Last month, The Guardian revealed that Canadian pipeline company Enbridge has paid Minnesota police nearly two and a half million dollars for services including the surveillance and arrest of Water Protectors resisting the company’s construction of a new Line 3 pipeline.
As mandated by its contract with the Minnesota Utilities Commission, Enbridge has now picked up the tab for the arrest of more than 1,000 demonstrators against the pipeline, as well as supplies, training, and burgers and beers for police along the way.
Like similar militarization in the face of police-extractive industry agreements in other parts of the world, police presence at the Enbridge project site and surrounding area has resulted in abuses against community members opposed to the project and allowed the company to continue trudging towards operationalizing the pipeline-- which threatens human rights and the environment-- despite strong public opposition.
It is inherently undemocratic for a corporation to finance, for private gain, state forces that claim-- however unconvincingly-- to serve and protect the public. In this case, like many others involving natural resource extraction and police, a state-corporate alliance facilitated violations of tribal sovereignty and paved the way for further capture of native land for colonizer profit. Violent state-corporate alliances like the Enbridge-police alliance are part of a dangerous global trend that underscores the urgency of reinforcing tribal sovereignty and holding corporations and police forces to account. This post situates the Enbridge-police agreement in Minnesota and violent crackdown against Water Protectors at Line 3 within a disturbing global context rooted in colonialism.
Minnesota, in context
The new Line 3 pipeline is a seven billion dollar project that would carry oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin in the United States. The pipeline cuts across Indigenous land and poses the significant risk of oil spills to fragile ecosystems and 20 rivers relied upon for Anishinaabe wild rice growing in northern Minnesota. (Check out this native land map to learn about the Indigenous land in the area endangered by the pipeline and elsewhere.)
The company-police alliance securing the project not only endangers native and non-native communities’ livelihoods and ecosystems that may be affected by the pipeline in the coming years, but it also endangers Water Protectors demonstrating against the project now. Many who have been arrested report that police used excessive force before and during their arrests and that they were denied food and medical care in detention. Alleged abuses against protestors by Enbridge-backed police include psychological and physical harm including a dislocated jaw, solitary confinement, and injuries from pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets.
The violent crackdown on demonstrators against Line 3 opens a window into the bleak history of corporate and state seizure of Indigenous land in the United States and to a broader global context of modern police-extractive industry agreements.
History of colonial state-corporate alliances in the United States
The genocidal violence of colonization in the United States has gone hand in hand with favorable legal frameworks and protection by state forces since the 19th century. Tribes were forced to sign treaties regarding their territory with the US Government under duress, and few agreements were fully honored anyway-- the Supreme Court ruled in 1903 that Congress could unilaterally end treaties through its plenary power. And, according to federal law, Indigenous nations do not own the reservations these treaties created. Instead, native land is held in trust by the federal government of the United States, ostensibly to be governed with the tribes’ best interests in mind. Later, under the guise of granting tribe members private property, allotment whittled down the treaty land held in trust and left the remainder available for private purchase.
While tribal land rights were being eroded in law and in practice, corporate property rights in the United States were being built up. If tribal land was taken out of trust, the state could give it to corporations through eminent domain for infrastructure projects. The aim of these corporate-state alliances was simple then and remains so as they have developed over time-- to hand over Indigenous land to white settlers. Then and now, police and military forces have been there to subdue any resistance.
Modern police-extractive industry agreements
One of the most recent and high-profile examples of a colonial corporate-state alliance is the police response to resistance to Energy Transfer Partners' (ETP) Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation beginning in 2016. Similar to Line 3, the Dakota Access Pipeline would have crossed an essential waterway near Standing Rock Sioux land, posing a grave environmental risk and developing land in violation of a treaty. Pipeline workers, private security forces, and police met the #NoDAPL movement, the Water Protectors’ massive and organized response, with shocking brutality. There was no contract or payment between ETP and the state in this case-- not all corporate-state alliances are so formal-- but the corporate-state alliance through violent defense of shared interests was clear. When a corporation digs up your ancestors’ graves and the state blasts you with a water cannon to prevent you from impeding business interests, they probably start to feel like the same group.
In the case of Line 3, the Minnesota Utilities Commission, a state regulator, actually conditioned approval of the pipeline project on the creation and funding of an escrow account to reimburse police for associated costs, including those related to the inevitable demonstrations against it. While this is a first, at least for Enbridge projects in the United States, Canadian Big Oil, including Enbridge, is no stranger to making substantial financial contributions to law enforcement (or lawmakers, for that matter) to further its interests. On top of this, Canada has a history of colonial violence that includes corporate-state alliances connected to land grabbing from Indigenous peoples domestically and abroad. Today, the Canadian extractives industry is more powerful than any other (75% of the world’s mining companies are Canadian), and it has an infamous record on human rights and environmental impacts, sometimes connected to formal or informal alliances with police.
Police-extractive industry agreements have also been used, with devastating results for human rights and land defenders, in other parts of the world. (See this report by our friends at EarthRights International about police-extractive industry agreements in Peru. Last year, the country’s Constitutional Court found these contracts to be unconstitutional.) Despite this, the “Minnesota Model” of extractive industry police financing may be replicated in other parts of the United States.
The impacts of the Enbridge-police agreement in Minnesota and security agreements between investors and police in other parts of the world show that this model is extremely dangerous. Informal alliances driven by common interests between corporate and state actors are bad enough for people and the planet-- formalized security agreements co-opting state forces into protecting private investment at the expense of human rights and land defenders have no place in Minnesota or elsewhere.
This Native American Heritage month, we honor the Water Protectors resisting Line 3 and Indigenous human rights and environmental defenders around the world who stand up to powerful state-corporate alliances threatening people and the planet. We also join defenders and civil society organizations around the world in denouncing extractive industry-police alliances, calling for corporate and police accountability, and for first nations’ sovereignty to be respected.
Avery Kelly is a Staff Attorney and Daniel Kiefus is the Office Coordinator at CAL.
