The Army Corps Faces More Than a Permit Decision. It Faces a Promise.

Guest Opinion

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to make what many will see as a permitting decision on Enbridge’s proposed Line 5 tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac.

For Tribal Nations, it is something much larger. It is another test of whether the United States will uphold the promises it made when it entered into treaties with our ancestors. For nearly two hundred years, Tribal Nations have heard the same assurances. The United States promised our treaties would be honored. It promised our rights would endure. It promised to protect the resources that make those rights meaningful.

Yet history tells a different story.

Time and time again, whenever tribal rights have collided with economic development, industry, or political convenience, those promises have bent. Homelands were taken. Languages were stolen. Rivers were dammed. Sacred places disappeared beneath reservoirs and highways. Native children were separated from their families in the name of assimilation. Entire ways of life were sacrificed because someone else decided the cost was acceptable.

Each generation was told the harm was necessary.

Each generation was told to trust treaties are the supreme law of the land. 

The Line 5 tunnel asks us to believe that this time is different.

When most Americans hear the phrase “treaty trust responsibility,” they think of lawyers, courtrooms, or dusty history books. I think of my grandparents.

I think of my uncle pulling fish from the waters of Lake Superior. I think of my family picking berries in the summer, hunting in the fall, making offerings of tobacco before a harvest, and teaching us that the Great Lakes are not resources to exploit but relatives to care for. For Anishinaabe people, treaties were never simply about land. They were about the future.

When our ancestors signed the 1836 Treaty of Washington, they did not surrender who we were. They reserved the right to continue living as Great Lakes people to fish, hunt, gather, and maintain what the treaty called the “usual privileges of occupancy.”

In return, the United States made a promise.

That promise became what is known today as the federal trust responsibility: a solemn obligation to protect Tribal Nations, our treaty rights, and the natural resources those rights depend upon.

I have spent the last decade fighting to decommission Line 5 and protecting the Great Lakes. During those years, I have sat with nearly every state and federal agency involved in this project. I have participated in consultation after consultation, hoping someone would finally step back and see what Tribal Nations have been saying from the beginning.

Instead, I watched government willingly operate in pieces. One agency studies wetlands. Another evaluates water quality. Another reviews archaeological sites. Another examines endangered species. No one asks what happens when all of those impacts fall on the same people. No one asks what happens when the project threatens not just water quality or cultural resources, but a treaty-protected way of life.

That is where the federal trust responsibility matters.

The trust responsibility is not simply a duty to consult with tribes before making a decision. It is an obligation, a legal, moral, and constitutional obligation, to ensure that the rights reserved by treaty remain real. The United States does not fulfill that obligation by inviting Tribal Nations into the room if it ultimately permits the destruction of the very resources those treaties were meant to protect.

A treaty right to fish means little if the waters are placed at perpetual risk.

A treaty right to gather means little if construction destroys the places where medicines have been harvested for generations.

A treaty right to hunt means little if forests are cut down and wetlands are filled. 

A treaty right to maintain our way of life means little if our ancestors are excavated, catalogued, and displaced to make room for infrastructure.

My family has lived that way of life for generations. My father was a fisherman. My grandfather was a fisherman. My family hunted, gathered, and lived from these waters long before Line 5 was ever imagined. We did not survive because governments took care of us. We survived because the Great Lakes did.

That relationship is exactly what our ancestors protected when they signed the 1836 Treaty. They had the foresight and the strength to preserve the “usual privileges of occupancy.” A relationship with land and water. 

Throughout this review, Tribal Nations repeatedly warned the Army Corps, the State of Michigan, and Enbridge that ancestral villages and burial sites existed along both shores of the Straits. We knew because our oral histories remembered what maps did not.

We were right.

Hundreds of archaeological sites have now been documented.

For many Americans, those discoveries are remarkable archaeological finds. For us, they are our grandparents, our history, our language, our proof that we have always belonged here. Proof of those “usual privileges of occupancy.” Yet, even after centuries of dispossession, we are still being asked to move aside so another project can proceed.

The United States has an opportunity to write a different chapter.

The Army Corps can continue the long history of treating tribal treaty rights as something to acknowledge before approving the project anyway. Or it can finally give substance to the federal trust responsibility by recognizing that protecting treaty rights sometimes requires saying no.

While the federal trust responsibility is unique to Tribal Nations, the responsibility to faithfully consider the public belongs to every federal agency. Thousands and thousands of people have participated in this process because they recognize that the Straits of Mackinac are not simply another construction site, they are one of the world’s greatest freshwater resources. The Army Corps now has both treaty obligations and a clear public mandate to protect them.

This decision will say far more than whether Enbridge receives a permit. It will answer whether the United States believes its promises endure when they become inconvenient. For a process that hears every voice but changes nothing does not build public trust. It erodes it.

For Tribal Nations, this question is as old as the Republic itself. The Army Corps now has the opportunity to answer it differently.

I hope it does, not only for Bay Mills Indian Community, but for every American who believes that when our nation gives its word, it should keep it. For the question before the United States is whether those words are merely written on parchment, or whether they still carry the weight of a nation’s honor.

Whitney Gravelle is president of the Bay Mills Indian Community.