While half a dozen female tribal elders sing and pray with the frozen Mississippi, it is clear that the struggle for some orchestras is sacred and eternal. The question is how much they will join them in the face of tougher legal challenges, increased pressure from the police and the limits of the pandemic.
“More than 130 people have been arrested so far in the last few months,” tribal lawyer and activist Tara Houska told CNN. Some are physically arrested at construction sites, but police are also watching social media feeds to harass protesters and send summonses by mail. Before we crossed the frozen river, Houska attended her trial with a judge over Zoom and was ordered to post $ 6,000 bail.
“They seem to think it’s going to stop us from protecting the country. They fundamentally miss the point of what water conservationists are doing, who are willing to put our freedom, our body, our personal comfort at stake for something greater than ourselves, ”Houska said.
After living in Washington and fighting Dakota Access and Keystone XL, she hopes this move can convince the Biden government that the Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency were sneaky in their environmental impact studies during the Trump administration and were in too much of a hurry. to issue permits. .
But Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge insists it has passed every federal, state and tribal test. The company rushed to complete the pipeline before it could be stopped by politics or the courts. Of the 340 miles that cut through The Land of 10,000 Lakes, more than 40% are already in the ground.
“Line 3 is not like the Keystone XL pipeline,” Mike Fernandez, head of communications at Enbridge, told CNN. “It already exists. And it’s already an energy lifeline for literally millions of people in the US and in Canada. And the reality is that even if we see a huge growth in renewable energy, we still need 40 years of fossil fuels. has to come. ‘
A journey to the tar sands transversely through the scale. Massive, man-made pits crawl with massive trucks, filled with what feels like sticky cookie dough and smells like asphalt.
Tens of thousands of tons are moved every day to massive processing plants where the flask is boiled and blown with Athabasca river water heated with natural gas. To separate the flammable bitumen from the dirt and clay, it takes six liters of fresh water to produce one liter of tar sand gas, and the lakes needed to contain the resulting toxic waste are one of the largest man-made creations in the history.
But for the workers building Line 3, pipelines are safer and cleaner than transporting oil by truck or train. And if you stop line 3, they argue, it means nothing to stop the world’s greedy demand for that kind of fuel.
“I honestly think people were drawn to pipelines because it’s easy to fight pipelines,” Kevin Pranis told Labourers International Union of North America as cranes lifted 25,000 pounds of pipes, just as long as city buses.
“The truth is that carbon emissions do not come from pipelines. They come from cars. And if you really wanted to go straight to the source, you can protest against car dealers, then you can protest against filling stations. But the problem people like car dealers and they like filling stations and they will be very angry about that. ‘
“Although most of the 5,200 people building Line 3 are from oil states like Texas and Louisiana, there will be about 400 Native Americans,” Fernandez told me. “We’ve met all the First Nations along the pipeline. We’ve listened, and as a result, there are about 320 route changes.”
Enbridge’s tribal relations suffered in February, when two men working on Line 3 were caught in a human trafficking set up to protect underage indigenous girls.
“The two individuals who were arrested were fired.” Fernandez said. “We do not tolerate that kind of activity or behavior, and that prompted us to go to one of the contractors to say ‘It is our expectation that they should be trained to a certain level.’
Follow the pipeline route, and feelings can change through the trunk or miles.
“Do you think people who scurry around the house without any heat are thinking about climate change?” said Jim Jones. “They’re thinking about heating their house and putting food on the table.”
As a member of the Leech Lake Band of the Ojibwe and a former expert on cultural anthropology for the state, Enbridge Jones was hired to walk the pipeline route and ensure that the indigenous spaces or ruins are not violated.
“I have the peace that I did my best to protect what is important to us,” he said. “And I can tell you honestly, as of today, nothing of historical context has been excavated or disturbed.”
After the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa entered into an agreement with Enbridge to manage part of line 3 through their discussion, tribal leaders said they were placed in an impossible position. Some tribes worked with Enbridge on the trail, while others like Winona LaDuke of Ojibwe’s White Earth Band despised none other than Enbridge.
LaDuke laughs when he is told of Jones’ promise. ‘He’s looking for pot cards and arrowheads. We are living people. ‘
LaDuke is a longtime environmental activist who twice ran for vice president on Ralph Nader’s Green Party ticket, but after fighting for years for indigenous rights against withdrawing energy companies, she never thought the fight would come to her. not.
“Enbridge wants to criminalize us,” she said. “I’m a grandmother, you know, studying at Harvard, running for Vice President twice. At what point did I become a criminal? I’m just asking, ‘How much should we as Americans take for a Canadian multinational country? to walk? a little richer at the end of the tar sands era? ‘
She helped convince a local sympathizer to sell them a piece of land where the pipeline crosses the Mississippi. As the weather warms up, protesters hope their numbers of tents, yurts and fly fish will grow as much as Enbridge can drill under the frozen Mississippi drilling site.
“Our people say ‘Do not fight with Mother Nature. You can not win, and we get a beat. So why would you pipe the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired power plants with this?’ Said LaDuke, pointing to Line 3.
“The tar sands are the gun. It’s the trigger.”