equipment, climbed on diggers and transformer boxes, and been sprayed with dirt and debris kicked up by a low-flying Border Patrol helicopter. When I got there, dozens had been arrested by police in riot gear. The short road to the station was blocked with a powder-blue motorboat, flying a banner that read “Relatives Not Resources.” A large group had stayed outside the pumping station, chanting support for the arrestees. Enbridge is racing to finish construction by the end of the year, and many were here for the long-haul fight at camps all along the pipeline’s route. President Biden helped cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, but has not acted on Line 3—so they were staying.
Later that evening, the cops cut activists’ chains loose with bolt cutters and saws, and reportedly used a sonic device known as an LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, to disperse the crowd. By then I was on my way back south on Highway 71, splicing through central Minnesota’s lakes and rivers. What will the future of this water be? Line 3 is advancing, and climate change is already here. I gazed out at the sun setting on the water, transfixed.
