LaDuke lives on the White Earth reservation, part of the Ojibwe nation in northwestern Minnesota. She’s been a booming voice in Native American land rights for three decades, and in recent years that has intersected directly with campaigns against fossil fuels. She was at the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline — which she calls the “Selma moment” for a lot of Native activists — and she’s now taken that energy to a lower-profile but equally important fight: stopping the reconstruction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.
“We don’t have any oil in Minnesota,” LaDuke points out, but because the nearest port is in Superior, Wisconsin, the state has become a thruway for Canadian oil. “We have six Enbridge pipelines already, and two Koch brothers pipelines,” she says. Enbridge is hoping to reroute Line 3, which was built in 1968 and has started to decay, rather than digging it up and repairing it. But the new route would go directly through land that sustains the Ojibwe nation — it’s the only place in the world where wild rice grows naturally, and it’s a core part of their economy, their culture, and their diet.
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