Bodies On The Line

Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline replacement slices through the southern half of Saskatchewan, but there’s little Indigenous opposition in the province. To mount our own fight, we’ll have to learn from other Indigenous resistance efforts along the pipeline’s route.

- Brandy-Lee Maxie

On the road leading to a field dotted with tipis at Standing Rock, hundreds of flags from different nations whipped in the wind. Each flag that flew on “flag road,” including the Treaty 4 flag,

has a history of resistance and a modern-day battle with genocide and colonialism behind it. Each flag represented treaties that have been broken over and over again, nations defending their unceded land from settler governments, and Indigenous communities fighting to stop companies from poisoning land and water.

At its peak, Standing Rock had about 20,000 people gathered in the Great Sioux Nation territory, better known as Oceti Sakowin (or the Seven Council Fires). These are homelands that Saskatchewan’s Nakota Assiniboine people shared for thousands of years, before a border split us into Saskatchewan and North Dakota.

Many who gathered in North Dakota returned to their home territories to take a stand against industry in their own backyards. Now, on both sides of that border, Indigenous peoples are fighting again – to stop the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, which would ship over 700,000 barrels of crude oil each day from Alberta’s tarsands to the Husky oil refinery in Wisconsin.

This article began as an investigation into the Indigenous opposition to Line 3 in Saskatchewan. After all, the pipeline cuts clear across the entire width of this province. But the loudest Indigenous voice in Saskatchewan in opposition to Line 3 has, for a long time, been me, and I already know the landscape. While there is scattered grassroots resistance to the pipeline, there are not many elected Indigenous leaders opposing the project in Saskatchewan.