Naomi Tillison, director of the natural resources department for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe tribe in northern Wisconsin, sees Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline as a serious threat to the Ojibwe people. The pipeline, she says, isn’t designed to withstand the forces of the river if the waterway and the pipeline overlap.
“There’s been a lot of activity going on, and just accessing time and time again can have impacts to the health of the natural resources, including the health of wetlands.”
“That obviously is very concerning to us, because downstream of the river is where wild rice grows,” Tillison explains. “And there’s other really important resources for the tribe that the tribal community depends on, including the fish they harvest.” Wild rice, or manoomin, grows in the Bad River sloughs, and is a sacred staple of the Bad River Band.
Enbridge, a Canadian company, uses Line 5 to carry up to 22.68 million gallons of crude oil to Sarina, Ontario, Canada from Superior, Wisconsin, each day, according to Enbridge’s website. Line 5 is connected to Enbridge’s Line 3, which runs from Alberta, Canada, to Superior and has also faced harsh criticism from some Indigenous nations in Minnesota. The Bad River community has grown increasingly concerned that Line 5 will break.
In 2017, the Bad River Band voted not to renew easements for the pipeline. Later, in July 2019, they filed a federal lawsuit against Enbridge, arguing for their rights not to renew these easements as the band has basic property rights over the parts of the reservation that the pipeline runs through. The case is still in discovery, and litigation and arguments aren’t expected to begin for a few more months.
David Joe Bates
The Bad River meandering, or curving, and flooding its banks.
The Bad River Band is part of a larger nation of Lake Superior Ojibwe Native Americans, sometimes referred to as the Chippewa. The Nation is spread across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and has a strong connection to Lake Superior and the upper-Midwest lands. The Bad River, for which this band is named, cuts through reservation land before running into Lake Superior. Though Line 5 was originally constructed away from the Bad River, the river has started meandering, or curving, closer to the pipeline.
This, Tillison says, increases the risks to the band: “If the pipeline will be exposed at that location of the meandering river, that's a huge concern. There’s a different design of a pipeline if you're within a water body versus if you’re not. So the pipe that would be exposed was not necessarily designed to withstand the forces of the river.”
The Bad River community, Tillison says, has grown increasingly concerned that Line 5 will break. Persistent flooding has lessened ground support for the pipeline in some areas, worrying members of the band. In 2016, Bad River and its tributaries experienced massive flooding that caused the ground underneath and above the pipeline to erode significantly, weakening its support, according to Tillison. Less support from the ground makes Line 5 more susceptible to breaks or leaks, sometimes referred to as “anomalies.”
One forty-nine-foot stretch of Line 5 is fully exposed and unsupported. This section, which Enbridge calls Slope 18, lies near a tributary of Denomie Creek that only flows seasonally. Denomie Creek is itself a tributary, meaning that it flows into Honest John Lake and the Bad River sloughs.
Enbridge placed sandbags under part of the exposed pipeline to provide emergency support, Tillison says. The Bad River Band has also asked that Enbridge help reconfigure the hydrology of the area, both to preserve the wetland habitat and to lessen the amount of water that will pass near the exposed pipeline.
Helen Quinn Pasin
A drain pipe placed by Enbridge to shuttle water away from Slope 18.
But these mitigation efforts have been hampered by difficulties accessing the forest to maintain the pipeline. In 2016, Tillison said her department received eight access permit requests from Enbridge, meaning that the company asked permission to enter the Bad River reservation to do maintenance on their line. In 2015, it had asked for twenty-five such permits. However, by 2018, Enbridge requested almost 200 access permits. That number decreased in 2020 due to the pandemic.
“There’s been a lot of activity going on, and just accessing time and time again can have impacts to the health of the natural resources, including the health of wetlands,” Tillison says.
In 2018, an Enbridge helicopter crashed in a remote part of the reservation while patrolling along the pipeline. Dean Bass, the sixty-four-year-old Canadian who was piloting the helicopter, was killed in the crash.
The burned wreckage from the helicopter crash has not been removed from the forest. Jet fuel and other chemicals also spread in the area following the crash. The Bad River Band demanded that Enbridge take steps to remediate the landscape, work that began in 2019 and still continues.
The following year, in 2019, a helicopter flying polymat fabric into the forest to perform maintenance on the pipeline accidentally dropped the fabric into the forest. The fabric, estimated to weigh around 7,000 pounds, has still not been removed from the forest, according to Tillison.
Calls and emails to Enbridge’s media representatives were not answered.
Not all community members were happy when the Bad River Band sued Enbridge seeking to shut down the pipeline. The company has promised jobs, financial payments, and economic growth to Bad River residents as well as residents of other small communities in northern Wisconsin.
In the past, Enbridge has offered money and gifts to municipalities where it wants to build pipelines, says David Joe Bates, a Bad River elder, adding that those economic promises remain largely unfulfilled.
The pipeline has divided the band’s six-member governing council. Bates says the vote not to renew the easements for the pipeline was an even split, with Tribal Chair Mike Wiggins casting the tie-breaking vote against the pipeline in 2017. It was only after Enbridge did not cease use of the pipeline that Bad River Band decided to sue the company. After that vote, Enbridge proposed rerouting Line 5 around the reservation into some lands south of Bad River.
But some members of Bad River remain opposed to a reroute, saying the band’s natural resources would still be at risk. Because of the topography of northern Wisconsin, the watershed drains north into Lake Superior, Tillison notes. If the pipeline were to leak, even outside of the reservation, Bad River’s water might still be contaminated.
Enbridge tried to settle the lawsuit with a counter-proposal, offering to pay the Bad River Band $30 million and agreeing to continue using Line 5 on reservation lands only until it could build a reroute. Wiggins said he and the rest of the Tribal Council would not go along, according to an interview with Michigan Radio and a post on his personal Facebook page.
Two other tribal governments have agreed to similar deals. In 2018, the Fond du Lac band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, who are part of the same nation as Bad River, accepted around $17 million in a settlement with Enbridge to permit Line 3 to go through its reservation lands. The year before that, the Lac Courte Oreilles Band in Wisconsin signed a new twenty-five-year easement agreement to permit Enbridge to have two pipelines run through its land for $60 million.
Philomena “Phoebe” Kebec, a member of Bad River Band and a policy analyst for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, says she can understand why some nations decided to take the settlement, especially if they were in financial need.
“Enbridge invests in the creation of positive public relations locally, and not just tribally,” she says. “This investment comes in the showering of trinkets for feel-good initiatives targeting youth, elderly, law enforcement, et cetera. Compared to the risk posed by the pipeline, very minimal actual funding is going towards community organizations in the pipeline’s path, but you know, the company’s strategy can be persuasive in rural areas that are chronically underserved.”
For many Bad River Band members, Line 5 raises the recurring issue of sovereignty. When the U.S. government negotiated treaties with Native American nations centuries ago, it acknowledged tribal sovereignty. That includes giving Native nations a say in what happens to their lands and water.
And, Kebec notes, water holds a significant spiritual significance to Native nations, and any threats to it aren’t taken lightly. Much of Line 5 is located within the Lake Superior basin.
“Lake Superior is a reservoir of freshwater that carries global significance,” Kebec says. “And there’s also a spiritual and symbolic value in lifegiving and life-sustaining properties of that water. Seen in this light, Line 5 represents a significant risk to the tribes—and to my tribe specifically—even if a spill were to occur outside reservation boundaries.”