Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. Today my guest is Joe Bates. Joe is an environmentalist, a community leader and a native rights activist. He’s a member of The Bad River Band, which is located along Lake Superior in Wisconsin. In 2013, Enbridge, a Canadian energy company was told to shut down oil pipes under the Bad River Reservation. Five years later, they had not shut anything down and the tribe raised concerns that an imminent oil spill might threaten their namesake river. Come 2024 Enbridge and the Bad River were still locked in a legal battle and the pipes had not yet been shut down. Joe Bates and many others in the Bad River Band have fought tooth and nail to protect their river, Lake Superior and their tribal lands. They’re the subject of Bad River, a documentary released in early 2024. This fight is ongoing and as recently as last week, Bad River activists occupied the Department of Natural Resources Office in Madison, Wisconsin in opposition to permits granted to Enbridge. Joe Bates, welcome to All About Change. It’s my pleasure to have you as my guest today.

Joe Bates:

Morning, Jay, and thank you for the invite. It’s a pleasure being here.

Jay Ruderman:

So Joe, before we jump into what is currently going on, how did you personally get started as an activist?

Joe Bates:

Back in 1995 at The Bad River, we had a freight train that was scheduled to go across the southern section of our reservation and across two rickety old railroad tracks. Our trestles actually one over the Bad River, one over the Wong creek. We had Ogichida that said, “We are not going to allow this train to cross these bridges.” This train was filled with sulfuric acid. They intended to take it to the White Pine mine in Michigan and dump it into the mine shafts so that they could extract the remaining copper out of the mine shafts. We had a group of men and women involved that built the fire. They stood on the railroad tracks with this train bearing down on them and they did not budge.

Jay Ruderman:

Wow.

Joe Bates:

So that ended up being a standoff for a number of days, and at that time I was operating a small mom and pop store. Even though I didn’t get down there and stand with them, I made sure that we had supplies, food and water that we donated from our store to maintain our Ogichida that was holding up this freight train filled with tankers of sulfuric acid. We weren’t going to allow it and they didn’t. The mine ended up closing down.

Jay Ruderman:

That sounds like quite an activist story. Someone who’s running a mom-and-pop who is faced with an existential threat to his way of life and takes action and then develops that action becomes more involved. What was it inside you that caused you to become an activist, even though that wasn’t your plan initially in life to be an activist?

Joe Bates:

I have a lineal descendancy to one of the original signatories of a treaty of 1854, Chief Oniquot or Chief Cloud. He is my hereditary chief and he was part of the delegation that had gone on to Washington with Chief Buffett. They met in Washington and they struck out a deal taking down the Removal Act of 1837 where we were actually being forcibly removed from our homelands, and it’s ingrained in me to want to help do better. I want to help make our place a better place to live. I want people that are unborn that have yet to come. I want them to be able to experience and live some of what we’ve been able to do. Granted, our lives were very hard, very tough, and we had to survive and we did it off the land. That’s the big thing. We have to take care of the land, take care of the water, and that’s what’s really important so that we can continue to survive as people.

Jay Ruderman:

So I want to talk about the land, but I think you make an interesting point about activism in general because we go about our daily lives, whatever we do in our lives, but for an activist, I think there’s something inside of them that says, “I want to help. I want to correct a social injustice.” And I think you had that inside of you. For those listeners who are not familiar with the Bad River Band, you came back there, you got married, you raised children, you have grandchildren. Talk about what this piece of land is, what it means, not only physically, but what it is and why it’s so special and why the people are connected deeply to the land.

Joe Bates:

It’s rooted in our migration story, a story that was given to us many years ago by a creed, and we were told to travel along the waterway, which is now known as the St. Lawrence Seaway, until we got to the place where the food grows on water, that would be our beloved Cacoggan Sluse in the Cacoggan Sluse is a vast area of wild rice or manuman as we call it. It’s this land that we have that was promised to us. It became fur trading place back in the early days when we had the settlers coming over during the fur trade. This property that we’re on was set aside for us after this treaty of 1854 because we had our own death march, what we call the Sandy Lake March, where during the Removal Act we were forced off our reservation. The men, they were forced to go to a place called Sandy Lake, Minnesota to get their supplies, clothing, blankets.

So we had several hundreds of men and young men that went and tripped to Sandy Lake for this. When they arrived, there were no supplies, there were no annuities. They had to make do with what they had. In the meantime, we have the women, the grandmothers, and the children that were left back in Odena, back on the reservation. They had to survive the best they could. What ended up happening was on the trek back, our people that had gone to Sandy Lake said, “This is it. We’re not getting our stuff.” So they trekked back to the reservation and in doing so, hundreds of people died along the trail. They died in Sandy Lake from starvation and the element at that time, Chief Flo, he decided he was going to travel to Washington to try to work out a deed to give us our reservations and cancel the Removal Act of 1837 for us. And in that treaty, it outlines that river Redcliffe Plac de Flambeau, and the Couturet has forever permanent homelands for as long as we shall live without fear of forced removal. Right now, we are in fear of forced removal due to this pipeline that we have running through the heart of our reservation called Enbridge.

