A Trail of Broken Promises: The Farce that is Tribal Consultation

Guest Opinion

I have spent the last decade fighting Line 5 and the proposed Great Lakes Tunnel Project. In that time, I have sat across the table from nearly every state and federal agency that has authority over this project. I have participated in what our government calls “tribal consultation.”

What I have learned is that consultation, as it exists today, is broken.

Every agency sees only the narrow slice of the project within its jurisdiction. One looks at water permits. Another studies wetlands. Another reviews cultural resources. Another focuses on endangered species. Yet no one is willing, or perhaps empowered, to step back and ask the only question that truly matters: What is the cumulative cost of this project to a people, a place, and future generations?

For Tribal Nations, nothing exists in pieces. Water, land, ancestors, culture, language, treaty rights, and future generations are inseparable. Yet our governments continue to evaluate them as though they can be compartmentalized.

That failure has consequences.

I come from a large family of treaty fishers, hunters, and gatherers. My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and generations before them lived from the Great Lakes. Until the 1990s, Bay Mills Indian Community faced profound poverty. My grandfather grew up in a tar-paper shack. My mother grew up in a house without plumbing. My father grew up in a house with dirt floors. We lacked basic government infrastructure until the 1980s.

Yet, we never went hungry.

The land fed us. The lakes sustained us. Our people understood that if the land cared for us, we had a responsibility to care for it in return.

Those teachings shaped every part of my life. We placed tobacco before a hunt. We thanked the animals that sustained us. We gathered berries without taking too much. We offered copper to the Great Lakes for safe passage. Fish nourished our ceremonies, from a baby’s first meal to the funeral of a loved one.

That is what our treaty rights protect. The 1836 Treaty was never simply about catching fish. It preserved “the usual privileges of occupancy” our ability to continue living as Great Lakes Anishinaabe.

How do you measure that in a permit application?

The proposed tunnel asks us to.

Throughout this review process, Tribal Nations repeatedly warned state regulators and Enbridge that ancestral remains and cultural sites existed on both shores of the Straits of Mackinac. We knew because our ancestors told us. Our oral histories remembered villages, camps, trade routes, ceremonies, and homes at the very place our teachings describe as the Heart of Turtle Island.

And we were right.

Archaeologists uncovered hundreds of sites carrying our history, our language, and our identity.

Even in death, our ancestors cannot rest.

After generations of losing our lands, our language, and our way of life, we are now told that their resting places can be excavated, sifted through, catalogued, and displaced in the name of infrastructure.

That is not mitigation. That is another chapter of the same story. 

For more than a decade my tribe, Bay Mills Indian Community, has fought to get Line 5 removed from the Straits of Mackinac and shut down permanently. The State permitting this tunnel project is just another example of how our voices have been ignored. 

Supporters claim this tunnel will “protect the water,” but protecting the water does not require extending the life of a pipeline that has already outlived its intended lifespan. Let’s be honest, this is about money. Enbridge has bought the media, property owners, unions, you name it. Everywhere you turn they are about “protecting the water.” But if that were actually the case, we would be talking about decommissioning Line 5 not building an expensive monument to keep it operating for decades more.

Meanwhile, the people who actually live here are asked to bear the costs. Northern Michigan communities face years of construction, noise, dust, groundwater impacts, and uncertainty. Families who have relied on these waters for generations are told to accept more sacrifice so a Canadian oil company can continue business as usual.

This has never been about politics.

It is about principle.

It is about whether one of the largest freshwater systems on Earth should be placed at continued risk for a pipeline that provides minimal direct benefit to Michigan while enriching a private corporation. It is about whether treaty rights are meaningful or merely acknowledged before being ignored. It is about whether consultation is a genuine opportunity to shape decisions or simply another procedural box to check.

I know what history will remember.

It will remember whether we chose convenience over courage.

It will remember whether we protected the waters that define Michigan or treated them as expendable.

And it will remember who stood up when it mattered most.

My people have endured hardship before. We are still here because resilience is part of who we are. We have always understood that we borrow these lands and waters from the generations yet to come.

That responsibility has not changed.

Neither has our resolve.

We will continue fighting for the Great Lakes. We will continue defending our treaty rights. We will continue speaking for our ancestors and for the children who deserve to inherit clean water, living cultures, and a homeland that still remembers them. We have never measured our success by whether the fight was easy. We measure it by whether we honored our responsibility to protect what is sacred.

Because some things are simply too sacred to bury beneath a tunnel.

Whitney Gravelle is president of the Bay Mills Indian Community.

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