Based on transcript of comments by Holly T. Bird, as edited by Jeff Smith

Today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2024, we are sharing thoughts from Holly T. Bird, an attorney/activist who is a descendant of the Apache / Yaqui (Durango Community) / Purepecha Tribe and lives here in Northern Michigan. Holly also served as the Executive Director of the Water Protector Legal Clinic, the leading legal organization for the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

What follows here are comments Holly offered at Groundwork’s Tunnel Vision event, in which five panelists presented a multifaceted assessment of the Line 5 tunnel construction project in the Mackinac Straits. Holly’s words helped people understand Line 5 from the cultural and legal perspective of Indigenous people. Holly’s views are her own, and she is not speaking in official capacity on behalf of any Michigan or Great Lakes region Tribes.

I’m here to talk about sovereignty and tribal sovereignty and what these cases mean. So, treaties are the law of the land. They’re the law that affects everybody and it’s what puts boundaries in place between us and other sovereign nations. We know, for example, treaties define the shape of the United States and who is part of the United States and who isn’t. Same with Canada, same with other sovereign nations, including Tribes.

Sovereignty means that you have the right to make decisions about what it is that you are or what you do. So we as people, hopefully as free people, we have sovereignty over our bodies, right? And as Tribes, that means we have the ability and the right, the given right, to govern ourselves. We’re here because we were meant to be here, and we have the right to govern ourselves. Tribal sovereignty is not an idea that’s given to us by the United States. We have been here for thousands and thousands of years and already had our own sovereignty.

If you were to think about the length of my arm as a timeline of our history, tribal history goes from my shoulder to my finger tips. U.S. history is the tip of my pinky.

So, yes, we have a long history of sovereignty, but it’s also important to ask how do you understand our sovereignty? How does the government of the U.S. understand our sovereignty, and the way it works by law—by treaty, primarily. In this country, we have many Tribes, hundreds of them—in Michigan we have 12 tribes—and we have as nearly as many treaties as there are tribes. Some treaties affect multiple tribes.

Treaties are everybody’s law. Everybody here should know the treaties that they live under, because they’re your law too. But in this region, and as it affects this case of the Enbridge pipeline, we’re looking at the Treaty of Washington, which was created back in the 1800s and underneath that we have the Chippewa Ottawa resource authority, which governs the rights of the Tribes that are affected by the Treaty of Washington.

And these are primarily the Tribes that are around the upper part of Michigan and the lakes. It governs our right to fish. It governs our right to exist in our own cultural ways and have our livelihoods with the water, with the fish, with the inland waterways, with the flora and the fauna.

And then the other treaty that we often have heard being talked about is the Transit Treaty, which is between the United States and Canada. The way that it interplays with tribal sovereignty is that Enbridge has already violated our treaties as far as putting the pipeline in. One of the number one tenets of tribal sovereignty is you’re supposed to have a consultation with that Tribe, the Tribes that are affected, and that’s really on the U.S. government to do that. That was not done when the original pipeline was put through.

In fact, my husband, who was a tribal counselor for the Grand Traverse Band, was at the very first consultation between Enbridge and Tribes concerning the pipeline. And this is Enbridge coming to say, hey, we want to do a tunnel. That happened only about six years ago.

So we know, and Enbridge knows that they’ve been part of the violation of that treaty. How it affects Line 5 is through the livelihood of the Tribes here, which is subsistence fishing. Fishing is a huge way of life here, the waters are a huge way of life, everything from creation stories, where we came from, to food, not just fishing, but manoomin, the wild rice, to culture, spirit, everything. We have ceremonies around it. We have entire ways of life surrounding the water, and any encroachment on that is a violation of the treaty.

So we know encroachment has happened a lot. We know that that’s happened not just by Enbridge, but, you know, by the state, by the federal government. But this, this would be particularly egregious, and the Tribes have spoken out against it unanimously.