Clip:

A Canadian company, later known as Enbridge constructs an oil pipeline that will move oil from Western to Eastern Canada. The cheapest and easiest route for this pipeline was to dip down to the United States and the Great Lakes before heading back to Canada.

In 1953, Line Five is installed on the reservation courtesy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs without the consent of the Bad River band. The line is 12 miles long, which includes about three miles of tribal land and six miles of allotted parcels owned by different Bad River members. The BIA signs a pipeline easement agreement allowing the company to operate on bad river land for 20 years, all for a payment of less than $3,800.

Jay Ruderman:

I’ve heard the phrase that water for the seventh generation. Can you explain the importance of fresh water for your people, but not only for your people, but also for the American people?

Joe Bates:

That is correct. Lake Superior, my good friend and cousin Mike Wiggins Jr. calls it the stronghold of fresh water for the world. We have great lakes here, not only Lake Superior, but also the other great lakes that lie in danger of foreign pipeline company. We want to get it out of here. We want our families to be able to live the way they choose here at home, whether it be working, whether you live off the land, whether you harvest, oh, what we have here is very, very precious and we got to protect the water. Everything from the Bad River flows out in Lake Superior and from there we have millions of people that could be impacted by an oil spill right here on our reservation as well as of the many river crossings that we have in northern Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan.

Jay Ruderman:

You are living on a very precious piece of land. You’re living on a natural piece of land that you gather wild rice that the band or the tribe is living there are stewards of the land. There’s a pipeline that’s coming from a Canadian oil company called Enbridge. The pipeline is crossing your reservation. The Bad River Band is a small group of people standing up to a company that has a $96 billion market cap. How did this process start? Because I understand that this pipeline is some seventy-some odd years old. How did it happen and how does it continue despite the opposition of the Band?

Joe Bates:

This pipeline was installed back in the early 1950s, Lakehead Pipeline company and the federal government, the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, actually felt that this would be a good idea. We’ll go ahead and put this pipeline across the reservation. Our tribe had no say in this pipeline that went across our homelands and the BIA felt that it was in the best interest of a foreign oil company that they go ahead and put this pipeline in to make it the shortest route from Alberta, Canada to a Sarnia, Ontario and without any kind of regard to safety. At that time, we’ve seen some black and white videos of them wrapping cloth around a steel pipe and then pouring tar over, and that’s what lies in the ground. We don’t know how many leaks, slow, minute leaks that might be in this pipe. We have over 100 confirmed anomalies by the Enbridge Corporation just in 12 miles of pipe going across here, across our reservation.

That leads me to question how many anomalies are in 645 miles of pipe that was built in an early 1950? So we spring ahead in the early nineties, so we had a number of leases that came. I remember going to council meetings where they were talking about these renewals, and finally it was they went ahead and pushed it through. Our tribe received $800,000 one-time payment for a pipeline that will run across our land for another 50 years, so when we move ahead, the tribe bought up various parcels of land along within the reservation, and in doing so, they acquired property along the pipeline.

Those easements expired, so what we did was the tribe, through various talks, the BIA finally said, “Look, we’re going to let the tribe have input in this pipeline.” I remember being at the meeting in January 2017 when we finally said, “No, we’re not going to renew your leases.” And right in the bottom of the lease, black and white, it says, “At the conclusion of this business contract, you are to remove. You are shut down, remove and remediate the pipeline corridor.” Black and white. That’s that’s what they agreed to, and as it turns out, they ended up being bad renters because they continue to stay there like squatting, the way I look at it. They continue to run 540,000 barrels of oil through their pipeline today in trespass. Federal court has issued that yes, they are in trespass, but they did stop short of shutting the pipeline down immediately, so therefore, we have to live with it forced threat of removal until July of 2026.

Jay Ruderman:

There’s the issue of the United States deciding without the agreement of The Band to go ahead and give this right to a Canadian oil company to run oil through your reservation into Canada without your consent, and then the lease is run up and you want to protect the environment. Can you talk about some of the real threats to the environment where this pipeline at points has been exposed, is hanging in the air, is encroaching on getting closer and closer to the river and the water source that’s emptying into Lake Superior?

Joe Bates:

We had an incident happen here on the reservation several years ago. A helicopter was flying along Line Five and that helicopter, unfortunately, they crashed. To crash between two ravines in an area that we call Slope 18. Slope 18 is a tributary that empties into Denime Creek. Denime Creek travels just 200 yards from my home through our community out to Lakes Superior. Then after that helicopter crash, our natural resources department went out there to survey damage that had taken place in the woods. There was a fire, there was jet fuel, so they went out to assess the damage and in doing so they backtracked to the east and came upon Slope 18 and they were shocked to find an over 40-foot section, 30 inch pipe suspended in air with no support where it had completely washed all of bedding and what have you from the pipeline out just washed it.

Currently, Enbridge is on their fourth fit to remediate what’s going on. I’ve seen pictures of the Slope 18 and currently we have all of that, the riprap that they put in there to protect that top pipeline and once again, that’s going to fail. That’s just one.

