A MESSAGE FROM TARA HOUSKA
On March 31st, 18 banks have a $2.2 billion loan to Enbridge that is due for renewal. Between now and then, we’re going to do everything in our power to make it loud and clear to the executives of those banks: They must walk away from Line 3 ― or there will be consequences.
Every week, we’re going to ask you to take an action that helps put pressure on those 18 banks funding Line 3. We’ll ask you to send direct emails to CEOs, call board members, take part in Covid-safe street protests, participate in projection actions, join online rallies and much more.
If enough of us take these actions together, we can make the companies funding Line 3 feel enough pressure that they will walk away from Enbridge.
We’re going to start today with one, easy action for you to take. Click here to send the CEOs of 18 major banks a message that they MUST walk away from Enbridge and Line 3 on March 31st.
For the last seven years, I have been fighting Line 3 with everything I have. If built, Line 3, a massive toxic tar sands pipeline, would destroy the sacred wild rice beds my people depend on for our food, our culture and our way of life. It would contribute as much to the climate crisis as 50 new coal-fired power plants. It would endanger 800 wetlands and 200 waterways.
Despite ongoing legal challenges from the Red Lake Nation, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Minnesota’s own Department of Commerce, environmental organizations, and 13 brave youth intervenors, construction of Line 3 continues ― bringing thousands of out-of-state workers to northern MN in the middle of a deadly pandemic, threatening already vulnerable rural, Indigenous communities with the virus even more.
As an Anishinaabe woman it is my duty to protect the water, the land, and my people. I am moved to act because I love the people, the four-legged, the winged, the finned, the land, the water.
It is my duty as an Anishinaabe woman that compels me to support people in taking direct action to stop the construction of Line 3. Direct action, like when Water Protectors recently locked themselves inside a section of pipe, blockaded the entrances to construction sites, and locked themselves to trucks being used to carry Line 3 pipeline materials.
It is from this sense of duty that I am asking you to join us in this campaign. Together, I know that we can do this. Throughout history people-powered movements have changed the world. And they sure as hell can stop Line 3.
You can join the #DefundLine3 campaign and take your first action with us by clicking here and sending a direct email to Jamie Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs ― your email will go directly to the inboxes of CEOs, executives and board members of the banks funding Line 3.
Since the antiracist uprisings began last year, I have been proud to stand in solidarity with the demand of Black-led movements to defund the police. Indigenous people understand White Supremacist police brutality. Like Black folks of this country, we’ve faced it for centuries.
Now, just as racist police forces have brutalized Black and Indigenous bodies, Enbridge is brutalizing sacred Anishinaabe land ― and is being protected by a militarized police force paid for by a Candian oil company as it does so.
Together, we are powerful.
Miigwech
~ Tara Houska for Stop the Money Pipeline
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Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe) is a tribal attorney, founder of Giniw Collective, and a former advisor on Native American affairs to Bernie Sanders. She spent six months on the frontlines fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and is currently engaged in the movement to defund fossil fuels and a years-long struggle against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. She is a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a group committed to positive representation of Native peoples.
She is a TED speaker, the 2017 Harvard “Public Interested” keynote, received an “Awesome Women Award” from Melinda Gates and a 2019 Rachel’s Network Catalyst Award, is featured in “Women: A Century of Change” by National Geographic, and was named an “Icon” on the cover of Outside Magazine’s 40th Anniversary edition. Tara has contributed to the women-led climate anthology “All We Can Save”, the New York Times, the Guardian, Vogue, Indian Country Today and been featured on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Democracy Now, and BBC. She lives in a pipeline resistance camp in Northern Minnesota.
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United In Defense of The Water 