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Background on this story:
Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off With an Oil Company and Police Over a Minnesota Pipeline
THE EARLY MORNING sun was still low on a dirt road in northern Minnesota this March as a small crowd faced Aitkin County sheriff’s deputies. The crowd drummed and chanted messages of support for the seven people on the other side of the police line, who sat linked together from one side of the road to the other, locked to concrete-filled barrels. The chained demonstrators were stopping construction personnel from entering a pump station for Enbridge’s Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline that has become the latest flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens.
Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho 28-year-old from the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, greeted me from behind a mask. They described what water protectors, members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement, had recently encountered along Line 3’s route: an intensifying law enforcement presence including aerial surveillance at a pipeline resistance camp.
“It was actually really crazy — a DHS helicopter flew over camp yesterday,” Big Wind told me, referring to the Department of Homeland Security. They heard it before seeing it circle twice just above the tree canopy. “You could tell it was intentional and it was to intimidate us and to surveil us.”
As Big Wind described the low-flying DHS helicopter, a masked police officer approached us. Big Wind went on, “We see the police taking a more escalated response to the actions that have been happening here.”
“Can you describe that escalated response?” Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida cut in. “’Cause I’m the police, and I argue with you that we haven’t taken an escalated response. We’ve had a very even-keeled response.” Big Wind knew Guida well and was irritated by the interjection.
“I was literally talking about how there was a helicopter flying over,” Big Wind said, “a DHS helicopter — and you just interrupted my conversation.”
“We have no helicopters,” Guida replied. “We haven’t been in any helicopters. The stories you tell — they need to be true.” Big Wind retorted that the water protectors had video of the helicopter.
“Thought you didn’t want to argue,” Guida snapped back. “Take a look at the badges around here and find me the Department of Homeland Security. There’s none here.” Guida was proud of his recent record: Despite an influx of activists as the winter cold eased, his deputies had avoided making any arrests the prior week. “I don’t call that an escalated response. I call it exceptional public safety,” he told Big Wind. “Don’t tell lies about cops.”
The sheriff and I stepped aside to talk further. I asked him about the special Enbridge-funded account that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission had set up to reimburse law enforcement for pipeline-related expenses. For water protectors, the funding from Enbridge positions the police as biased toward the company — or at worst privatized operatives for Enbridge.
Guida assured me there was nothing wrong with the pipeline company’s payments to police. “Enbridge doesn’t pay for us,” he said. “It’s a reimbursement for expenses that are related to this line that we wouldn’t normally have.” Guida said the arrangement was better than taxpayers footing the bill, adding that a government-appointed account manager needed to approve every Enbridge payment. Guida said, “I don’t think that we have any connections with Enbridge — there’s a good separation.”
A few days later, Guida left me a voicemail to acknowledge a mistake: “I do have to apologize, because there was a helicopter that buzzed the camp,” he said. Big Wind had been right.
Big Wind’s camp is in a neighboring county, and Guida was unaware that another sheriff had called in Customs and Border Protection. Guida’s understanding of what was happening in the battle between the pipeline company and the water protectors was incomplete — a symptom of the sprawling, multiagency response to pipeline resistance.
For water protectors, the law enforcement denials and the escalating Enbridge-funded policing are part of a pattern of law enforcement working hand in hand with pipeline companies to police their opposition — and then refuting that a collaboration exists. From Standing Rock to Jordan Cove, private and public resources, sometimes intermingled, are put in service of what water protectors say amounts to a corporate counterinsurgency against their efforts to save the planet from the fossil fuel industry.
In Minnesota, the label is more than just semantic. The state permit for the Line 3 pipeline includes an unusual condition: “The Permittee, the permittee’s contractors and assigns will not participate in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns to interfere with the rights of the public to legally exercise their Constitutional rights.”
Water protectors say Enbridge has violated its permit conditions. They point to the escrow account created for Enbridge to pay for pipeline policing, an intensification of surveillance, and a yearslong divide-and-conquer effort by the pipeline company aimed at local communities. Though questions remain surrounding what exactly the state of Minnesota meant by the permit provision, Enbridge and the police’s efforts seem to bear the hallmarks of corporate counterinsurgency. An Intercept investigation involving dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of public records, and reviews of academic literature suggests the pipeline opponents have a strong case to make.
“They were told not to do — what is it? — ‘counterinsurgency’ is the exact term they’ve used,” said Tara Houska, a 37-year-old Anishinaabe water protector from Minnesota and a veteran of the fight at Standing Rock. “I don’t understand how surveilling, harassing and targeting people on a daily basis is not counterinsurgency.”
ENBRIDGE’S PIPELINE IS just one battleground in a larger struggle with enormous stakes. Enbridge, a Canadian energy firm, is expanding and rerouting its old, corroded Line 3. Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to a hub in Wisconsin, where it can be more easily transported to refineries from the Gulf Coast to eastern Canada.
Rapidly ending the extraction of this particular fossil fuel is imperative to the climate crisis due to the nature of the oil: The processes required to transform sticky Alberta sludge into usable fuel make tar sands oil one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. The risks are compounded when tar sands travel: Oil pipeline spills are endemic, and Enbridge has a particularly nasty record.
Most of the U.S. portion of the route, more than 330 miles, is in Minnesota. There, the conflict over Line 3 centers on both the larger climate considerations and local concerns, particularly of Anishinaabe people. Though the struggle against Line 3 has lasted the better part of a decade, the efforts were invigorated by mounting Indigenous-led resistance to pipelines that bisect treaty lands across North America. Opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota gave rise to what became known as the water protector movement in 2016 and was promptly met with a private-public crackdown at the edge of the Standing Rock Reservation.
As The Intercept reported in an investigative series beginning in 2017, Energy Transfer, the firm behind the Dakota Access pipeline, hired private security contractors who saw the Standing Rock movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” — going so far as say that water protectors “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model.” The security firm, TigerSwan, ran a counterinsurgency modeled on what the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan, infiltrating the anti-pipeline movement, conducting surveillance and spreading propaganda, while routinely coordinating with local law enforcement.
When Enbridge brought the pipeline fight to Indigenous lands in Minnesota, the public officials responsible for issuing a permit were well aware of what had just happened next door in North Dakota. Three years ago, Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner John Tuma, a Republican, spoke at a public hearing during the permitting process for Line 3. “I was not impressed with what happened out there,” Tuma said, of North Dakota. “This is the United States of America. Citizens of Minnesota have a right to protest.”
Tuma was in favor of explicitly prohibiting counterinsurgency in the construction permit. “I think what’s critical for me to know as we go forward is that those kind of activities, this insurgency-type stuff, the Pinkerton-style-type stuff doesn’t happen here in Minnesota,” he said. The anti-counterinsurgency language was inserted into the permit — but with no definitions to accompany it. The vagueness has meant accountability to the terms of the permit’s anti-counterinsurgency clause is hard to come by.
Tuma declined to comment for this story, but the Public Utilities Commission’s Executive Secretary Will Seuffert confirmed that the commission never defined the term “counterinsurgency.” As for accountability, Seuffert said the state’s designated public safety liaison for the pipeline, Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, would be the one to monitor for such tactics and raise concerns if they occur. The Department of Public Safety did not reply to a request for comment.
There is more to read, but this is dark shyt with this corporation is bribing the police to let them fukk up protestors and rush this pipeline through.
