Annabelle Marcovici
Parts of the Line 3 Pipeline, which Enbridge hopes to abandon after installing an entirely new pipeline, coming out of the ground on the Fond du Lac reservation.
Debra Topping has been harvesting wild rice near her home on the Fond du Lac Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota for thirty-eight years. Around late summer, she skims the shallow lakes where it grows, using two lightweight wood batons, called “knockers,” to pull the stalks of grass over the canoe, and swatting the husked tips, the “spikelets,” into the boat. The seeds are protein-rich and nutty in flavor. Topping sometimes cooks them inside a pumpkin, with sweet potatoes and squash—her grandson’s favorite dish. An uncle once told Topping that the family needed 100 pounds of finished wild rice per year for each person. In practice, she says, it’s more like four times that much—enough to share with the community during feasts, ceremonies, and funerals. “Wild rice is why the creator put us where we’re at, as indigenous Anishinaabe people,” she tells The Progressive.
Topping speaks hastily, en route to a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission public hearing on Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Larger than the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, the project threatens to decimate the wild rice lands so foundational to Topping’s culture and family life. “As a mother, a wife, and most importantly a grandma, I need to protect this food source for our future generations, because that’s who we are as a people,” she says. “Without it—that’s genocide.”
“Without wild rice—that’s genocide.”
Some activists The Progressive spoke to are calling Line 3 the “alternative Keystone” for providing tar sands oil a route out of landlocked northern Alberta. It will snake across the Canadian border, clip a corner of North Dakota, and traverse Minnesota before arriving at Superior, Wisconsin, where the oil can then be shipped to Gulf Coast refineries via other pipelines and routes. But unlike Keystone XL, Line 3 has largely escaped public attention, thanks to Enbridge’s branding of the project as a “replacement” of an existing pipeline.
This is despite the fact that it will diverge drastically from the old route through northern Minnesota, and could double the amount of oil Line 3 transports per day (it will have a daily capacity of 915,000 barrels of diluted bitumen). This makes Line 3 not only larger than Keystone XL (which will have a capacity of 830,000 barrels per day) but the same type of oil will flow through it—a matter of grave concern to Topping and other “water protectors,” as many indigenous pipeline protesters call themselves.
Unlike conventional oil, diluted bitumen is essentially tar sands oil mixed with solvents that allow the semisolid substance to flow—it sinks in water and is more difficult to clean up in the event of a spill. This was the case in 2010, when Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline leaked 1.2 million gallons into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Line 3 will cross the Mississippi River (twice), the Whitefish Chain of Lakes, and approach Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. It will also pass within ten miles upstream of 3,400 acres of wild rice lakes. “Really,” says Topping, “it’s just as simple as: How clear and pure do you want your drinking water?” Minnesota is the last stand against Line 3.
Diluted bitumen is essentially tar sands oil mixed with solvents that allow the semisolid substance to flow—it sinks in water and is more difficult to clean up in the event of a spill—which will happen.
The Calgary-based company Enbridge has begun construction in Canada and Wisconsin, and is only waiting on the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to grant it the last remaining permits (a decision is expected in April 2018). In early August, Dallon White, who grew up on the nearby Leech Lake Reservation, began keeping tabs on Enbridge’s work just across the border in Wisconsin. This was also on territory ceded by the Ojibwe (or Chippewa) to the U.S. government twelve years before a similar treaty created the Fond du Lac Reservation in 1854. It guarantees the right of Ojibwe people to hunt and gather within the treaty territory, a right that would be threatened if the wild rice lakes are contaminated.
Just weeks before turning thirty-three, White made a Facebook announcement about his birthday wish: for others to join him in a nonviolent direct action at an Enbridge construction site just southwest of Superior, Wisconsin. Dozens responded, and soon they established a camp for themselves on a piece of private land within the Fond du Lac Reservation, now called the Makwa Initiative. On his birthday, a few dozen shut down construction on Line 3 for nearly two hours (Topping was at the action but stayed on the sidelines). Afterward, some of them remained at the camp.Today, Makwa is home to a couple dozen water protectors, who have also been joined by roughly another hundred on special occasions, according to Topping, who is still involved with the camp.
Many are from territories spanning Minnesota and Wisconsin that were ceded by the Ojibwe to the U.S. government under the 1837, 1842, 1854, and 1855 treaties in exchange for reservations, payments, and rights. Many were also tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets, water-sprayed, strip-searched, and bitten by dogs while opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation last year. As the October Line 3 public hearings approached, they continued to lock themselves to Enbridge construction equipment, and joined other indigenous residents, environmental groups, and nonnative landowners at the hearings to air their concerns. Some have taken to calling this movement “the next Standing Rock.”