Where Enbridge has the Line 5 pipeline running through the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin, the easement for that also expired, and that section of line 5 is also at danger of rupture. In fact, there’s a piece of the pipeline where there’s only about 11 feet between the pipeline and this corroding riverbed where that pipeline’s exposed and can actually become damaged. It’s very tenuous. And that whole area is the Bad River Band’s rivershed. It’s their watershed. It would be a disastrous situation.

So the Bad River Tribe actually took a really brave action and chose not to renew the easement. It was very brave, because they’re a small Tribe. They don’t have a lot of money. It was probably one of the first times that we had tribes saying, “Out, Buddy. You’re done!” Enbridge ignored it. In court it was found that they were trespassing because they no longer had a right to be there. However, the judge decided they could keep operating the pipeline till 2026. It’s nice that they told them that they had to remove it, but Enbridge has no plans to do that. They really don’t.

Through their arguments in this case, they’ve tried to say that their right under the Transit Treaty to have a pipeline going through these lands, whether it be state, federal or tribal, overrides everybody else’s rights. That’s what they keep arguing, that their pipeline is more important because of the apparent risk to the public if it should be removed. Mind you, and we’ve already seen studies that show there is no real risk to the public if Line 5 is removed because there are other options that are viable options for transporting the oil. And I think we had determined for Michigan the price increase for gas was like one or two cents per gallon. I’d pay $1 more, honestly, to protect my lakes from a ruptured oil pipeline.

But this argument’s a really dangerous argument. We’re supposed to be protected from other countries and other corporate entities. There is no federal law right now that allows them to do something different than that, and in fact, it would violate umpteen federal laws if the U.S. government does not protect Tribes from Enbridge.

This stuff has been happening to us for a long time. Let’s talk about that for just a second. Folks, my people, have been dying for a long time. We can go back to the Osage murders. Some of you just saw that movie Killers of the Flower Moon. That was some of the first murders for oil, and that was just flat out murder. We could talk about the Texaco Chevron oil spill in the 1970s that happened around Ecuador and the Amazon. Four Tribes went extinct. Four Tribes went extinct. Think about that. Tribes aren’t little. They’re not just the small family groups, they’re 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez oil spill with the Alutiiq, which is a Tribe up in Alaska, completely demolished their way of life. They call that “the day the water died,” because it’s never been the same. And then in 2010 we had the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We had the Louisiana tribes, at least five of them whose subsistence was shrimping, and they can no longer do that, and their health concerns coming out of that were worse than the oil workers. We know about the Kalamazoo River spill. We know about Standing Rock.

And another offshoot of that that most people aren’t aware of are the man camps that come out of the oil fields out toward Montana and the Dakotas. The uptick in crime was like 75%, and that was coming out disproportionately on Indigenous women and children, deaths, murders. You know, we still can’t even count the number that have happened, and man camps are a risk here with the tunnel.

So, you know, going back to talk about those threats, like I said, we’re already dying. We’ve already been dying. And that’s what we risk here as well, we don’t always have big money to hire lawyers. You know, we put our bodies on the line. I’ve heard some people get upset with tribal people who will show up at things and lay their body down, but that’s all they have. Does that make sense? That’s all they have.

So here, though, when we talk about these treaties and sovereignty, this is dangerous. This is dangerous for all of us. We know that because water is precious. We know that because air is precious. And our climate is precious. But in these cases, what Enbridge is asking the court to do is to completely ignore the rights of all of you—not just us this time—but it’s all of you and all of us.

So the fight is an extraordinay fight, and I don’t wish for anybody to die, you know, in any place, much less my people continuing to experience that. But I’m thankful for everybody who is here today. My advice is to keep fighting. Support our Tribes in their fight. Get that word out there. Talk to your neighbors. Sometimes the work is done with the American public, and it’s done with who you vote for, right? So get out there. If you have Great Uncle Joe that you know, loves his gas automobile and just thinks that climate science is hokey, please go talk to them. You’ve got to have those uncomfortable conversations so my people don’t keep dying. So that your people don’t start to die. Miigwech.

Holly T. Bird, Co-Executive Director of Title Track.