To Indigenous People, Line 3 is a Battle Over the Future

Opposition is mounting to a project that threatens Native lands, and the planet.

by

The water in the Shell River in upper Minnesota is critically low. As I float downstream, my back and legs often touch the riverbed. I wade in search of deeper water but can’t find a place to immerse the full length of my body.

This is a drought year. Winona LaDuke, the Ojibwe director of Honor the Earth, says it’s the worst drought she has seen in her sixty-two years. Yet Enbridge has requested to use five billion gallons of water, and Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources has approved it.

“In the local papers they demonize us but we’re here to protect the water, which should be everybody’s job. Soon the land of ten thousand lakes will be dry land.”

Enbridge, a Canadian energy corporation, is constructing the Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. It will cross the Shell River five times and drill under twenty-two river crossings in Minnesota’s northern lake region.

At $7.5 billion, the proposed new Line 3 would be the largest project in Enbridge’s history and one of the largest crude oil pipelines in the world.

Recently, the DNR suspended the water allocation to Enbridge but allowed the company to “suck water from parched rivers and the Mississippi River,” according to LaDuke. “We saw them pumping water, maybe . . . half a million gallons of water out of the Mississippi River, already very low, under guard of the DNR,” she tells me.

“[The Shell River] is not really a river, it’s a pond,” adds LaDuke, “it is very dry.”

I am at the Shell City Water Protector, Cultural, and Treaty Camp on 1855 Treaty land of the Anishinaabe people. LaDuke was released from jail the previous evening, on July 22. She had been arrested earlier that week for sitting in prayer with six other women on an easement leased by Enbridge. The other six women were released from the Wadena County jail after two nights and three days. LaDuke was transferred to the Aitkin County Jail, where she served another day for violating the terms of a previous release.

The river’s name refers to the large mussel and clam population it hosts. Shell City, founded around 1880 and now uninhabited, once had a button factory, using the shells in the river. Bitumen, the Tar Sands oil, sinks to the bottom. A spill in the river will kill these populations as well as the wild rice, long part of the local Native economy, and pollute drinking water.

Already, before any oil started flowing, Enbridge’s digging caused frac-outs—the seepage of toxic slurry from drilling into the water. There have been no studies of how a spill would affect Lake Superior, a major source of drinking water.

Enbridge is now reimbursing numerous area police departments to protect the project, in effect making them mercenaries for the multinational. LaDuke and others went to check on a frac-out on the Willow River “and the DNR were there to arrest us, not Enbridge, which caused it,” she says. “It’s a big problem that a Canadian corporation owns the police force.”

There’s a long history of mining companies taking small towns in third world countries and militarizing the police, causing human rights violations, LaDuke adds, now it is happening in northern Minnesota. “That is not what you want in a democracy.” 

Living in the camp in Wadena County for a week, I witness a constant stream of squad cars, most of them from other counties, doing the rounds. Some campers wave at them. Others are angry.

The planet is baking. There are fires everywhere. You can’t tube down the rivers in northern Minnesota because there’s no water. The farms are parched. That doesn’t bode well for the last tar sands pipeline.

I videotape two Native men asking an officer why he was there and whether he volunteered to police the camp. Indeed, he did. At 2 a.m. on the night we arrived, a number of sheriff’s deputies searched the central teepees, also shining their flashlights into tents where people, perhaps families with young children, were sleeping. No reason was given for the searches.

Local white men in large trucks adorned with huge U.S. flags and slogans such as “Climate change is a hoax” arrive in the camp almost daily, driving slowly and stopping by the commons area, looking, I believe, to incite a brawl which could land water protectors in jail.

Another night, again around 2 a.m., two large trucks and a car arrive, barreling through camp at high speed, revving their engines extremely loudly and screaming obscenities. The camp’s security people followed them and watched as they discharged an automatic weapon outside the camp. A car sitting nearby with its lights off turned out to be a Hubbard County squad car, apparently there to protect the locals.

“I feel we’re being pursued not just by locals but the police too,” says Bill Smith, the Cherokee-Blackfoot-Norwegian-Irish lead security. “In the local papers they demonize us but we’re here to protect the water, which should be everybody’s job. Soon the land of ten thousand lakes will be dry land.”

At that Smith jumps to his feet, making himself very visible. “I don’t know who these people are,” he says, looking straight at a truck driving slowly by the tents. These are expensive trucks, he notes, which suggests they are owned and driven by people in the big ag business who are paid handsomely by Enbridge for their land.

The cops, Smith tells me, “are trying social fear and other tactics to wear us down, but they don’t understand that we and our ancestors before us have been through it all our lives and there’s nothing left that they can do. They punished us for things we didn’t do; they took away our languages and our kids. They can’t terrorize our people any more than they already have. . . .We do intend to hold our rights and our treaty rights.”

Despite these provocations, life in the camp is peaceful (though many arrests, some brutal, have taken place in other camps along Line 3). It is a multiracial and multigenerational gathering, with campers aged nine months to eighty-eight years old. The kitchen is well supplied with fresh food, as well as venison on one occasion. Charlie, who is from Red Cliff Reservation in northern Wisconsin, runs it with a light hand and a smile.

Some campers are regular kitchen helpers, and others help for a day or two while visiting. The central fire is lit permanently and folks gather around it at all times. Some play instruments and sing. Night owls like myself sit in a circle around it after dark, sometimes observing the last kitchen workers cleaning until close to midnight.

