Line 3 pipeline fight heats up with daily direct actions, serious police aggression in MN

The fight to stop Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline from crossing Ojibwe lands and potentially destroying the wild rice beds has seriously heated up. For the past week, direct action every day has forced halt after halt to construction, notably stopping Enbridge from "pulling back" pipe under the river by locking to a drilling rig. In response, police have escalated to rubber bullets, chemical weapons, and even rearrests of just released water protectors. There were 19 arrests just on August 4th as water protectors made their stand on the Thief River.

A place called the Thief River is an appropriate place to be confronted with those who seek to pump stolen tar sands "oil" over stolen land and under stolen water. If the pipeline breaks, the wild rice beds Anishaabe people depend upon will be destroyed. Already, leaks of drilling fluid (known as "frack-outs") are fouling water where Enbridge is running drilling rigs to create tunnels for their Black Snake pipeline to dive under water.

It is known that Enbridge has hired local police to engage in counterinsurgency. This is an admission that an insurgency exists or is believed to exist. This in turn means Enbridge is knowingly engaging in an "Indian War" just like those who stole gold from the Black Hills. No doubt white Enbridge executives would gladly kill Indigenous water protectors if they thought they could do so without calling down the thunderous fury of a globally supported, pan-Indigenous campaign of resistance that would
show their small-time cop buddies what an insurgency REALLY is.

As it stands, Enbridge executives already are widely considered legitimate targets for residential protests at any hour of the day or night, and so are the executives of their investors and contractors. These are nonviolent, but try to sleep through one-or get invited to neighborhood wine and cheese parties after your behavior caused furious protesters to descend on your block late in the night. Ojibwe leaders could snap their fingers and have a storm of protesters treating executives of Enbridge and all their business partners the way HLS and their investors and customers were treated before. Enbridge need only ask the FBI about Huntingdon Life Sciences to know just how bad it can get.