Urgent Cinema: Winona LaDuke and the Enbridge Pipeline

These days, Winona LaDuke—an Anishinaabe activist and onetime Green Party vice presidential candidate from northern Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation—is a key voice backing the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline project in North Dakota. The ongoing protests mirror a project closer to home: Enbridge’s proposed Sandpiper pipeline, which would’ve piped oil from northern Minnesota through tribal treaty territory to the port city of Superior, Wisconsin. A four-year battle that eventually resulted in Enbridge canceling the pipeline is the subject of award-winning photographer and filmmaker Keri Pickett‘s newest documentary, First Daughter and the Black Snake, which looks at LaDuke’s environmental activism and advocacy in defense of Sovereign Lands. The title, as Picket explains, combines the Dakota meaning of La Duke’s first name with the destructive “black snake” of indigenous prophesy—the oil industry.

The film screens at the Walker on Thursday, September 15 as part of Cinema of Urgency: Local Voices, a showcase of contemporary works by Minnesota filmmakers who connect national debates to specific districts, funding, and infrastructure. In advance of the program, I connected with Pickett to discuss the film. This is the seventh interview with each of the filmmakers showcased in Thursday’s program: Remy Auberjonois, E.G. Bailey, D.A. Bullock, Mahmoud Ibrahim and Nathan Fisher, Karl Jacob,, Dawn Mikkelson, and Norah Shapiro.

First Daughter and the Black Snake addresses Winona LaDuke’s environmental activism and, in particular, her work to stop the Enbridge pipeline. When did you begin work on the film and what attracted you to the subject matter?

My real American history education started in 1980 when I attended the Black Hills Survival Gathering. At that gathering I volunteered to run the switchboard in the American Indian Movement tent. Years later I wanted to learn more about the indigenous people of Minnesota and a friend said, “I know just the person for you to meet.” So in 1984 I met Winona LaDuke up at the White Earth Reservation, and over the years I have tried to document the milestone moments in her life.

In 2013, when the Enbridge corporation announced that they planned to construct a pipeline which would across the Headwaters of the Mississippi River and the wild rice beds of Winona’s Anishinaabe territory, I knew I had to follow that story.

I started photographing LaDuke’s actions in the spring of 2014, and I started filming her “Love Water Not Oil” horseback ride against the current of oil that summer. But it wasn’t until I followed her to New York City to participate in the climate change summit and the People’s Climate March that I realized that I had to commit to making a film about her efforts. Native people are the leaders of the charge to protect water from contamination of fracked and tar sands oil.

I attended college at MSU (now University of Minnesota Moorhead), and I love northern Minnesota. I believe that our states water is our most valuable resource and worth fighting to protect. Inspired by Winona and her Ojibwe community, I want to share what have seen with others so they might add their voice and participate in protecting our natural resources.

Your background is in photography, and previous projects such as your photo book Faeries have provided rich, intimate engagement with subjects often marginalized (or absent) from mainstream media. How did your background in photography inform this project? 

As an artist, my work has centered on family and community, and I am interested in revealing how our lives reflect our value systems. Intimacy and honesty are important to me and through my photography books Love in the 90s, Faeries, and Saving Body and Soul I have shed light upon people who have typically been marginalized in our society—the elderly, the gay community, and the poor and homeless.

First Daughter and the Black Snake is a continuation of my artistic interest in family and community exploring how actions reveal value systems and how much one person can make a difference. Documenting Winona’s pipeline fight is therefore a natural extension from photography into the moving image reflecting my lifelong efforts to document people who are struggling against the odds.

The film includes sequences of public forums and town halls. Why did you think it was important to capture public debates? How does this footage supplement the interviews you include?

First Daughter and the Black Snake follows what happened during these past two years. In the course of documenting I have amassed over 800 hours of footage in the process. Winona and her allies have attended countless public hearings conducted by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the state Department of Commerce. Winona says in the film that “democracy is not a spectator sport.” Many people complain about the system, and very few take the time to engage within the system.

I am inspired that the native communities who have lost so much at the hands of the government would choose to participate in that same system. The film has interviews but primarily I have tried to tell a compelling story of how Winona has fought the pipelines with treaties, indigenous “slow” food and her spiritual horse ride with a cinéma vérité approach.

Democracy Now recently featured an interview with LaDuke and a report on funding for the Dakota Access Pipeline, identifying 17 banks that are providing financial support for the project. In making this film, were you primarily interested in depicting activism or the larger systems and companies that support the pipeline? In national coverage of the oil industry and pipeline development what parts of the story do you think are typically under-addressed?

My documentary film focuses on the activism. Native American communities have born the brunt of much of the extreme energy extraction practices of major corporations. Enbridge Energy and Marathon Petroleum are featured in my film. These corporations have experienced the Minnesota regulatory system and pushback from many environmental groups such as Honor the Earth, Friends of the Headwaters, and MN350.

Citizen protestors have gathered and made their voice heard. The people’s efforts have been the focus of my film as I am documenting what I have seen Winona and others efforts to protect the water.

In indigenous communities the “black snake” is prophesied to bring destruction to the earth, and many believe that the oil industry is the black snake. The people I have documented and tried to make visible are the protectors rather than the perpetrators.

The end of my film reveals the Enbridge pipeline battle has changed. There is a win with the Sandpiper pipeline but the struggle remains here in Minnesota with Line 3, and now the black snake has moved to North Dakota to the Dakota Access pipeline.