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Enbridge is "funding and incentivizing" Minnesota police

Atkin, Emily
http://heated.world/p/i-dont-feel-safe-here

Publisher:  Heated
Date Written:  17/03/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

Line 3's mostly female, indigenous opponents say they're being harassed by local cops bankrolled by the Canadian oil giant.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Ask anyone working to oppose Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline project in any capacity in Northern Minnesota, and they will tell you they’ve been followed by cops while driving alone. Most will tell you they’ve been intimidated—verbally, physically, or both. Some will tell you they suspect they are being surveilled. Others report violence and brutality.

...

Arrest comes with the territory of direct action. But Simone Senogles, an Anishinaabe water protector with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said she’s experienced unnecessary brutality in the process.

When she locked arms with other women to try and stop police from removing another protester from a tree last December, for example, she said a large male officer “pulled me hard by my arms to release me [and] wrestled me to the ground, holding down my head and shoulders.” She was held overnight with 11 other women in an Aitkin County jail cell designed for 8 people. Social distancing was not an option.

It’s the smaller things, though—the following, the stopping, the questioning, the feeling of being constantly watched—that are increasingly tearing at the community opposed to Line 3. “I feel like a meth addict,” said Tania Aubid, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. “Things constantly trigger me. The sound of helicopters. Cops coming to the gate of the camp. Counterintelligence, how many people are here.”

Shanai Matteson, a non-Native water protector and lifelong resident of Aitkin County, said her young kids can feel it too. “My daughter told me she had a dream that we got stopped by police and they took me away. And she said ‘bring her back!’ but they didn’t.”

Women who participate in direct actions against the pipeline aren’t the only ones who report being followed and intimidated by Minnesota police, either. Rita Chamblin, a resident of Bemidji, holds trainings on how to legally monitor the pipeline’s construction for the group Watch the Line MN—but tells everyone to always take someone with them. “I don’t go out and monitor alone, and I’m an old white woman,” she said.

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