Stopping Line 3 is a matter of justice.
It is about justice for the land. It’s about justice for the water. Justice for Anishinaabe people whose culture and way of life it threatens. Justice for people all over the world who are being impacted by the climate crisis.
That’s why I am excited to announce that, today, we are launching a major new campaign: #DefundLine3. You can click here to take the first action as part of this campaign.
Back in 2016, I helped to launch #DefundDAPL. As Indigenous Water Protectors were being brutalized by racist, militarized police ― shot with rubber bullets, bitten by attack dogs and blasted with water cannons in the middle of winter ― #DefundDAPL spread nationally.
Protests erupted in cities around the country, close to a dozen city governments committed to breaking ties with the funders of DAPL and nearly $100 million in personal accounts were moved away from the funders of that colonial pipeline.
Now is the time for us to defund the White Supremacist, carbon bomb that is Line 3.
Over the next two months, we’re going to make the financial companies that support Enbridge and its toxic Line 3 pipeline feel the heat. Here’s the plan.
On March 31st, 18 banks have a $2.2 billion loan to Enbridge that is due for renewal. That’s in 51 days. Between now and then, we’re going to do everything in our power to make it loud and clear to the executives of those banks: They must walk away from Line 3 ― or there will be consequences.
Every week, we’re going to ask you to take an action that helps put pressure on those 18 banks funding Line 3. We’ll ask you to send direct emails to CEOs, call board members, take part in Covid-safe street protests, participate in projection actions, join online rallies and much more.
If enough of us take these actions together, we can make the companies funding Line 3 feel enough pressure that they will walk away from Enbridge.
For the last seven years, I have been fighting Line 3 with everything I have. If built, Line 3, a massive toxic tar sands pipeline, would destroy the sacred wild rice beds my people depend on for our food, our culture and our way of life. It would contribute as much to the climate crisis as 50 new coal-fired power plants. It would endanger 800 wetlands and 200 waterways.
Despite ongoing legal challenges from the Red Lake Nation, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Minnesota’s own Department of Commerce, environmental organizations, and 13 brave youth intervenors, construction of Line 3 continues ― bringing thousands of out-of-state workers to northern MN in the middle of a deadly pandemic, threatening already vulnerable rural, Indigenous communities with the virus even more.
As an Anishinaabe woman it is my duty to protect the water, the land, and my people. I am moved to act because I love the people, the four-legged, the winged, the finned, the land, the water.
It is my duty as an Anishinaabe woman that compels me to support people in taking direct action to stop the construction of Line 3. Direct action, like when Water Protectors recently locked themselves inside a section of pipe, blockaded the entrances to construction sites, and locked themselves to trucks being used to carry Line 3 pipeline materials.
It is from this sense of duty that I am asking you to join us in this campaign. Together, I know that we can do this. Throughout history people-powered movements have changed the world. And they sure as hell can stop Line 3.
Since the antiracist uprisings began last year, I have been proud to stand in solidarity with the demand of Black-led movements to defund the police. Indigenous people understand White Supremacist police brutality. Like Black folks of this country, we’ve faced it for centuries.
Now, just as racist police forces have brutalized Black and Indigenous bodies, Enbridge is brutalizing sacred Anishinaabe land ― and is being protected by a militarized police force paid for by a Candian oil company as it does so.
Together, we are powerful.
Miigwech
~ Tara Houska for Stop the Money Pipeline
Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe) is a tribal attorney, founder of Giniw Collective, and a former advisor on Native American affairs to Bernie Sanders. She spent six months on the frontlines fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and is currently engaged in the movement to defund fossil fuels and a years-long struggle against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. She is a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a group committed to positive representation of Native peoples.
She is a TED speaker, the 2017 Harvard “Public Interested” keynote, received an “Awesome Women Award” from Melinda Gates and a 2019 Rachel’s Network Catalyst Award, is featured in “Women: A Century of Change” by National Geographic, and was named an “Icon” on the cover of Outside Magazine’s 40th Anniversary edition. Tara has contributed to the women-led climate anthology “All We Can Save”, the New York Times, the Guardian, Vogue, Indian Country Today and been featured on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Democracy Now, and BBC. She lives in a pipeline resistance camp in Northern Minnesota.
