Indigenous, Environmental and Community Leaders Call on U.S to Respond to UN Letter About Human Rights Abuses of Indigenous People and Line 3
“We believe that good nations should uphold their treaties and good countries should not wage war on Indigenous peoples.”
Washington, DC (September 3, 2021) -- Winona LaDuke, Tara Houska and Kate Finn hosted a press call in response to the recent letter sent from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to the United States regarding allegations of human rights violations against the Anishinaabe associated with the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline construction.
On August 31, CERD published a letter to the U.S. Government dated August 25, requesting that the U.S. respond to these allegations. The letter notes, among other things, that these rights violations would amount to a violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which the U.S. has signed and ratified.
The letter requests that the U.S. Government provide information on how it guarantees the right to free, prior, and informed consent; prevents adverse impacts of the pipeline on the Anishinaabe and their culture, health, and environment; guarantees the right to an effective remedy to these rights violations; and prevents violence against Indigenous women and excessive force against protestors.
The following are portions of the speakers’ statements from the call:
Tara Houska, Founder of the Giniw Collective
“Governor Walz and President Biden have said nothing as unarmed, non-violent water protectors have been hit with rubber bullets, mace, and been subjected to so-called “pain compliance” in the past month. I’m one of those water protectors. As I sit with scars caused by rubber bullets paid for by a tar sands company called Enbridge and my friends tend to potentially permanent facial paralysis, elected officials continue to tout themselves as climate leaders. You can’t allow one of the largest tar sands infrastructure projects in North America through Indigenous lands and the Mississippi River headwaters and be a climate leader. Their silence is appalling. Stop Line 3, now.”
Winona La Duke, Executive Director, Honor the Earth
“What we have seen over the past seven years is the Enbridge corporation, with the cooperation of the Canadian and now the United States government, succeeding in violating our rights consistently; not only to free prior and informed consent, but also our human rights in terms of sex trafficking, violations of our rights in terms of police brutality and injuries that have occurred as rubber bullets have been shot at our people by Minnesota law enforcement and paid for by Enbridge. We've seen the destruction of our rivers, we've had 28 frac-outs which have burned our wild rice and our rivers, and we've had 5 billion gallons of water taken from our people, in a time of the worst drought in the history of Minnesota.
Here we have a Canadian multinational corporation that is not only a climate criminal in a time of climate chaos, but a corporation and a country which is now promoting violence against Indigenous peoples, a total denial of our rights to continue food security, existence, environmental eco-side damage, and certainly the violation of treaty rights and all agreements under our laws and and under international laws.”
Kate R. Finn, Esq., Executive Director, First Peoples Worldwide, University of Colorado
“Now that the United Nations committee has responded to the petitions sent by Honor the Earth and the Giniw Collective, the United States is in a position to respond. These kinds of petitions and requests are sent to the UN all of the time, and the committee doesn't often have the opportunity to respond to all of them, but it responded here.”
