The Mississippi River springs from innumerable lakes and wetlands in northern Minnesota, where the indigenous Ojibwe harvest wild rice. In an insane and suicidal world, what could be more beautiful than a rolling green protest camp full of activists chanting "Water is life"?
We got up early last Monday and made our way to the previously secret location. It was a construction site: a pumping station along the route of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which, if ever completed, would send almost a million barrels of Tar Sands crude every day to US refineries and Gulf Coast exporters. We were there to blockade, lock down on the equipment and ultimately get arrested by the police: civil disobedience by around two hundred people, with hundreds more in active support. Meanwhile another, even larger group was heading for peaceful and prayerful protest near Coffeepot Landing, at an Enbridge construction easement where the pipeline would cross beneath the nascent Mississippi, only a few yards wide at that point. Those folks are still there, camping on the easement, after the indigenous sheriff decided on conscience that he could not repress their action.
I can tell you that it was blazing hot in the sun, that it was fabulous to lock arms with your neighbors and find out why they had come to stare down the cops, and that in a world condemned by speed and greed, there is no better use of your precious time than a pipeline protest to protect the rights of the people whom colonial capitalism has always tried to eliminate, in order to create the disaster that is now facing all of us.
Jane Fonda spoke quite wonderfully while I sat in the shade of a bulldozer, but incomparably more inspiring were the voices of Winona LaDuke, from Honor the Earth, and Tara Houska, an indigenous lawyer and founder of the Giniw protest camp.
When the fuzz finally came out in force, late in the afternoon, they were fast to invade and seal the pump station perimeter, but slow to extract the activists who had locked down on the machines. Those of us who were outside the gate at that moment formed a line and advanced right up to the noses of the cops, chanting for hours till the sun set with glorious colors and they finally came for all of us. The local jails were full by then, so we would only get citations. They zip tied our hands behind our backs and dragged us over to some bare bulldozed ground. As I went down in the dust, a cry rose up: "Who are we?" Everyone roared back with one voice: "Treaty People!"
A protest action takes bodies and plans, concepts and visions. This action was exquisitely planned to reveal the water and wild rice at one site, the destructive equipment at another. The vision was clear: a restoral of indigenous life in the territory, coinciding with a drawdown of fossil-fuel infrastructure. And the concept was far-reaching.
If we didn't know it already, we learned at the camp that the treaties made between native tribes and the early US state were "the supreme law of the land," enshrined in the Constitution, but honored only in the breach. Those treaties gave the tribes who signed them rights to hunt, fish, gather and carry out ceremonial activities on the treaty territory forever, even though indigenous ownership of the land would be restricted to much smaller reservations. Today those treaty rights must be extended to entire ecosystems, because resource extraction, overuse of water and relentless industrial pollution threaten every aspect of native lifeways.
It takes two to make a treaty, and it takes two to uphold it. At the camp, indigenous leaders encouraged us to think, not only about them, their sufferings and their dreams, but about ourselves, who we are, where we came from and how we got to this place. As the descendants of European settlers, and/or as citizens of the United States, we have not only rights, but also unique and important treaty obligations. The colonial capitalist state is a traitor to its own law. Protest, political engagement and active solidarity have become ways that we, as individuals and groups, can begin fulfilling our part of the bargain.
Who am I in the era of climate change? My ancestors came from the British isles and the Dalmatian coast. I was born in San Francisco, surrounded by an extraordinary natural environment. Yet today I live in a scorched world, whose probable destiny became so bitterly clear last year, when the California fires burned down the home that my family had built with our own hands. How much more terrible is this scorching feeling for young people in their twenties, who came in such large numbers to put their bodies on the line in Anishanaabe treaty territory in northern Minnesota? We shall have to spend the rest of our lives searching, not only for who we are, but for a world that we can live in. Neither of these things will be easy, though they may be intuitive for some. You cannot erase the past, but you can chose to inherit what still promises a future. In relation to the fragile and contested sovereignties of the Indigenous, we USians can strive to be Treaty People.
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Some links to find out more:
https://www.stopline3.orghttps://welcomewaterprotectors.comhttps://twitter.com/GiniwCollectivehttps://unicornriot.ninja/2021/rising-up-to-the-heat-treaty-people-gathering-resists-line-3-pipelinehttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html