Water Gives Life, by Luke Henkel by Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center

F A L L “When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late,that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” —ALANIS OBOMSAWIN

Fall is a season of death, but it is also a remarkable season of vibrancy and life. Through the beauty of the dying and changing leaves, we experience warmth and comfort. The heat of summer subsides and suddenly, for the first time in months, we may experience the brisk winds of fall. In autumns past, bonfires used to mark its commencement. Now, with wildfires blazing, campfires and bonfires are banned in many places. Fall foliage has altered because of global warming and invasive insects (i.e. emerald ash bores, spotted lanternflies) have begun to appear in the fall killing trees and crops. The crunch of rusty and golden leaves beneath our shoes causes nostalgia and reminds us of the reality that we can no longer live the way we once did. Our climate passivity has changed the way we celebrate nature and points to the harsh reality that we have created. In this season, we can be inspired to protect and preserve the natural beauty that enshrouds us.

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Sasha Beaulieu, Red Lake Treaty Camp, Photo © Jaida-Grey

Water Gives Life Reflections on Line 3

BY LUKE HENKEL

ate last summer, I stood at the edge of the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota watching the sun descend towards the pines and the reeds. It was the end of a very long day, at the end of a very, very long week. The twilight unfolding in front of me was symbolic—the sun was setting on the hopes of all of us gathered at the edge of the marsh, it seemed. Line 3 was moving ahead, as implacable as the onset of darkness, and the resistance against it felt weak suddenly, fading, like the strength of summer at the far end of September 2021. It was hanging on, but barely, and winter was not far away. Sadly, hope seemed to be slipping below the horizon a lot more quickly than the sun. I stood with my affinity group of

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water protectors, a band of six of us from Seattle who had come out to help defend these sacred lands against the black snake of Enbridge Corporation’s Line 3, which was now nearing completion. In just a matter of weeks, it was slated to start pumping thick, heavy, crude, tar, sands, and bitumen right through the area. Here, the mightiest river in the United States was a foreshadow only, a series of unconnected marshes, but despair was already a threatening current, starting to flow strongly. It pulled the ground out from under me as if I stood at the ocean instead and the ground shifted with every wave. Our planned protests had been canceled because of a COVID-19 outbreak; the action I’d come for was not going to happen. The construction on Line 3, however, very much was.

intimate as the one that draws Catholics to the Eucharist: It is one of divine connection, of ultimate union, of such interconnectedness that you can’t talk about one without fully talking about the other. Imagine taking the sunshine out of the flower—without the sunshine, the flower simply couldn’t exist. This is not just poetry or metaphor or nice imagery. It is a fundamental reality. It is a truth so essential, it is beyond words, beyond comparison. I came to understand this over my time in Minnesota on the front lines of the fight, with deep, bodily knowledge. The land I stood alongside is not just home to the Indigenous. It is being. It is relationship. It is love, life; it is everything. The water, the soil, the rivers, the trees, above all the sacred wild rice (manoomin in Ojibwe)—it is all a relationship of the most unimaginable beauty. It’s pure love, expressing itself in a language without any human words. This is the language that the soul speaks to the rhythm of heartbeats, heartthrobs, heartaches, heartbreak. This is also a truth completely ignored in the Line 3 saga (and in Indigenous struggles against extractivist fossil fuel

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October was the goal for the completion of the pipeline—one month away. At that time, 760,000 barrels of oil a day would be rocketed through the belly of this black snake on its way from Canada to Wisconsin. After a 1,000-mile journey from west-central Alberta to the terminal on the edge of Lake Superior, it would be refined and shipped elsewhere in the Midwest, to eastern Canada, and south to the Gulf Coast, and then around the world. Nearly all 330 miles in northern Minnesota were already complete, and every day that we’d been in the area, more miles were laid down. Even without the COVID-19 outbreak rupturing our plans, it was increasingly difficult to organize an action, simply because the pipeline was going in the ground so quickly. Enbridge had a very tight deadline— and they were pulling out all stops to make it. We stood then in encroaching darkness, both my small affinity group and the overall movement. Just that morning, we’d had a tough conversation with a Collective leader, a two-spirit Northern Arapaho organizer who informed us the resistance camps faced an uncertain future. As close as Enbridge was to its goal, the legal charges against water protectors were ratcheting up. So was the violence. Protesters were facing heightened felony charges, and there had already been police raids at one camp earlier in the summer. Police brutality landed several water protectors in the hospital, two with potentially permanent damage. Indigenous protesters were facing much more serious police aggression, and they were specifically being targeted. There was a very palpable feeling overall that the resistance was making its last stand. New strategies were needed straight away, but that path forward was as unclear as the muddied waters of the Mississippi further south. What to do in the face of this devastating and dangerous pipeline, which threatened the very waters in which I stood? This wasn’t just the birthplace of the mighty Mississippi. This was the sacred land of the Ojibwe, who know this area as gichizibbi, or “great waters.” This land is home for the Ojibwe in a way that I will likely never fully understand as a white individual. And it is being gutted by a pipeline passing stolen oil from one land to another. (Stolen, because how can this whole process ever be one of true consent in the first place, no matter what consultative processes are followed? Despite Enbridge Corporation’s claims of having met with the Tribal bodies and followed the proper procedures, how can anybody truly consent?) This land is being ravaged for profits and for benefits, this place will never see. Line 3 is a violation of Indigenous land. As such, it is a violation of Indigenous identity, of Indigenous humanity. This is because the land in and around the headwaters doesn’t just belong to the Indigenous nations of the Ojibwe, Anishnaabe, White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Earth (at least not in the political or legal rights sense we use to talk about ownership). This land is the Ojibwe, Anishnaabe, White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Earth peoples’. The people are the land, in a relationship as

