As spring melts Minnesota’s ice, a new pipeline battle begins

Originally built in the 1960s, the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline covers 1,097 miles from Canada’s tar sands to Superior, Wisconsin. Of the approximately 340 miles through Minnesota, the replacement pipeline includes new sections and additional capacity and is cutting through some of North America’s most pristine forests and swamps. In small camps along the way, a small but growing group of protesters tries to stop them, driven by old prophecies and the promises of a new president.

In the Ojibwe tribal tradition, an environmental moment of reckoning was foreseen at the time of the Seventh Fire, when “the fair-skinned race will have a choice between two roads”, one green and lush, the other black and charred. A wrong choice, he was warned, “would cause much suffering and death to all people on Earth”. The Ojibwe are one of the largest groups of Native Americans in northern Mexico, with tribal members ranging from present-day Ontario, in eastern Canada, to Montana.

“More than 130 people have been arrested so far in the past few months,” lawyer and activist Tara Houska told CNN. Some are physically arrested at construction sites, but the police also watch social media feeds to identify intrusive protesters and send subpoenas by mail. Before we walked down the frozen river, Houska attended the hearing with a judge on Zoom and was ordered to pay $ 6,000 bail.

“They seem to think that this will prevent us from protecting the land. They are fundamentally missing the point of what the water guards are doing, which is putting our freedom, our body, our personal comfort at risk for something greater than us” said Houska.

After living in Washington and fighting Dakota Access and Keystone XL, she now hopes that this move will help convince the Biden administration that the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration were inadequate in their studies of environmental impact and too hasty in issuing licenses.

But Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge insists that it has passed all federal, state and tribal tests. The company is rushing to complete the pipeline before politics or courts can stop it. Of those 340 miles cutting the Earth from the 10,000 Lakes, more than 40% are already buried.

“Line 3 is not like the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Enbridge communications director Mike Fernandez to CNN. “It already exists. And it is already a lifeline for literally millions of people in the United States and Canada. And the reality is that, even if we see a huge growth in renewable energy, we will still need some fossil fuels for 40 years to come. . “

A trip to the tar sands confuses the mind with its scale. Large man-made wells crawl with huge dump trucks, full of what looks like sticky cookie dough and smells like asphalt.

Tens of thousands of tons are transported to huge processing plants every day, where the goo is boiled and pumped with water from the Athabasca River heated with natural gas. To separate flammable bitumen from dirt and clay, six gallons of fresh water are needed to produce a gallon of bituminous sands gasoline and the lakes needed to store the resulting toxic waste are among the largest man-made creations in history.

But for workers building Line 3, the pipelines are safer and cleaner than transporting the oil by truck or train. And if you stop Line 3, they argue, it does nothing to stop the world’s voracious demand for the type of fuel it burns.

“I think, quite frankly, that people were attracted to pipelines because it is easy to tackle pipelines,” said Kevin Pranis of the North American International Workers Union as cranes lifted 25,000-pound pipes the size of city buses.

“The truth is that carbon emissions do not come from pipelines. They come from cars. So, if you really want to go straight to the source, you can protest the dealerships, you can protest the gas stations. But the problem, that is, the people like car dealerships and gas stations and would be very angry about it. “

Although most of the 5,200 people who are building Line 3 are from oil states like Texas and Louisiana, “about 400 will be Native Americans,” Fernandez told me. “We met with all the First Nations along this pipeline. We heard and, as a consequence, there are about 320 route changes.”

Enbridge’s tribal relations were damaged in February, when two men who worked on Line 3 were caught in a human trafficking scheme set up to protect underage indigenous girls.

“The two individuals who were arrested were fired.” Fernandez said. “We do not tolerate this type of activity or behavior and this led us to go to one of the contractors to say ‘This is our expectation, that they will be trained to a certain level.'”

Follow the pipeline route and feelings can change according to the tribe or kilometer.

“Do you think that the people who are fighting at home, running out of gas and without heating, are thinking about climate change?” said Jim Jones. “They are thinking about how they are going to heat the house and put food on the table.”

As a member of the Ojibwe’s Leech Lake Band and a former cultural anthropology specialist for the state, Enbridge hired Jones to travel the pipeline route and ensure that there is no violation of indigenous spaces or ruins.

“I am at peace for having done the best I can to protect what is important to us,” he said. “And I can honestly say that, to date, nothing of the historical context has been discovered or disturbed.”

After the Lake Superior Chippewa Fond du Lac Band struck a deal with Enbridge to manage part of Line 3 through its reserve, tribal leaders said they were put in an impossible position. Some tribes worked with Enbridge on the route, while others, like Winona LaDuke, of the Ojibwe White Land Strip, have nothing but contempt for Enbridge.

LaDuke laughed at the news of Jones’ promise. “He’s looking for marijuana graphics and arrowheads. We are living people.”

LaDuke is a longtime environmental activist who ran twice for the vice presidency for Ralph Nader’s Green Party, but after fighting for indigenous rights against extractive energy companies for years, she never imagined that the fight would come to her.

“Enbridge wants to criminalize us,” she said. “I’m a grandmother, you know, a Harvard graduate, ran for vice president twice, at what point did I become a criminal? I’m just asking, ‘How much risk do we, as Americans, have to take so that a Canadian multinational can you run a little richer at the end of the tar sands era? ‘”

She helped convince a friendly local to sell them a small piece of land where the pipeline crosses the Mississippi, and as the weather warms up, protesters expect the number of tents, yurts and fly fishing shacks to grow faster than Enbridge can drill under the ice. Mississippi.

“Our people say, ‘Don’t start a fight with Mother Nature. You can’t win, and we’re being defeated. So, why would you put the equivalent of 50 new coal plants with that?” LaDuke said, pointing to Line 3.

“Bituminous sands are the weapon. This is the trigger.”