Finding Hope in the Fight Against Line 3

Tara Houska protesting at Line 3. [AJ+]

By Isra Rahman

One summer day, Tara Houska, an Indigenous lawyer and activist who has been protesting the construction of the Line 3 oil pipeline in Minnesota, found herself running from rubber bullets.

Local police attacked protesters for demonstrating near and on the pipeline construction site. Officers shot Houska with rubber bullets, sprayed her with mace and arrested her. In an interview with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, Houska said that “the level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme. People were shot in their faces, in their bodies, in their upper torsos.”

It’s the latest escalation in the ongoing struggle to stop Line 3, a 1,031-mile crude oil and tar sands pipeline that will extend from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin. Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, has been leading the construction efforts on the pipeline, which passes through land that the Anishinaabe people use to fish and hunt. Some claim this violates numerous treaty agreements.

Indigenous activists and water protectors have set up camps along different parts of the pipeline to disrupt construction, which is supposed to be completed by the end of the year. Houska, who is Anishinaabe from the Couchiching First Nation and the founder of woman and two-spirit led Giniw Collective, is one of the people actively leading the movement.

In an interview with AJ+ producer Julia Muldavin, Houska reflects on climate activism, the fight to stop Line 3 and what gives her hope. Here are the main takeaways.

Why the fight to stop the Line 3 pipeline is important

Line 3 is an “expansion of human greed and destruction and colonial practices of disrespecting Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous rights and Indigenous personhood,” Houska said. “Anishinaabe people were told by Creator to come where the food grows on water. We came here to the Great Lakes region, and we've been here for thousands of years. This is the only place in the world that wild rice grows. It is at the heart of our culture and who we are as people.”

The pipeline would be incredibly disruptive to this practice, she continued, since it “goes through all the places that people don't see, that are out of sight, out of mind. They’re the sacrifice zones.” This is why she’s motivated to take part in the protests – “to protect the wild rice and protect future generations.”

Police, an energy company and suppressing dissent

“As part of the approval of the project, the public utility commission in Minnesota ordered the creation of the Public Safety Escrow Trust, which … essentially acts as a place where Enbridge can dump in as much money as police officers are seeking to be reimbursed for costs related to the Line 3 protests,” Houska said.

At this point, she continued, “We're probably at well over a million dollars … there are counties that are [seeking reimbursement for] $100,000 for just a couple of months of surveilling, harassing, intimidating and oppressing Indigenous people and allies involved in the Line 3 struggle. There are usually police officers parked around the clock outside of our little encampment on private property, sending over drones, sending over helicopters, trying to bill for riot gear, rubber bullets, less lethal ammunition.” (For their part, the Public Utilities Commission told AJ+ in an email that over a million dollars has been spent on "eligible public safety expenses.”)

Lessons from Standing Rock

Houska protested at Standing Rock in South Dakota in 2016 to block the Dakota Access pipeline, which was being built beneath the Missouri River. At its peak, over 10,000 people occupied the camps, including representatives from over 300 tribes.

“It was the first time that I saw land defense work, where people were actually at the place that was being actively destroyed and putting their physical bodies in front of the machines. To me, that was just so powerful on so many different levels, realizing the incredible amount of pressure and effectiveness of that tactic,” Houska said.

“It's this beautiful act of spiritual prayer and the coming together of different nations and people putting themselves on the line, being willing to engage in self-sacrifice to try to protect the land for someone else, not even necessarily just for themselves, but for future generations and for other nations,” she continued. “I'm not a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe or of the Lakotas downstream or anything like that. But to me, it was my relatives that [we] were trying to protect … what was sacred to them and what is sacred to them.”

Building solidarity

Houska and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wrote an op-ed together on what intersectionality means when it comes to fighting the pipeline.

Houska told AJ+, “You’ve got southern Minnesota, where you have police brutality on full display and militarization of police, brutalizing people out in the streets that are angry about the murder of yet another Black man. And then in northern Minnesota, you got Indigenous water protectors and allies who are facing [police] that are funded by a corporation for protecting their land, for protecting our land. It's not like the struggles exist separately. They are intertwined … Theft of land, theft of labor, it's at the heart of a lot of the dysfunction.”

Activism and violence

Houska has been told she’s a “radical” by some. But she doesn’t agree. “It’s not radical to protect the land. It's not violent to protect [a] place. The violence that's happening is happening at the hands of someone else – the people that are ripping apart the Earth,” she said. “When I hear phrases like ‘ecoterrorists,’ I think, who is the person that's actively destroying the ecosystems around us, who are the entities doing those acts? It's not us. We're trying to protect it.”

How to stay hopeful

“When you see people risking their freedom, risking their bodies, risking their own comfort for someone who's not even here, [for future generations], that's super powerful,” she said. “And seeing all these young people coming out and learning how to be in the woods – that gives me huge hope. When I was 18, I wasn't doing any of this work, and they're like 15 … or 13, or 12. And they're already talking about decolonizing and reparations and Black Lives Matter. They've got this whole host of problems, including human existence being wiped out as a species … They've done the marches and the rallies and the campaigns. And now they're here.”

The way she looks at it, Houska said, “Our people have been wiped out before for being out of balance with the Earth. And it doesn't really frighten me to think about that because it's happened before. It doesn't mean that you don't act though,” she continued. “Wouldn't you still want to be part of a world that’s the most equitable, just and kind and respectful of each other and of all life as possible … Don’t we still want to be more grown as people and try to repair our relationships to each other and to the living world around us? Seeing people [work toward that] gives me hope.”

Click here to watch the full AJ+ video about Indigenous resistance and Line 3.

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