This Ojibwe Band Is Suing to Stop a Pipeline From Polluting Their Wetland Home

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Around August of each year, when temperatures swell in the Great Lakes region, wild rice — or manoomin in the Ojibwe language — begins to flower. Rice stalks can grow as high as 10 feet in the shallow waters, and to harvest, sticks and poles are used to knock seeds loose into boats or canoes. The harvest is critical each year to the Ojibwe.

But those ricing waters are under threat as the Canadian oil transport company Enbridge looks to reroute its controversial pipeline, Line 5, through prime harvesting areas. Now, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of six Ojibwe bands in northern Wisconsin, has filed a lawsuit against the United States Army Corps of Engineers, or USACE, to stop construction.

“For hundreds of years, and to this day, the Band’s ancestors and members have lived, hunted, fished, trapped, gathered, and engaged in traditional activities in the wetlands and waters to be crossed by the project,” the lawsuit says.

In October, USACE granted Enbridge a permit to build a 41-mile addition to Line 5 in order to circumvent the Bad River reservation, but Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigation organization representing the tribe, argues the permit failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Earthjustice says the pipeline will cross waterways that flow onto the Bad River Reservation and leaks would threaten the watershed and ecosystem, needed for wild rice harvesting and fishing. After the

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