Then we have The Bad River itself where Line Five crosses the bad river. When they put this pipeline in, the River Bank itself was over 300 feet from the pipeline over the course of the river’s light that has curve, different forces along the river bottom. What’s happening is the river’s trying to cut a new channel and the pipeline itself lies right across that meander where the river wants to go, and now we are looking at a mere 10 to 11 feet from the pipeline. We’re in a situation now where the very next four, five, or six inch rainstorm could very well take that pipeline out.

It’s one of those things where there’s a whole on of us that live in danger of the next big storm. What we need to worry about is when the water starts coming up, the river starts scoring the bank away, thereby, taking out the bed that the pipeline lays in and there we are. We could be looking at another Kalamazoo. I’d also like to mention Jay, that our Bad River that we have, it supplies the necessary nutrients to everything that we do. We have medicines that grow naturally along the river bank, medicines that grow along the roads that we have and that grow in the woods. All of the animals that rely on the water that the Bad River provides as well as the tributaries that empty in to the bad river. My ancestors, they survived on trapping, and hunting, and fishing and granted, we don’t need to do that to survive today, but it’s still nice to be able to have the ability to participate and exercise those rights that we retained as Anishinaabe people here.

Jay Ruderman:

Last March, Enbridge came to The Band and offered $80 million to settle past disputes and this offer was flatly rejected. When you heard about this offer, what did you think and how did you feel about The Band rejecting it?

Joe Bates:

You can’t put a price tag on it what we have. We have such clean water here that replenishes us. It nourishes us. If we accepted a $80 million bribe by Enbridge, that is putting a dollar figure on everything that’s important to us, whether it be the wild rice, whether it be the ability to go hunting when we want, whether it would be the ability to go fishing, and that’s putting price tag on it and to many of us, what we have is priceless. Even if it’s $80 million they want to throw at us, that’s putting a dollar value on our resources on what we have here. No, I’m not good with that. What we have is more important than $80 million.

Jay Ruderman:

Let me ask you about the movie, Bad River was released last year tells the story of The Band’s fight to protect Lake Superior and the sovereignty of The Band. You’re featured in a number of occasions on the film. What did you hope to achieve in participating in being filmed for this documentary?

Clip:

This is a story of the Bad River people and their home on Lake Superior.

Our people have been here for millennia.

They’ve had to fight for who they are.

And the Ojibwe have been resisting ever since.

There was a black car that used to ride around. We see that coming we run.

And they basically just grab kids and take them and take them off to these boarding schools.

They were modeled after prison systems.

It was a genocidal project.

The whole idea was your culture is primitive.

The oppression, the racism just hit a pinnacle.

It was all built up, punk.

I’ve had native people get killed.

Go home.

There’s always some kind of threat.

They’ve had to fight to protect their land.

Seems improbable that a pipe would be hanging in mid-air.

That’s the ticking time bomb.

When the meander reaches the pipeline, apocalyptic.

It breaks. It’s going to pour right into the Lake Superior and that’s bad.

Joe Bates:

It’s certainly been taken off a lot better than, I mean a lot bigger than what I could have imagined. My part in the movie was talking about the offer that I received from Enbridge. I am a shareholder in tract of land, that pipeline cross, and in doing so, I have received offers from Enbridge in the past to settle, initially it was $2,000 just to give them an easement in perpetuity and once the reroute was up, then they would pay me an additional $8,000. Therefore, they wanted to bribe my signature for $10,000 for them to make their $1 billion. It’s like I said, it’s putting a price tag on what we have and if we accepted that money, if it was $80 million, $120 million, they would say, “Oh, the pipeline broke. We’ll just pay you more money.” At that point, we have no place to go. We have nowhere else to go. This was our promised homeland and we want to remain here. We want to continue to thrive here and Enbridge threatens all of that, as well as other extraction resource industries. They threaten our livelihood here. That’s the biggest thing and we have to do what we can to keep what we have.

Jay Ruderman:

The movie did amazing. It started off in 12 theaters. It expanded to 25 in some communities that outperformed huge movies like Dune and Ghostbusters. The movie is now streaming on Peacock. What’s the next step for the Bad River Band and what can people do to help?

Joe Bates:

We’re going to continue. We have a Defend The Bad River Fund. There’s a link that’s right on our website and they can donate there. They could also inquire as to doing a screening, so the movie Bad River as our Share Club Canada did.

Jay Ruderman:

I think a lot of people are going to see it, but Joe, I think the amazing part of this story is you are someone who is just leading his life as part of his tribe in the land that your people have occupied for generations and you’re concerned about the future, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, your great-great-grandchildren, that they have access to this land that is your land. You’re fighting a fight that is protecting the fresh water for much of the United States trying to prevent a real tragedy. Whether you intended it or not, you and the other members of The Band are really doing something very important for the United States. This is a story that not enough people know about and they say act locally and influence globally, and I think that’s what you’re doing. Joe, I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for being my guest on All About Change and it’s been my absolute pleasure talking to you.

Joe Bates:

Thank you very much, Jay.

Jay Ruderman:

Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word. Tell a friend or family member or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation. That’s it for now. I’m Jay Ruderman and we’ll see you next time in All About Change.