On The Immediate Construction of Line 3 (Oil Pipeline)
TESTIMONY — OPPOSING HF342 — March 27th, 2018*
My name is Shanai Matteson and I’m from a small town called Palisade, on the Mississippi River.
I was there early this morning, taking a walk with my two kids right where Enbridge wants to put their oil pipeline across the Willow River and the Mississippi… And I thought to myself, “How can I explain this to my kids? That their neighbors and their representatives have agreed to let a corporation put an oil pipeline here… Have fast tracked construction… In this wet swampy ground, across these living rivers… Risking all of our lives?“
I’m not a professional lobbyist or activist. I’m ashamed it has taken me so long to testify. This approval process has been confusing to me, and now apparently it doesn’t even matter… They can just start building it, throwing out the previous public comments and EIS?
I’ve looked at the EIS and the maps, and I also grew-up with that land. This project doesn’t make any common sense.
I left my hometown when I turned 18 because there were so few choices. And because I wanted to see and experience the world. I am glad I did that.
Sometimes, you need to leave the places you love to appreciate how special they are, and to understand how special you are, because you come from a place where people still have a real connection to the land and water that sustains them. We can still swim in that river.
This isn’t true where I spend most of my time now, in Minneapolis.
Most of my neighbors and friends here in the cities don’t know that their drinking water comes from the Mississippi River — the same river that will be put at risk if this pipeline is built. This water connects all of us.
The same is true of our groundwater up north, which we drink unfiltered, and which many of us take for granted. Once oil gets into that wet ground, it is not going to be possible to clean it up again. And there is no money in this pipeline plan to build the kinds of drinking water facilities it would take to protect us.
In my hometown, when someone is sick or needs help, neighbors step up. We gather together, bring food, and help to care for that person and their family — because we know this is how you sustain a community.
We don’t ask, “How will this benefit my bank account? How will this improve the career of a politician? How will this generate profit for a company that has never cared for or loved this place… Or the people who live here?”
I think it’s well past time to gather together, in and outside of spaces like this, to ask ourselves some questions:
“What ways of life are we are willing to give up to turn a profit for companies like Enbridge? And how do we plan to heal the rifts this project is already causing?”
For too long, we’ve taken for granted that the life and culture given to us by this land and this water, and by our people working on this land, would always be there for us.
Because I’ve been able to travel up and down the Mississippi River, to small towns and big cities — meeting with farmers, fishermen, indigenous people, scientists, and other working-class men and women like my own family, who are trying to do the best they can — I have learned an important lesson:
What we do the the land and the water, we do to ourselves.
I’ve been to places where the land has been sold to corporations for the promise of a few jobs, and then used for their benefit — farmed to death, mined, torn up, built upon, dumped on, and degraded.… And just like that land, the people in those communities have also been degraded. They’ve been pushed out of the way, made sick, divided up by politics and money — and left pitted against each other, arguing over scraps.
The decision to put an oil pipeline through the heart of our communities — through the places we call home — is not one that should be made based on the profitability or utility of a corporation that is not even based here in the US … Where is the public good in that?
Today, I’ve brought water that I gathered from a farm on the proposed pipeline route. This water is clean and pure. It’s been filtered by wetlands, and protected by generations of people who have been stewards of this land — including my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. Including men and women who are working on that land today, and because this process has been so opaque, are not able to be here.
Including indigenous people who were there before us, and who still continue to fight for their right to be seen and heard, to have access to the land and water that their lives and cultures depend upon too. They are fighting, we are fighting, for all of us.
I’m here to offer you all a drink of this water, because like others who oppose this pipeline, I believe your life is more sacred than money.
I also believe there is no price we can put on the future. There is no way we can know what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will need from this land, or the ways they’ll have to live here when freshwater is scarce, and our climate has changed.
The police departments in communities along the Line 3 route are already gathering military equipment, training to stop the resistance to this project. Do they believe that our lives are more sacred than money? When it comes down to it, are they prepared to do the dirty work for Enbridge, even if that means hurting their own neighbors?
Are any of us prepared for what this choice really means?
It seems some of our own neighbors are willing to give up on this land and water — to give up their responsibility to steward this land, which has and can still sustain us — for the promise of jobs, and a payment from Enbridge.
I understand how they could make that mistake. We do need jobs, but these are not the jobs we need. And when we give up our responsibilities like that, we are giving up our ability to respond. Our resilience, which we will need in the future.
The people where I come from work very hard, and some of them live hard lives too… And I believe it will only get harder for all of us if we keep taking these kinds of trade-offs and promises offered by projects like this pipeline.
Once something like this has ripped up a place, crossed a wild and scenic river, polluted the groundwater… What else is that place good for?
Right now we still have choices. There are other futures we can create that are sustainable, connecting us back to the land and water and each other, instead of dividing us up and leaving us with an impoverished future.
When the route for this pipeline was planned, I believe they were betting on our greed and shortsightedness. I also believe they knew they were exploiting our pride and our love of our places, and our desire to see ourselves and future generations there in the future. They were betting on our ignorance too — thinking we would always believe money is what keeps us alive and in place.
Money is not what keeps us here.
Love and care for our places, and for life — for the water and the land it depends on — is what will keep us here. If a corporation can just take land from people, or buy it for far less than they paid the lobbyists and lawmakers, then what else will they take?
What else are we willing to sell?
I invite you all to visit the place where I’m from, and places like it all across Northern Minnesota. Take a walk on the land that this pipeline will destroy, like I did this morning. Get your boots muddy. Drink this water, while it is still clean, and then tell me how you feel about this pipeline.
Even the people who have sold to Enbridge are going to regret what they’ve enabled, because that money will run out — if it hasn’t already — and they will still need to drink this water.
We need to stop doing this to ourselves, and start healing our relationships to the land and to each other, so we can begin to imagine and create a better future. That’s going to take all of us.
Thank you to everyone who has been preparing for that future.
*A version of this testimony was shared at a meeting of the Minnesota House Committee on Job Growth and Energy Affordability Policy and Finance, as they considered a bill to authorize construction of the Enbridge Line 3 Oil Pipeline.
