Oil Pipeline Threatens Catastrophe for Tribes in Michigan – Again

This Indigenous Peoples Day, the approximately 2,700 Ojibwe tribal members of the Bay Mills Indian Community in northern Michigan are marking the holiday amid fear that their region could face another environmental catastrophe like the one that occurred in 2010, when Enbridge’s Line 6B oil pipeline burst and spilled over a million gallons of tar sands crude oil, contaminating the Kalamazoo River and over 40 miles in its watershed.

Today, the community is afraid that an even more potentially devastating event is looming: a future rupture of another Enbridge relic, the antiquated 72-year-old Line 5 pipeline, which originates and ends in Canada but travels across Wisconsin and Michigan, and crucially, through the Great Lakes under the Straits of Mackinac.

“There were two questions everyone asked when Line 6B broke,” tribal president Whitney Gravelle told Truthout. “It felt like the entire state of Michigan was like, ‘There’s pipelines in Michigan? ’And then… ‘Where are they?’” After members of the public learned that Line 5 ran under the Straits where Lakes Michigan and Huron conjoin, and that it had been installed in 1953 without consideration of treaties with the Anishinaabeg tribes — the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi — or even informing them, the momentum to decommission Line 5 really grew, she said. Fifteen years later, the fight to uphold their rights under the Washington Treaty of 1836 — and to forestall a monumental tragedy for all of humanity — is still ongoing, as every passing day without a spill in the Straits is a tenuous miracle defying increasingly losing odds.

Fifteen attorneys from Earthjustice and Native American Rights Fund, plus their internal team, have been writing comments and briefs; collecting evidence; and submitting documents, information, and expert testimonies in order to push multiple federal agencies to eradicate the risks to the waters that comprise 20 percent of the world’s remaining fresh water supply and provide drinking water for 40 million people in the U.S. and Canada.

“The Environmental Protection Agency only responds if there’s an oil spill on land,” Gravelle explained, “while the U.S. Coast Guard responds if there’s an oil spill on water. We’ve challenged them both with our worst-case scenario: ‘What if there’s an oil spill in January, and the straits are covered with ice? What are you able to do when the break is four miles beneath the water, pluming oil up, and covered in a foot of ice. How are you gonna get to it? How?’ They have no answer, they just stare at us blankly.”

The unfortunate reality is that even without a catastrophic oil spill, the Great Lakes are under serious threats from climate change; extractive industry; plastic and shipping pollution; invasive species like the Quagga mussels; algae blooms in Lake Erie; and what Gravelle described as a general lack of care. “We have seen a major decline in the volume of our treaty fishery as well as a major decline in the water quality of the Great Lakes,” she said. The pipeline, built to last 50 years but already operating over 70, has spilled oil multiple times along its 645 miles, sometimes in their treaty territory. The single 30-inch pipeline becomes two 20-inch pipelines for the 4.5 miles it runs under the Straits “and if it opens in the straits, that’s the be all and end all. We’re done after that, the Great Lakes are done,” Gravelle warned. “That’s the heart attack that kills the Great Lakes.”

It would also be an attack on the fundamental way of life for Anishinaabeg, whose teachings passed down from time immemorial describe the relationship between humans and the waters as sacred and reciprocal — “If we take care of the lakes, they will take care of us,” Gravelle said. “That’s why we do the work we’re doing.” But their resistance, inspired by the Idle No More movement and the uprising against DAPL at Standing Rock, has been frustrated, especially since Trump’s Day One executive order declaring a national energy emergency. That order, Gravelle said, empowered Enbridge, which is aggressively pursuing three permits to build the Great Lakes Tunnel, a never-before attempted feat of engineering that will try to encase Line 5 in concrete and move it from where it currently is on the lake bed. One permit was granted from the Michigan Public Service Commission, but an appeal will be heard by the Michigan Supreme Court; another is before the Environment Great Lakes and Energy Division, and is currently in a comment period; and a third from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to be granted. Additionally, there are two cases proceeding in federal court with the state of Michigan, one in which Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Enbridge under the Public Trust Doctrine to permanently remove Line 5 and another, where Enbridge sued Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for revoking their permits to operate on the lake bed, which is on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court — a turn of events Gravelle calls “worrisome.”

In the weeks running up to Indigenous People’s Day, the broader communal focus turned to ceremony, culture, history, community engagement, and preparing for the traditional harvest of manoomin (wild rice). Members of all three confederated tribes — the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi — and their guests were invited to build a lodge and gather for Three Fires, One People, “a four-day ceremony held on the north and south shores of the Straits of Mackinac with fires lit on each side of the water. We gather to honor the ancestors who rest here, to lift prayers and make offerings together.”

“These Waters Are Everything to Us”

Paula Carrick, the tribal historic preservation officer in the Bay Mills history department, told Truthout that manoomin was essential to their origin story.

“At the beginning of time, we came from the great salt seas of the east, and we were told to leave the east to go and find the food that grows on water — manoomin,” she said. According to teachings, their ancestors were led west by ajiijack (cranes), who brought them to the rapids where the St. Marys River reached Lake Superior, which is how they became Boweting inini — the People of the Falls.