People have come from as far as England and as close as the small towns nearby. Many locals are concerned about what will happen to their water once Enbridge starts pumping oil through the line.

There is a sister camp called Horse Camp within a few minutes walk that has young people, aged seven years to older teens, tending to the horses while learning and practicing traditional ways and customs. They also ride the horses to scout on Enbridge, at least three times a day.

Three of the young Horse Nations women, along with two of the women who were arrested with LaDuke, meet on July 24 with a Water Walk spanning the length of Line 3, with participants walking from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day, collecting water and praying at every place where the pipe will intersect a body of water.

Kiley Knowles, fifteen, carries the Walkers’ eagle staff while Sasha Richards, sixteen, carries the water. Iris Gibson, thirteen, is the third youth rider. They ride for hours, through the town of Park Rapids and the countryside, accompanied by an armada of cars.

The final ceremony, uniting the Walkers, Riders, and supporters, is interrupted almost immediately by big white men in a big truck demanding that we get off the deserted area where we gathered. Sheriff deputies are on their way. The women who had been arrested were released on the condition of not getting arrested again, so we have to end the ceremony before it started, get in our cars quickly, and leave.

The six arrestees have been recognized and honored in several ceremonies. On July 25, the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation stop at Horse Camp with their beautiful, sacred twenty-five-foot totem pole, which they are taking from Washington State to Washington, D.C., stopping for a ceremony and live-streamed events at communities that lead efforts to protect sacred places under threat from resource extraction and industrial development.

During the ceremony, the women, as well as the young riders and some of the central people in the camps, receive beautiful traditional blankets. Upon returning to Shell City Camp, Ojibwe elder Great Grandmother Mary Lyons conducts another ceremony, again honoring the arrestees.

Lyons begins with a land acknowledgment: We stand on Ojibwe land, but it used to belong to the Dakota people and was acquired through war. Ojibwe folks supported Standing Rock, inhabited by Lakota and Dakota people, during their struggle against the Dakota Access pipeline. Now, continuing the reconciliation, Dakota and Lakota people have come to Shell River to support the Ojibwe struggle.

On July 27, I accompany other Shell City Camp denizens on a drive up to Firelight Camp, on the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where a frac-out has occurred. Enbridge has a highly secured staging area on one side of the road and a paved easement on the other. Leaders and members of the White Earth Reservation issue a cease and desist letter to an Enbridge representative, calling on the corporation to halt construction at the site for two days so Indigenous water protectors could exercise their treaty rights and hold a prayer ceremony for the water, an essential resource to millions of people.

The representative, sweating under the hot sun, does not have the authority to stop construction. Involved in the back-and-forth is the Clearwater County Sheriff, Darin Halvorson, the only sheriff in the Line 3 area who has not taken money from Enbridge, nor arrested water protectors. His job, he tells me, is to serve and protect all of the people in his county.

Unfortunately, a day later a sheriff’s deputy from Clearwater County proves that statement wrong. Jill Ferguson, 68, also known as Bad Ass Grandma due to previous actions, participates in an action at the headwaters of the Mississippi. She puts her hand on the lock for the cage surrounding the pipe that Enbridge has constructed in order to draw water. When she refuses to remove her hands deputy Alexander Yocum exercises compliance methods on her, pressing his thumb into her neck, “so hard that I thought he’d kill me,” she says. He twists her head into the cage, bends her fingers “to the point I thought they were going to break, then the same with my elbow... My hands are arthritic and it would have been easy to take them off the lock, but Yocum chose to do all these,” says Ferguson, who was then arrested and spent the night in jail.  “I have a concussion from my head being pushed into the cage, which is crazy—I can’t eat, my ears are buzzing, my hands are shaking. My spine has been hurting so bad that I had to go to the ER, and was told I need a surgery.”

“They’re trying to stop the flow of people from coming,” says the grandmother of eight . “I’m afraid they’re going to kill someone. To do that on anyone is terrible, to do it on an old person is insanity. And to do it for a corporation is beyond comprehension.”  

The negotiation is followed by a ceremony, led by Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, for a group of runners from the Standing Rock, Fort Peck, and Cheyenne River tribes. They are on a healing prayer run from Standing Rock along the Line 3 pipeline route. Led by young people, participants in the action march to the Enbridge area, singing, chanting, and drumming, and tie prayer ties on its fence. The runners then resume their run.

When we arrived at Shell Lake Camp, sections of Line 3 were visible for miles, being prepared for assembly. When we left a week later, they were assembled.

Will Enbridge win?

“This is a battle over who gets to determine the future,” LaDuke tells me. “This is the last tar sands pipeline . . . and investment in the tar sands has diminished significantly since the project was started seven years ago. The shippers are suing Enbridge because they don’t want to pay the $2 billion cost overruns for this pipeline. Several companies are looking at removing their tar sands interests.”

Meanwhile, she adds, the planet is baking. There are fires everywhere. You can’t tube down the rivers in northern Minnesota because there’s no water. The farms are parched. That doesn’t bode well for the last tar sands pipeline.

“We want the Biden Administration to do an Environmental Impact Statement on Line 3,” LaDuke says. “There wasn’t one done by the Trump Administration, not surprisingly. The Army Corps of Engineers could pull some of the permits for the parched rivers that should no longer be crossed. We’re going to continue battling it out, river by river.”

*This article was updated after publication to reflect details regarding torture inflicted by the Clearwater Sheriff's Department.