“What we stand for is the continued existence of Indigenous life on this Earth—but also the continued existence of life on this Earth . . . . To imagine what it would be like had we not been colonized, to imagine a future in which not just Indigenous people fit, but all people fit. All those elements existed for a brief moment in time at the camps at Standing Rock.” —Nick Estes, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe
I’ve spent the past ten years fighting oil pipeline projects—tar sands and fracked oil. I’ve joined with tens of thousands of people to say that the fossil fuel industry must subside, that our energy systems must be transitioned, and that water is worth more than oil. I’ve faced criminal charges in three counties and served jail time as a water protector and an Indigenous woman in northern Minnesota. I still face court proceedings.
As we smell the burning forests and seek to survive the floods of climate change, we can see the problems of the oil industry, of carbon, and of greed. What I do—is it worth it, you might ask?
The short answer is yes. What would you do for someone you love? Just about anything. Sharon Day, an Anishinaabe elder, reminds us, “This Earth is the only home we have. Sometimes I wonder, why do we think there is anything more important to love?”
Sometimes you win. Five pipeline projects were proposed to run from the Canadian tar sands to U.S. markets and the Canadian and U.S.: Energy East (TransCanada), Northern Gateway (Enbridge), Keystone XL (TransCanada), Trans Mountain (previously Kinder Morgan Corporation and now Trans Mountain Corporation), and Line 3 (Enbridge). Of those, only Trans Mountain and Line 3 moved ahead, with Trans Mountain still under construction. Oil pipeline projects in the United States that were stopped by citizens’ groups include the Sandpiper (Enbridge), Constitution (Williams), Atlantic Coast (Dominion Energy, Duke Energy), Jordan Cove (Pembina), and others. If you fight, you just might win.
We need water pipes, not oil pipes. Water is worth more than oil. Water is life. How does the United States make such bad decisions anyway?
Indigenous people have long experienced the U.S. government’s commitment to extinction.
Well, it’s a long story, and Indigenous people have long experienced the U.S. government’s commitment to extinction. The North American energy economy is hard-wired to be an inefficient and toxic fossil fuel-based economy. We waste power, we waste water, and we waste oil. And we make everything travel a long way, because empire is about the conquest of large territories.
“Just as the human body adapts itself to the regular intake of ‘hard’ drugs, its systems coming to depend on them to such an extent that the user goes through a period of acute distress if they are suddenly withdrawn, so the use of ‘hard’ fossil energy alters the economic metabolism and is so highly addictive that during a crisis, a user community or country will be prepared to export almost any proportion of its annual output to buy its regular fix,” Richard Douthwaite writes in Short Circuit.
And companies will violate people’s Constitutional and civil rights for that energy fix.
A bit of history: After the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was created in 1960, Canada and the United States—the two most inefficient users of fossil fuels—looked toward “energy independence.” Venezuela, with the largest oil reserves in the world, was not politically aligned with the United States, so with a bit of guidance from the Koch Brothers (once among the largest owners of tar sands leases in Alberta), oil companies moved to Canada—Dene territory, to be specific. There, oil sands—which require a massive amount of processing, water, and toxins, earning tar sands the title of the dirtiest oil in the world—came to the surface. Before these companies came, we could drink the water from the rivers and lakes.
And then they needed pipelines. That meant a massive replumbing of North America’s oil pipeline infrastructure, from the Gulf Coast to the Arctic Ocean.
Some pipelines had already been built. Interprovincial Pipe Line Company and its U.S. partner, the Lakehead Pipe Line Company, served the tar sands. Both of those pipelines were purchased by the Canadian multinational corporation Enbridge, which moves 75 percent of all tar sands oil to the United States. The company’s aging Line 5 then pumps crude oil back to Canada, passing through the Straits of Mackinac, for processing in Sarnia, Ontario. It’s a complicated mess, and it’s not getting better.
Enbridge’s Line 3 was unfit to be used, as we learned in 1991 when the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history occurred in the Prairie River, near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, spilling 1.7 million gallons of crude oil.
In 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B burst, spilling oil into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. That spill went on for seventeen hours because monitors in Alberta, Canada, didn’t notice the reduced pressure. That’s what “big” does for you: You get to be out of touch with the reality on the ground.
Then the company moved to fracked oil pipelines, including one called the Sandpiper, which was proposed to ship fracked oil from North Dakota—which is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota territory—to markets for processing. Local residents and tribes opposed that pipeline, and it was defeated in 2015, so Enbridge financed part of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project instead. That brought them—and all of us—to the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016.
We, the water protectors and Indigenous peoples on the ground, found that we were fighting a web of pipelines.
We, the water protectors and Indigenous peoples on the ground, found that we were fighting a web of pipelines, including Keystone XL, which, after a brutal thirteen-year battle, was defeated. We tried to make the system work, but the system doesn’t work, which is no surprise. Organizers showed up, and of the 72,249 public comments submitted to Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission, 94 percent were opposed to Line 3.
Then came the occupation—the military occupation of northern Minnesota by a Canadian pipeline corporation. Enbridge had seen what $38 million in military-style repression looked like at Standing Rock. From that, they learned that they should install the pipe in a set of seven construction spreads. They also had the police—$8.6 million worth of police and other public agencies—a completely compromised Minnesota regulatory process, and the endgame of an operating pipeline. They got that, and now they want more.
Enbridge wants to replace the aging Line 5 that goes through the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin, where it hasn’t had a legal right of way since 2013. That’s right, the company is trespassing. The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa filed a complaint in federal court claiming that Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline is a “grave public nuisance” that poses an ever-worsening oil spill threat to the reservation. The band noted that the fifteen easements—of which the band controls twelve—allowing the pipeline to be installed on the reservation expired in 2013.
There’s also no legal easement under the Straits of Mackinac, and Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has called for Line 5 to be shut down. Line 5 faces far more regulatory and legal obstacles than Line 3 and is the embodiment of unnecessary. We continue to resist, because water is life.
Enbridge estimates it would cost $1.2 billion to remove Line 3, but corporations should clean up their mess—and pay for it, regardless of the cost. They should hire folks for green jobs to transition to clean energy. That’s the future, and it’s about life and the next economy.
In this time of climate disasters, we have learned that centralized energy systems are fallible: The grid will go down and so will the pipelines. That’s why we are rebuilding locally.
Take the case of Standing Rock. There, the Indigenized Energy Initiative (IEI) has installed the largest solar project in North Dakota. “Through the work of Indigenized Energy Initiative, we are Indigenizing—decolonizing—the deployment of renewable energy to address the social, economic, spiritual, and environmental concerns of Native people,” IEI co-founder Cody Two Bears said. “Native people are taking back the power.”
In this time of climate disasters, we have learned that centralized energy systems are fallible: The grid will go down and so will the pipelines. That’s why we are rebuilding locally.
On the White Earth Reservation, in northwestern Minnesota, we are growing fiber hemp for housing, the textile economy, the green-building economy, and, hopefully, electric batteries. That work is being done by the company 8th Fire Solar, which also produces solar thermal panels that can reduce the heating bill for homes by up to 40 percent. We plan to make hempcrete prefab homes with solar thermal panels. These are solutions. And we are interested in survival.
“Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses. For my community alone, it was the destruction of the buffalo herds, the destruction of our animal nations in the nineteenth century, of our river homelands in the twentieth century . . . . If there is something you can learn from Indigenous people, it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic society,” Nick Estes reminds us.
The strategy is survival and cooperation, not competition and conquest. It’s time to love your Mother deeply.