“This is where we ended up, Ontario is just across the river,” Carrick said, pointing to the mountains that explain why Enbridge found it cheaper to build their pipeline on the U.S. side where the terrain is flatter, having been carved out by an enormous glacier.

The common wisdom is that the Ojibwe were not forcibly removed to Oklahoma like the tribes in Southern Michigan because the fur traders and settlers that might’ve displaced them could not survive so far north without them. “They would’ve starved, sickened and died if we hadn’t helped them,” Carrick said. But ownership of the territory of their ancestral lands was greatly curtailed.

“These waters are everything to us — we work with clams shells in art or crushed for binder in pottery, we eat clams too. We make clay pots — slab and coil or pinch pots — the clay comes from the Big Lake [Lake Superior]. We fish of course, commercially and subsistence fishing, we have cranberry bogs,” Carrick explained. Traditionally, they also used the markings on the shells of sand turtles for calendars — 13 spaces (moons) ringed by 28 smaller spaces. “Everything about us is connected to the water.”

Carrick’s colleague, archivist Kayla Perron Assinewe, has assumed a leadership role in restoring the community’s relationship to manoomin, which was largely eradicated in the area by loggers who dynamited stacks of logs on the shore to float them down the river. She has organized the community to seed the waters with 800 pounds of wild rice seed, scattered from rice buckets on canoes.

Assinewe is the first to admit the seeds stink. “They smell like manure,” she said.

“But when you plant a manoomin seed, it has these little barbs on the end, so it torpedoes down when it drops, and then it hits that surface layer, and on that little barb it hangs in there and germinates through the winter. Then it will grow in the spring.”

Both Carrick and Assinewe are drawn to the story of Ozhaguscodaywayquay, who was married at age 14 to an Irish trader John Johnston, but maintained her cultural practices. In their joint telling:

The story with her is that she didn’t want to come here from Wisconsin. No, she didn’t. They forced her here, and they said that when she first got here, she sat in the corner of the room, put a blanket over her head, and wouldn’t leave the room or talk to anyone forever. And then she ran away home, didn’t she? She ran away home, and her father was mad and sent her back, and sent her brother back with her to make sure she stayed here. Then her husband bought her this fancy stove, and she took it and threw it out in the yard and refused. She only cooked over a fire. She still only spoke Anishinaabemowin. She had her medicine garden. She refused to transition to the modern times. Our ways were her heart.

“Sometimes We Need to Slow Our World”

Allyn Cameron, who directs the Bay Mills Cultural Program, told Truthout that the Straits of Mackinac are very dear to the community, though they’re 50 miles away.

“When we talk about Mackinac Island, the Straits of Mackinac, the whole Great Lakes area, we call that the heart of Turtle Island,” Cameron explained. “Our people, historically, moved all through this area, the straits, through Boweting, [the city of] Sault Ste. Marie, and we worked and lived and cycled all around based on the seasons, the fish that were available, the foods that were available, where the good hunting was, where the good berries were. We moved into the straits area to help trade and move things and survive, so that area is really significant to us.”

With that migration came dispersed burial grounds, many of them so old or remote as to be unmarked. The most gruesome aspect of his job is confronting the reality of grave robbing. “We have people out there with metal detectors, and they dig through all these old graves looking for anything they can put on the market, anything of value. A lot of these old artifacts that come up that you may see at auction, there’s a good chance they may have been looted,” said Cameron.

But for Cameron, nothing compares to the crime of allowing for the possibility of the Great Lakes to become Enbridge’s ecological wasteland when Line 5 inevitably ruptures.

“We go to the faucet, we turn it on, we get a drink of water, it’s easy to become complacent,” he says. “But I’ve been in ceremonies that helped me to understand what our four-legged and winged relatives go through, and so we have that empathy, compassion, and that understanding that sometimes we need to slow our world. We’re only just a part of creation.”

Above all, he said, he has a great respect for the powers of the water, and for that reason, he doesn’t go out on the ice much. Cameron remembers when his good buddy talked him into going ice fishing a little late in the season, when most of the fishing shacks had already been removed from the ice.

“I’m looking out, I can see pressure cracks on the ice. And as I’m taking a step, I see water at the pressure crack. He kept saying, ‘It’ll be fine, don’t worry.’ So I get a line and throw it over into the water. And no sooner did I throw it, I heard a splash and turned around. There’s my cousin standing on the ice, dripping because he went down and he was right back up. We tiptoed off that little lake.”

Through the obvious perils, Gravelle, who is a lawyer and served as a tribal attorney and tribal judge before being elected president, holds one particular treaty provision especially dear to maintain a holistic clarity as to her mission and her relationship with creation.

“Our treaty says the tribes in the area would continue to maintain the ‘usual privileges of occupancy in the treaty ceded territory.’ And I always like to highlight that language — the usual privileges of occupancy — because it’s not just the right to fish, it’s also the right to dance with the fish,” she said. “Because when you dance with fish, it’s about you going out, learning where to fish from your uncles, bringing that fish home, learning how to cook that fish with your mom, bringing that fish to ceremony, eating it with your elders, dancing in ceremony. And yeah, we do play with fish, and laugh with fish, and dance with fish. It is part of who we are. And so for me, in dignity, our Indigenous people say our ancestors fought for that language to be included in the treaty — the usual privileges of occupancy. There are reasons they wanted that language there.”