Rev. Billy Talen for BuzzFlash: Stopping the Enbridge Pipeline 3 in Minnesota Through Prayer-Walking and Civil Disobedience
Rev. Billy Talen paddles in support of Indigenous rights and the prohibition of Enbridge pipeline 3 (Courtesy of Rev. Billy Talen)
August 20, 2021
By Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping
We are here at the highway-wide gash in the woods, that descends to the edge of the Shell River and then continues through the forest on the other side. Under our feet the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline waits for its tar sands oil. Enbridge Energy leaves signs along the tread marks of the bulldozers, threatening trespassers with arrest.
“We” are Teddy Tam Tam, Brother Sunder and myself. We’re singers in a group of activists called the Stop Shopping Choir. We came from New York to these treaty lands of the Anishinaabe and Lakota in northern Minnesota. There was a call for allies by the RISE Coalition, R.I.S.E. Coalition - founded by Indigenous mothers Dawn Goodwin and Nancy Beaulieu.
We joined their prayer-walk, mostly on the shoulders of highways, for 40 miles over several days, and brought food and singing to the historic effort. There were about 45 water protectors walking at the point that we turned toward the Shell City camp to see the pipeline up close and personal. The prayer walk will arrive at the Minnesota state capitol on August 25. To defend the sacred, pipeline 3 must be stopped.
As we stand at the pipeline route, we are mindful that seven women, with Winona LaDuke among them, had submitted to arrest here two weeks before. The police, who made the arrests are paid in part by Enbridge. There are a lot of drones and helicopters, plainclothes spies and harassment arrests. This is the same benighted company that operated the DAPL pipeline that was stopped at Standing Rock, not far from here.
Our thinking as we stand on this killed ground, and the source of our talk and our dreams for days to come…. Is that our idea of “direct action” has been conservative, even if it has put us in jail and the courts. When we watch the violence here, with the Earth and its indigenous citizens as co-witnesses, distances open up, greater stages open for dramatic resistance. Consumerism’s brutish hypnosis no longer surrounds us. The burning of gas and oil is simply the wrong kind of fire.
Sunder, and Teddy and I had to come here and see the forest life flying and crawling and stalking and seeding back into this big square industrial vacuum. Everywhere, life is flooding in, from the spiders swinging out over the agony of twisted roots down to the Bald Eagle on the bare branch over the river. The Earth is showing the way.
Talking with our fellow walkers along the highway’s shoulder; we are one side narrowly missed by the harsh blur of extraction trucks and on the other side consoled by the lakes bordered by manoomin, wild rice… we share how we feel this force of nature coming up in us. We want to return to our old activism with this new power. Teddy and Sunder and I want to get back home to New York to testify in person, inside the financial banks that give Enbridge billions to break treaties and over-heat the Earth.
We’ll start with JPMorgan Chase and Citibank. When we walk into the back of the banks, where the executives sit in their suits with their wealthy clients, we will sing our song of the Shell River. We’ll sing the river right at their investment choices on the screens, sing with those harmonies you hear in the currents of water, and sing remembering the forest there, the loons and moose and trout in the stream. Can we change minds with a psychic flood?
Can we bring to the banks the pipeline’s death trail, the scar across the treaty land, the living beings shifting back and forth from the forest to the industrial destruction.? The struggle at genocide’s door needs to be common knowledge in the glassy 60 floor-high behemoths.
Can we be the river itself? Will we still have this power as we lug our duffel bags from baggage claim in JFK? Water protectors are like a part of the river that got away. You can’t stop such a river. We believe that the tributary of the Shell River will find its way to the black snake’s source, flooding the money-men with manoomin (wild rice).
With heads full of activist dreams, it’s almost dark as we paddle back from the pipeline to “Shell City”, the white teepees shining in the trees. We’re happily exhausted as we walk into the encampment, where Indigenous people sit in a circle around the fire, call out to us with hoots, then return to talking quietly.
Rev Billy is pastor at the secular earthy Church of Stop Shopping. Parallel to the August 25th occupation in Minnesota, on August 23 there will be actions in Washington, DC.
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