This Indigenous Peoples Day, the approximately 2,700 Ojibwe tribal members of the Bay Mills Indian Community in northern Michigan are marking the holiday amid fear that their region could face another environmental catastrophe like the one that occurred in 2010, when Enbridge’s Line 6B oil pipeline burst and spilled over a million gallons of tar sands crude oil, contaminating the Kalamazoo River and over 40 miles in its watershed.

Today, the community is afraid that an even more potentially devastating event is looming: a future rupture of another Enbridge relic, the antiquated 72-year-old Line 5 pipeline, which originates and ends in Canada but travels across Wisconsin and Michigan, and crucially, through the Great Lakes under the Straits of Mackinac.

“There were two questions everyone asked when Line 6B broke,” tribal president Whitney Gravelle told Truthout. “It felt like the entire state of Michigan was like, ‘There’s pipelines in Michigan? ’And then… ‘Where are they?’” After members of the public learned that Line 5 ran under the Straits where Lakes Michigan and Huron conjoin, and that it had been installed in 1953 without consideration of treaties with the Anishinaabeg tribes — the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi — or even informing them, the momentum to decommission Line 5 really grew, she said. Fifteen years later, the fight to uphold their rights under the Washington Treaty of 1836 — and to forestall a monumental tragedy for all of humanity — is still ongoing, as every passing day without a spill in the Straits is a tenuous miracle defying increasingly losing odds.

Fifteen attorneys from Earthjustice and Native American Rights Fund, plus their internal team, have been writing comments and briefs; collecting evidence; and submitting documents, information, and expert testimonies in order to push multiple federal agencies to eradicate the risks to the waters that comprise 20 percent of the world’s remaining fresh water supply and provide drinking water for 40 million people in the U.S. and Canada.

“The Environmental Protection Agency only responds if there’s an oil spill on land,” Gravelle explained, “while the U.S. Coast Guard responds if there’s an oil spill on water. We’ve challenged them both with our worst-case scenario: ‘What if there’s an oil spill in January, and the straits are covered with ice? What are you able to do when the break is four miles beneath the water, pluming oil up, and covered in a foot of ice. How are you gonna get to it? How?’ They have no answer, they just stare at us blankly.”

The unfortunate reality is that even without a catastrophic oil spill, the Great Lakes are under serious threats from climate change; extractive industry; plastic and shipping pollution; invasive species like the Quagga mussels; algae blooms in Lake Erie; and what Gravelle described as a general lack of care. “We have seen a major decline in the volume of our treaty fishery as well as a major decline in the water quality of the Great Lakes,” she said. The pipeline, built to last 50 years but already operating over 70, has spilled oil multiple times along its 645 miles, sometimes in their treaty territory. The single 30-inch pipeline becomes two 20-inch pipelines for the 4.5 miles it runs under the Straits “and if it opens in the straits, that’s the be all and end all. We’re done after that, the Great Lakes are done,” Gravelle warned. “That’s the heart attack that kills the Great Lakes.”

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