‘They screwed up our lake’: tar sands pipeline is sucking water from Minnesota watersheds

The Anishinaabe people are rallying to save their lakes and their traditional wild rice harvests

Along the eastern boundary of the White Earth Indian Reservation in north-western Minnesota, Indigenous Anishinaabe wild rice harvesters Jerry and Jim Libby set down a row of wooden pallets into the mud just beyond the dock of Upper Wild Rice Lake. It was a clear day, and tight, lush clumps of green rice heads were visible across the lake's horizon.

In a typical year, the entrance to this - one of a long necklace of wild rice lakes in northern Minnesota to which the region's Indigenous people flock every year in the late summer - would be covered in at least two feet of water. But now it is composed of suspended sediment as solid as chocolate pudding, through which the Libbys need to create a makeshift ramp simply to carry their canoe out to the waterline.