Anishinaabe

Bill McKibben 7-20-2021
Outlines of multiple faces with their mouths open as if singing or shouting. The faces overlap and are different colors.

Illustration by Matt Chase

IT'S ALWAYS AN honor to be invited to help with someone’s good work—to be a guest in their house, especially when that house is as big as all outdoors.

Early in the summer, the Indigenous groups that had been leading the fight against the proposed Line 3 tar sands pipeline in northern Minnesota asked everyone to join them. Freed by the vaccine to travel, many of us took up the offer; it was my first journey since lockdown. And so we gathered on the banks of the Mississippi—so far up the great river that you could, in fact, hop from one bank to the other. There were two big protests on the same June morning; one, at a pumping station, ended in hundreds of arrests of brave activists and real aggression from the police, who buzzed demonstrators repeatedly in a helicopter that kicked up choking clouds of dirt. I was about 20 miles away, and our protest was much more peaceful—indeed, it was mostly spiritual.

Its leaders were a series of Native elders. Along a usually deserted county road, several thousand of us mustered to listen to a water and pipe ceremony led by a pair of Anishinaabe women; it was a hot day, and the drone of their voices against the beat of drums both lulled and emboldened. Soon, a few of us struck out across a marsh, past signs declaring that we were trespassing, aiming for a wooden road that the pipeline company had built across the swamp to carry its equipment. We gained it, and soon there was an occupation underway—tents going up, people making plans for sanitation and food supply and security. But mostly there was prayer and ceremony: Within hours a sacred fire had been lit, and five days of ceremony were underway.

Liz Schmitt 4-22-2014

Members of the Reject & Protect witness set up a tipi on the National Mall. Photo courtesy Rose Berger.

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This week, we finally had some good news in the fight against climate change: President Barack Obama announced a further delay in the review process for the Keystone XL pipeline. The right thing to do is to reject the pipeline once and for all, but we all know politics is never that simple. The president says no decision will be made until the end of the year, which means the deadline comes after this year’s election. But the president isn’t up for re-election again, and protecting the environment should not be a partisan issue. All of us have a stake here.

We need more time, President Obama says, more reviews, more answers. But for Sojourners’ Rose Berger, who has been a leader in the faith community’s witness against Keystone XL, the answer has been clear for a long time.