“Enbridge has zero tolerance for illegal and exploitative behavior,” said Enbridge Communications Specialist Juli Kellner in an email. The company has conducted human trafficking awareness trainings for more than 11,000 workers involved in the project, but that won’t stop communities from advocating against Line 3. They were vulnerable long before these workers arrived and don’t want further exposures to harm. It’s hard to imagine how an oil and gas company can help.
“I don’t hold any hope that outside forces are going to come in here and save us,” Martineau said. “We keep us safe. We patrol our communities. We find our women, and there’s not much justice for us. There’s just us.”
Martineau means that literally. In 2016, they helped found Gitchigumi Scouts, an Indigenous-led group in Minnesota dedicated to searching for missing and murdered relatives. Martineau didn’t stop there. Earlier this year, they founded Camp Migizi, an Indigenous queer collective on the frontlines of the Line 3 battle.
“We realized that we could sit at home and be scared,” Martineau said, “or we could put ourselves on the line to try and help lower these statistics.”
The statistics out there are sobering: Native American women experience the highest homicide rate in the U.S. alongside Black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In some U.S. counties, murder rates are over 10 times the national average, per a 2008 Department of Justice report. However, these are likely gross underestimates, said Kate Finn, the executive director of First Peoples Worldwide, an organization seated within the University of Colorado at Boulder focused on the relationship between business and Indigenous peoples.
“Data around sexual violence is difficult,” Finn said. “It’s difficult when people who are victims don’t want to report for fear of shame, for fear of being outed, for a lot of reasons. And we know that often when Alaska Native or American Indian women do report, either their identity isn’t written down or tracked, so it’s hard for data to be collected.”