Pipeline Company Targets Individual Tribal Members in Court Battle for Line 5

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In recent lawsuits, Enbridge has targeted individual tribal members, seeking to question them under oath about their opposition to the company’s pipeline through tribal lands in Wisconsin.

Enbridge is getting personal with the Bad River Ojibwe tribe over the company’s Line 5 pipeline route through tribal lands in Wisconsin.

Enbridge is fighting to keep oil flowing through the approximately 12-mile portion of its 645- mile-long, oil and natural gas pipeline route that runs through Bad River tribal lands. In 2017, the tribal council voted not to renew the easement and filed a federal lawsuit in 2019 against Enbridge, demanding the company discontinue the flow of petroleum products through the line and remove it from the reservation.

“These circumstances represent an existential threat to the tribe, its reservation resources and its way of life and pose a dire threat to the treaty-protected rights of the Band and its members in the lands and waters of the reservation,” according to court documents. The company asked the court to allow attorneys to take statements under oath with tribal council members over their opposition to the Line 5 easement.“Enbridge is suing us, litigating adversarily as though we’re enemies, because we want them out of our watershed,” Wiggins said.

She said Enbridge’s insistence on a jury trial is a strategy designed to capitalize on the lack of education about tribal government authority, sovereignty and treaty rights., Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University’s College of Law, agreed. Indeed, some Bad River citizens have privately expressed the belief that ultimately Enbridge will prevail so the tribe should accept a settlement.

 

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