‘The Earth itself was screaming out:’ Bay Mills Indian Community fights pipeline permitting while enveloped in wildfire smoke

A Canadian oil and gas company wants to continue operating its Michigan pipeline for 99 more years. Tribes and climate groups are pushing back.

Whitney Gravelle spent July 15, 2026, trying to clear wildfire smoke out of tribal buildings, constructing homemade air purifiers from filters and box fans, and checking on community members with asthma and heart disease. Gravelle is the president of the Bay Mills Indian Community based on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  

The same day, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy approved two key permits for Enbridge, a Canadian oil and gas company, to build a tunnel for a pipeline that runs through the Straits of Mackinac, a sacred waterway for the Bay Mills community that connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. If fully approved, the project would allow Enbridge to operate the tunnel and pipeline through the Straits for 99 more years.

Bay Mills Indian Community has been fighting to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline for over 15 years, alongside climate action organizations and all of Michigan’s other recognized tribes. Line 5, they argue, poses extreme risks to fragile, sacred, and economically important ecosystems. And it locks Michigan into almost another century of supporting oil and gas infrastructure, even though burning oil and gas causes climate change and the state set a goal of 100% clean energy by 2040.

“Looking back for me, it’s ironic, but the day of, I was really upset,” Gravelle said, recalling her experience on July 15. “We received the permit decision, and we quite literally had a climate crisis on our hands. And knowing that there were other First Nations up in Canada that had lost their homes to wildfire, it sort of felt like the Earth itself was screaming out for somebody to notice what’s happening.”

The wildfire smoke that shrouded Bay Mills in mid-July, along with much of the upper Midwest and Northeastern U.S., resulted from intense wildfires in the boreal forests of Ontario and northern Minnesota. 

The fires bore the fingerprints of climate change: Scorching temperatures in the areas where they sparked were made three to five times more likely by climate change, according to nonprofit research organization Climate Central. And climate change is making fires in these forests more likely and more extreme. Officials said the fires in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness will likely burn until it snows.

Gravelle and others opposed to Line 5 said that by continuing to permit and invest in oil and gas infrastructure, the state of Michigan is not only putting the Great Lakes at risk of contamination, but also failing to meet commitments to address climate change.

The fight to stop Line 5 

Enbridge’s Line 5 is a 73-year-old oil and gas pipeline that runs from Superior, Wisconsin, to refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. The fight to shut it down in Michigan has its roots in an oil spill from another Enbridge pipeline. In 2010, Line 6B burst, spilling over 1 million gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in south-central Michigan. Oil flowed from the break for 17 hours before Enbridge shut down the pipeline, Inside Climate News reported. It was one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history.

“It felt like collectively the state of Michigan went, ‘We have pipelines? Where are they?’ Gravelle said. “As people learned about Line 5, they saw immediately the inherent catastrophic danger that the Great Lakes were in.”

Denise Keele, executive director of the Michigan Climate Action Network, calls Line 5 America’s most dangerous pipeline. 

“It is running through 20% of the world’s fresh water, the drinking water source for 40 million Michiganders, the tourism source of all of Michigan’s economy, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and the Anishinaabe Indigenous tribal sovereign nations,” she said. “This is where the world was created in their origin stories.” 

Currents through the Straits of Mackinac, home to a portion of Line 5, are fast and regularly change direction, according to University of Michigan researchers. An oil spill here, they said, would “lead to a big mess that would be very difficult to contain.” 

Additionally, the Straits are often covered with thick ice in the winter, meaning a spill would be hard to stop and clean up in the cold months.

The section of pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac today is composed of two 20-inch diameter pipes that lie on the lakebed. The tunnel Enbridge proposes building under the Straits will make the Line 5 pipeline safer, Enbridge Media Relations Strategist Ryan Duffy wrote in an email.

But advocates don’t just want to stop the tunnel – they want to shut down the pipeline entirely. 

They say that in addition to the Line 6B spill, over 1.1 million gallons of oil have spilled from Line 5 in the last 50 years. In June 2026, Enbridge spilled drilling fluid into sensitive wetlands in Wisconsin as part of a Line 5 reroute project that is being challenged by the Bad River Band.

A betrayal of climate commitments? 

The recently approved permits don’t guarantee that the project will go ahead. Enbridge still needs a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build the tunnel through the Straits. [Editor’s note: The Army Corps granted the permit August 12, 2026, after this article was published.]

Additionally, they’ll need a new permit from the Michigan Public Service Commission. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in late July 2026 that the commission failed to fully consider the environmental impacts of the tunnel when it approved a permit in 2023, so that permit has been vacated.

Debbie Chizewer, an Earthjustice attorney who is part of Bay Mills’ legal representation team, said that she also expects to see legal challenges to the recently approved Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy permits.

Gravelle and Keele said they feel the state and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, have let down tribes and climate advocates. Whitmer campaigned on a promise to shut down Line 5. 

Whitmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether she still supports shutting down the pipeline. 

“My own political read is that us environmentalists, despite what I know some folks want to say about how dangerous I am, is that people are not scared of the environmentalists. What they’re scared of is Enbridge suing them,” Keele said. “One of the things I say all the time is it shows you who really has power. And here we have an oil giant, a Goliath, who absolutely has more power than a sitting governor of a free state.”

Gravelle said that the Bay Mills Indian Community has worked to reduce its own reliance on fossil fuels. The tribe has helped members install heat pumps so they don’t have to use propane to heat homes in the winter; they’ve also installed solar panels on tribal buildings and are building a $17 million solar farm.

“When I see the small steps that Bay Mills has been able to take, it really has me reflect on what the state of Michigan could have done in these 15 years, in this last decade, in these eight years with Gov. Whitmer,” she said. “I really feel that there was a lost opportunity there.”

Kyle Whyte, an enrolled member of the Citizens Potawatomi Nation and a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan who served on former President Joe Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Council, said that Biden also missed the chance to shut down Line 5.

“It is disturbing that after all of the electoral benefits they got from climate, they are not able to realize that they need to sustain that,” he said. “That they’re doing this double betrayal of now backing off on things as obviously bad and problematic as Line 5 is absurd.”

A long history of colonization

The pipeline crosses tribal land, including the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin as well as land that Anishinaabe communities like Bay Mills ceded to the United States government in exchange for the continued right to live out “the usual privileges of occupancy.” 

“That very specific language, ‘the usual privileges of occupancy,’ what that really means is the ability to live an Indigenous way of life,” Gravelle said. “We cannot be Great Lakes Anishinaabe without the Great Lakes. There is no place for us to go when oil spills in the Great Lakes; we have no other home. We’re the ones that are trapped here and will suffer the consequences.”

Bay Mills Indian Community and other tribes in Michigan and Wisconsin say the pipeline infringes on their treaty rights.

Whyte said that no tribes were consulted in the creation of Line 5. 

“The problem with companies like Enbridge is that they don’t respect the requirements of consultation, of trying to respect tribal sovereignty and tribal treaty rights,” he said.

The dispossession of land and resources by the U.S. government has also left many tribal communities financially impoverished and vulnerable. Several tribal communities near Line 5 are considered frontline communities, or communities that experience the impacts of climate change first and worst.

Chizewer said that the fight against Line 5 means many different things to many different people. It’s about tribal sovereignty, and it’s also about protecting people from climate change, and protecting the fragile and sacred ecosystems of the Great Lakes.

“We’re doing everything that we possibly can to make sure that our children and their children and future generations don’t have to suffer the same consequences or live with the same fears that we are today,” Gravelle said.

This article was originally published by Yale Climate Connections.

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