“This oil is traveling through one end of the state and out the other, so people feel pretty weird that a for-profit, foreign company is being granted the right of eminent domain,” says Andy Pearson, an organizer with the climate group MN350, a state chapter of the national organization 350.org. (“Eminent domain” describes the power of the government to take private land for public use.) Some unions and consumer advocacy groups are supporting Line 3 for the construction jobs it will create, but even the Minnesota Commerce Department stated in September that Enbridge hasn’t established a real need for the pipeline, and that its environmental and socioeconomic risks outweigh its “limited benefits.” “We’re already set with oil in Minnesota,” says Pearson. “It’s not like a highway, where the person whose land it crosses could potentially use that highway often in their daily life.”
“This oil is traveling through one end of the state and out the other, so people feel pretty weird that a for-profit, foreign company is being granted the right of eminent domain.”
The push for Line 3 comes from corporations across the border, in the boreal region of northern Alberta, where wild rice also grows and the Canadian tar sands industry has seen better days. This is because of simple economics. The tar sands are carbon- and water-intensive to extract, which makes them not only bad for the environment but also expensive to produce. Because of this, the industry began booming only in the late 1990s, when oil prices were high and oil companies could finally turn a profit. The main problem was a shortage of pipelines; shipping oil by rail is expensive, like supplying a city with water by truck instead of a network of dams, reservoirs, and pipes. In response, several major pipelines were proposed. Two have since succumbed to native and environmental resistance (Energy East and Northern Gateway). The rest are hanging on (Trans Mountain, Line 3, and Keystone XL). But since oil prices plummeted in 2014, seventeen tar sands projects have also been shelved or canceled, and oil companies including Total, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil, ConocoPhillips, and Marathon Oil all sold off huge investments.
As of July, TransCanada had not secured enough shipping contracts to say for certain that they would go ahead with Keystone XL. This has raised some questions: Is there even enough demand from oil producers to justify more pipelines? “There is a lot of pressure to continue the tar sands industry,” says Tara Houska of the indigenous environmental organization Honor the Earth. Line 3 is enmeshed in this calculus along with another similarly routed Enbridge tar sands pipeline, Line 67 (also called the Alberta Clipper), which was quietly approved by the Trump Administration in October. “The federal government kind of mandated that they want to keep the industry afloat.”
This is despite Trump’s protectionist rhetoric. Not only did he approve Keystone XL and Line 67, but the United States is remaining aligned with its North American Free Trade Agreement partners, Canada and Mexico, on the goal of maintaining open trade borders for oil and gas companies. This vision is shared with several big investment banks and the oil industry associations of each country, who are eager to maintain NAFTA provisions like the one that allowed TransCanada to sue U.S. taxpayers for $15 billion after Obama canceled Keystone XL.
The cross-border Treaty Alliance of First Nations has adopted a similar strategy, with tribes and indigenous grassroots organizations attempting to block tar sands infrastructure on their territories. The global campaign for banks to divest from fossil fuels is also meeting with some success: In October, the Parisian bank BNP Paribas pledged to stop funding all tar sands pipelines and projects. “We’re relying on people all over the world with these divestment efforts,” says Houska. “But if the goal is American sovereignty and energy independence, we should be working toward energy independence that is both beneficial for the people and the environment, and not contributing to climate change and the destruction of our basic survival. We should be pushing for renewable energy.”
“If the goal is American sovereignty and energy independence...we should be pushing for renewable energy.”
But in northern Minnesota, the water protectors of Camp Makwa remain focused on blocking Enbridge construction, and appealing to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to deny the remaining Line 3 permits. Debra Topping is not placing herself in the way of construction equipment, but is “doing my grandma part” by delivering food and warm clothes to Camp Makwa, or shuttling other Fond du Lac grandmothers to the different hearings around Minnesota.
She also did this at Standing Rock, delivering relatives and supplies to the site. Since his birthday, Dallon White has been arrested twice for trespassing and resisting arrest. But as the temperature drops, his attentions have shifted to keeping his babies safe and warm. They were with him in the Red Warrior Camp at Standing Rock—his two-year-old was there for part of his stay from August to January, and his five-month-old daughter was conceived on site. There, he found the kind of community he hopes his daughters will one day have, “where you can walk outside, know your neighbor, be safe, and run free.” He also discovered the power of mass protest. Now, he’s waiting for more water protectors to arrive at Camp Makwa, not only to help stop Line 3, but also to protect the territory of his Ojibwe community for his children.
Being at Standing Rock taught him that, even if Minnesota officials call Line 3 unnecessary and local politicians follow suit, the pipeline could still arrive. “I don’t know how many false victories there were out at Standing Rock, everyone saying ‘yeah we won!’ and a thousand people would go home. Then all of a sudden: Bam! They’re laying that pipeline down,” says White. But he got his birthday wish, and this showed him that others in his community, from Minnesota to Michigan, are also willing to defend the territory. “It felt like I couldn’t do it alone, so I just had to make a public event and hope that people would come,” he says. “I was praying that people would come. And a lot of people did show up.”
Audrea Lim is an editor at Verso Books and has written for The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice.