Overview:
Tribes react to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approving a proposal that would result in miles oil pipeline in sacred tribal waters.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers today issued a record of decision approving Canadian company Enbridge’s proposal to bore a four-mile tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac to house its Line 5 oil pipeline.
Despite the federal agency’s approval, Enbridge cannot move forward with construction due to a recent Michigan Supreme Court decision ordering the Michigan Public Service Commission to redo its analysis of the project. The Army Corps’ permit follows other state approvals granted last month by Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) under the leadership of Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Whitmer’s backing of the permit flies in the face of her relationship with the state’s Tribes, who largely supported her bids for governor.
In 2020, Whitmer revoked and terminated the easement that allowed Enbridge to operate its dual Line 5 pipelines on the lakebed and in the waters of the Straits of Mackinac.
“In contrast to her public messages, Governor Whitmer has not stood up to Enbridge — in fact quite the opposite,” Managing Attorney Debbie Chizewer said in a statement. “But for her administration granting the EGLE permit, the Army Corps could not have given its approval today and put the profits of a private company above the protection of the Great Lakes.”
Under President Trump’s “National Energy Emergency” Executive Order, the US Army Corps has short-circuited its review of the tunnel’s impacts, prompting seven Michigan Tribes to withdraw as cooperating agencies last March.
“Our federal government has a solemn obligation to uphold and protect Treaty rights and is supposed to protect American waters and sacred spaces,” Managing Attorney David Gover with the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) said. “Instead, the U.S. Army Corps just rubber-stamped a Canadian oil project that desecrates a Tribal sacred space and threatens to pollute the Great Lakes.”
Enbridge’s proposal to run a hazardous liquids pipeline through a confined underground tunnel has never been attempted anywhere else in the world. It would turn the Straits of Mackinac — a sacred site of creation for Anishinaabe tribes — into a construction zone for more than six years, threatening permanent destruction.
In 2010, a pipeline owned by Enbridge ruptured in southern Michigan, spilling more than a million gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek, which flowed into the Kalamazoo River, resulting in one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history. Before that, in 1991
Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle said the move from the Army Corps is a blatant shirking of treaty rights in the name of an “energy emergency.”
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Army Corps is more than a procedural failure; it is a profound breach of the United States’ treaty trust responsibility to Tribal Nations,” Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle said. “Our treaties are solemn promises that carry the highest legal and moral obligation, yet the Corps cast that aside.”
“Instead of honoring the commitments embedded in the 1836 Treaty of Washington, they chose to treat Tribal Nations as an obstacle rather than as sovereigns whose rights must be honored – all to advance Enbridge’s interests at the expense of our homelands, our waters, and the Great Lakes,” Gravelle said. “This is a profound breach of the United States’ trust responsibility, and it is shameful.”