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expansion in their territories throughout the world). This reality, this truth, has been ravaged and distorted just like the land. When the land is ravaged, it is the people of that land who are torn apart, gutted, poisoned just the same. I myself felt gut-wrenching anguish that Line 3 was probably going to finish. But for the Ojibwe, Anishnaabe, White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake natives, experiencing the tar sands pipeline rip up the wild rice fields and pass through their waters is like having it pass through their own veins. It’s like having your insides poisoned. This, too, is in no way metaphorical. Water is life. Human blood, which keeps us all alive, is 90 percent water. Nibi 1 gaa-bimaaji’iwemagak. Destruction of water means death then, as surely as toxic sludge pumping through your arteries. This is an expression of truth, again as fundamental as the existence of our Creator. Being gutted might not be the most pleasant thought to dwell on, but oddly, it left me thinking about hope. I thought a lot about hope just then, and how difficult it is in the face of yet another pipeline through the Indigenous territory. My natural inclination was to talk about hope. But how to do this in the face of such terrifying darkness? Some say they don’t want to hear about hope. I have heard that aplenty in activist circles—even activist Greta Thunberg famously said, “I don’t want your hope. I do not want you to be hopeful.” Some have told me that hope, in a lot of ways, is a privileged, white thing to go on about. It is easy to talk about hope, really, if all in your life has been ok. It is easy to talk about hope if you have never fully been in the pit of despair. You can certainly talk freely about things like hope and light when it doesn’t cost anything for you to do so. Hope and all things getting better and being ok is a great topic when you’ve never paid the full price of them being very much not ok. These people—I could not deny that I am one of them—have hope to spare, and lots of it. But in the end, this talk of hope can be dismissive if not downright damaging, to people who face the violation of their sacred lands. Hope can sound like a smarmy thing indeed to go on about in earshot of someone who’s facing the destruction of their land, their bodies, their souls in one great ravaging. When your land—when you—are being poisoned? Come back and talk about hope when you’ve had that oil run through your body and blacken your own insides. I felt this truth as much as I felt the chill of the burgeoning night. I felt it more fully than ever after a week of failed actions and fear—fear of COVID-19, of time running out, of a pipeline leaking into the headwaters, of an ever-more-urgent climate

crisis. How could I even think about hope? Line 3 is just one of the dozens of Enbridge lines that crisscross North America— there are currently more than 17,000 miles of line across the continent. While the Keystone XL pipeline was successfully shut down last year by the Biden administration, Line 5 is currently undergoing upgrade and reconstruction with a proposed tunnel underneath the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac in Michigan—another Enbridge project that would add the carbon emissions equivalent of an extra six million cars on the road every year. Even if Line 3 did not go operational, one less pipeline will

◀ U.S. Customs and Border Protections helicopter flew over non-violent protesters opposing Line 3, Photo © Syndney Mosier ▲ Photo © Luke Henkel

“My natural inclination was to talk about hope. But how to do this in the face of such terrifying darkness?” not stop or reverse the climate crisis. Enbridge actually used that as an argument for Line 3: There will be no end to the demand for oil any time soon, so Line 3 is the best-case scenario. Nor will ceasing operation on this line halt or reverse the ravaging of Indigenous communities. What then to do? I realized in that darkening water that hope is not mine alone to talk about unless I am willing to stand in the darkness, the night, the depths of fear. Hope is not mine to give, even, unless I have received the ravaging despair that comes from losing your land, your belongings, yourself. Hope is not mine alone unless it is all of ours. It is like those flowers in a field. The sun does not just shine on one of the flowers and leave the rest in total darkness with none. So, it is with hope. The water that poisons one, poisons us all. If we talk about hope, we talk about hope for all. And better than talking—if we work for hope, we work for hope for all. Luke Henkel is an activist and water protector, former Divine Word Missionary (SVD) Brother, current graduate student, and lifelong spiritual seeker. He spent much of summer 2021 on the frontlines and in the resistance camps of northern Minnesota against Line 3 and is actively engaged in fighting fossil fuel expansion in the Pacific Northwest with the Protectors of the Salish Sea. He is currently pursuing his Master’s

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in Climate Justice remotely through Glasgow Caledonian University.