Thank you for this opportunity to present four scoping issues.
1. Spiritual impacts
-
-
- The Bay Mills Community believes that the Great Turtle emerged from the flood in the Straits of Mackinac to create Turtle Island, what we call North America. The Great Lakes are the heart of Turtle Island.
- The U.S. Government and White American have made every effort to destroy the spiritual ways of the Indigenous Peoples.The ACE needs to consult with the Tribes to learn the cumulative historic spiritual harms, both visible and invisible, inflicted by United States upon them, including the potential visible and invisible spiritual impacts of the Line 5 project.
-
2. Impacts of Line 5 on the U.S. Government’s treaty obligations
The Bay Mills Community and other tribes rely on their treaty rights for subsistence, spiritual, and cultural practice of their members, and to further their economic well-being. The U.S. government needs to preserve and enhance the resources and habitats that support healthy and abundant natural resources to meet our treaty obligations.
-
-
- In this instance, the ACE needs to apply the precautionary principle, which requires taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty. Further, the principle shifts the burden of proof to the accident-prone Enbridge Corporation to prove that its Line 5 project would never compromise the United States’ treaty obligations.
- The ACE needs to consult with the affected tribes to learn the cumulative historic harms inflicted upon the natural resources and habitats in violation of our treaty obligations.
-
3. Impacts of loss of Indigenous knowledge
-
-
- Traditional Ecological Knowledge is the living knowledge acquired by Indigenous peoples over thousands of years. ACE needs to consider the costs to the United States of this knowledge loss should Line 5 destroy the natural resource base of the Tribes.
- A Line 5 alternative is for the U.S. government to give the Indigenous nations a larger role in healing and managing the natural resources they and we depend upon for survival.
-
4. Impacts of White Exceptionalism
White people for a millennium have justified conquering, enslaving, and killing Indigenous people and destroying their non-Christian civilizations because of the imagined superiority of European civilization and religion, twinned with our scriptured God-given dominion over the Earth and all creatures, which gives us the holy right to plunder them for profit.
-
-
- ACE needs to explore and understand how this frame of White Exceptionalism has driven our willingness to harm others and the Earth for self-benefit, and how, in the case of Line 5, impacts our willingness to further desecrate a Native American sacred place and to even consider another fossil-fuel project amid climate change.
-
Thank you.
Louise Gorenflo
Habitat for All
