The Bad River Band in northern Wisconsin has held fast against the international oil company Enbridge for more than a decade, asserting that under no circumstances can the Canadian-owned pipeline continue to operate within reservation boundaries. The company, rather than heed the demands of the Band, has insisted that transporting oil through a section of pipeline known as Line 5 is their right. Rather than pack up shop, Enbridge proposed a new pipeline project, one that circumvents the reservation. 

Even though a federal district court judge ruled that the Line 5 pipeline was trespassing on the Bad River Reservation, in November 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) approved Enbridge’s permits to begin construction for what’s being called the Line 5 reroute project. The tribe balked: Decades of disrepair, ailing infrastructure, and water quality concerns didn’t sway the state’s top environmental agency. The tribe has tried a host of tools to protect their ancestral lands, to no avail. So in December 2024, and with the help of the environmental law organization Earthjustice, the Bad River Band sued the state, challenging the Wetlands and Waterways Permit as well as the Water Quality Certification given to Enbridge by the DNR. 

The legal proceedings began in August and will run through October. All three entities—the tribe, Enbridge, and the DNR—will make their case in the Wisconsin state circuit court. 

“Throughout this process, we’ll be able to put on witnesses, experts, environmental petitioners outlining all of the deficiencies in [the] DNR process,” said senior attorney for Earthjustice, Stefanie Tsosie, who is Diné. She said that the permit approvals were conducted without proper “baseline information” that led to incorrect evaluations of impacts that were “under-counted, underestimated, or in some cases, not even looked at.”

Tsosie explained that on behalf of the Band, Earthjustice is “laying the evidence down of all the ways that this project could go wrong—all the ways that this project could impact wetlands, waterways, water bodies, and all these waters flow downstream, through the reservation and into Lake Superior.”

It will likely be many months, if not years, before these legal proceedings are resolved. If the Band is successful, Enbridge stands to lose one of the necessary permits it needs to move forward with construction. To better understand the implications for tribal governance, future pipeline fights, and the ecological health of the Great Lakes, here’s a breakdown of what you should know.

What is Line 5?

Line 5 is a 645-mile section of pipeline that moves oil extracted in Canada through Wisconsin and Michigan and then back to Sarnia, Canada. It currently runs 12 miles across the Bad River Reservation. The pipeline was constructed in 1953 with permission from the Department of the Interior, though at the time the Band wasn’t given the opportunity to consent. The Band later signed easement agreements with Enbridge, allowing the company to operate lawfully. When those easements expired in 2013, the Band decided not to renew them. 

Instead of removing the existing pipeline from the Band’s land, Enbridge continued operation of Line 5. In 2019, the Band sued the company for unlawful trespass. A district court judge agreed in 2022 that the company was liable, and the Department of Justice concurred in 2024 that the Band was owed restitution, though there has been no accountability mechanism to ensure that Enbridge actually leaves the Bad River Reservation. 

What is the lawsuit about?

Instead of removing the existing pipeline, which might force the company to consider alternative ways of transporting oil, Enbridge proposed that it construct a new 41-mile pipeline around the reservation’s boundaries, though still in the watershed of the Bad River and Bad River slough. 

To begin construction on the Line 5 reroute project, Enbridge requires permit approvals from the federal Army Corps of Engineers and the Wisconsin DNR. In November 2024, the Wisconsin agency gave its approval. However, the state’s approval process inadequately evaluated the impacts to water quality, wetlands, threatened and endangered species, treaty rights, and legal concerns regarding the ongoing trespass, the Band argues. In December 2024, the Band sued the Wisconsin DNR.

According to the DNR permit, construction of the pipeline will impact over 300 acres of wetlands, forests, waterways, and other lands. Construction methods like grading, trenching, blasting, placement of construction matting, placement and storage of excavated material, and building roads to facilitate equipment and vehicle access are standard practice when it comes to pipeline construction. The state government argues that many of these impacts are “temporary” and “the project represents the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative taking into consideration practicable alternatives that avoid wetland impacts.” 

Why does the Band take issue with the permit?

The water quality standards used to determine that the planned reroute is the best, least damaging option were not determined by the Band; they’re the federal government’s. In 2011, the federal Environmental Protection Agency approved the Band’s water quality standards, based on the Anishinabe cosmological worldview that explicitly asserts that the “provisions for these water quality standards shall apply to all surface waters within the exterior boundaries of the Bad River Reservation.” However, the Band’s water quality standards did not figure into the state’s approval of Enbridge’s permit.

But the proposed pipeline reroute abuts the reservation’s southern boundary. A potential spill in the area could be catastrophic for the ancestral lands of the Bad River people and the plant and animal relatives that have supported life since time immemorial. The DNR estimates the probability of a spill to be low: about 0.00317 spills of any size over 20 years. But the Band doesn’t want to wait and see if there’s a spill; the land is too invaluable, the water too precious, and the track record of Enbridge too questionable. 

Since the permit expirations in 2013, the Band has been adamant about existing threats to water health and Enbridge’s negligence in addressing those concerns. The current pipeline is around 10 feet from a point in the Bad River known as the meander, a bend in the shape of the waterway that forms naturally as part of the river’s lifecycle. 

Many experts say it’s not a matter of if a pipeline will leak, but when. The federal government’s pipeline monitoring agency, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, calculated that in 2023, there were 1.5 pipeline spills per day. Enbridge has one of the worst spill records in the industry. The company is responsible for the biggest U.S. inland oil spill of all time, allowing nearly 900,000 gallons of oil to leak into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010. Line 5 itself has leaked more than 1.1 million gallons of oil over the last half century. Even the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues noted last year that Line 5 is a threat to the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater reserve by volume in the world.

What about the treaties that dictate shared access to the land? 

Wisconsin isn’t the only place where Indigenous people are fighting Line 5. There’s also a host of tribal and environmental concerns with the part of Line 5 that runs through Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac. While this lawsuit concerns the portion of Line 5 that runs through the Bad River Reservation, Enbridge isn’t welcome across the water either. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revoked the company’s easement in 2021, and the Bay Mills Indian Community, the tribe that has stewarded the waters and lands in that area since time immemorial, banished the company. However, the line still operates in the Straits. 

More broadly, the treaties that dictate shared access are complex. The Bad River Band entered into three treaties with the U.S. federal government—in 1837, 1842, and 1854—all of which ceded land but not the rights to hunt, fish, and gather in the tribe’s territories. In the case of the 1854 treaty, entering into this agreement was the means by which the Band was allowed to remain on their homelands, as this was the period of forced relocation of Indigenous peoples as a means of westward expansion known as Indian Removal.

According to a letter written by the Band to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the treaties also guaranteed the right to maintain the health of the ecosystems. 

“Recognizing the implications of the United States’ planned lumbering activities, tribal representatives explicitly retained their right to conserve and protect the oak and maple trees from which the Ojibwe derived important food sources and other values,” the letter read. 

Facing ongoing threats from climate change, ecosystem disruptions, and decreases in water quality is manoomin, the wild rice that is inherent to the origin story of the Anishinabe peoples, including the Bad River Band. Access to manoomin is guaranteed by treaty. The DNR wrote in its permit that Enbridge’s planned reroute won’t impact marshes where wild rice grows. 

The systems that the DNR evaluated in isolation—the wetlands, forests, rivers, and sloughs—are actually anything but, according to the Band. 

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor