Activists fight to stop construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline, which endangers an ecosystem that is one of the most important bird habitats in the western hemisphere

Deep within the humid green heart of the largest river swamp in North America, a battle is being waged over the future of the most precious resource of all: water.

On one side of the conflict is a small band of rugged and ragtag activists led by Indigenous matriarchs. On the other side is the relentless machinery of the fossil fuel industry and all of its might. And at the center of the struggle is the Atchafalaya river, a 135 mile-long distributary of the Mississippi river that empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

The activists gather at L’eau Est La Vie Camp, a resistance encampment set up to resist the Bayou Bridge pipeline, which will cross directly through the river basin to connect shale crude from the Dakota Access pipeline to a refinery in St James, Louisiana. From there, it will be shipped primarily to China.

The “water protectors”, as they call themselves, are camped near the path of the pipeline. Many live locally, but others come from afar, often hailing from tribes affected by similar issues, such as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Their efforts are focused on public protest to raise awareness, as well as direct actions to impede construction of the pipeline, which they say endangers the Atchafalaya hardwood forest and cypress-tupelo swamp, the largest in North America.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Found about an hour south of the Bayou Bridge pipeline, the Rockefeller wildlife refuge is home to one the US’s largest concentrations of alligators. Photograph: Joe Whittle/The Guardian

This ecosystem supports half of the continent’s migratory waterfowl and is one of the most important bird habitats in the western hemisphere. It’s also considered to be one of the most productive swamps on the planet – roughly 90% of the wild crawfish sold in Louisiana are caught here, making it the last stronghold of bayou Cajun fishing culture.

High on the activists’ long list of concerns is the possibility of a devastating spill: data collected by Greenpeace from the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration indicates the pipeline’s owners, Sunoco and its parent company Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) experienced 527 spills from 2002 to the end of 2017. According to a Reuters analysis, it had the worst spill record of all US pipeline companies between 2010 and 2016.

In 2014, an ETP pipeline ruptured 160,000 gallons of crude into Caddo Lake, which flows into the Atchafalaya Basin. The incident devastated the local fishing season.

Caddo Lake

Some tribal stories say that Caddo Lake is the origin place of the indigenous Caddo Tribe, which occupied the region until Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act extirpated them in the 1800s.

Caddo songs tell of an earthquake and flood that formed the lake. Unaware of the approaching danger, some of their ancestors were washed underneath the flood while dancing and singing, and were said to have become fantastic water creatures. Today, the lake is habitat for an abundance of fish and wildlife, including many alligators and snapping turtles – its resident relics of the Reptile Age.

In 1910, an oil company worker discovered gas bubbles emerging from the lake – a sign of oil presence. The lake bottom, which was owned by the federal government, was quickly leased. Soon, the world’s first overwater oil rigs were engineered to access the oil. The oil production which followed helped birth the Gulf Oil Company/Chevron.

As colonial encroachment expanded, Houma people, the southern neighbors of the Caddo, moved further south into the remote swamps of the Atchafalaya near the Atakapaw, Choctaw and Chitimacha peoples. There, they evaded forced removals due to their inaccessible locations. Those conditions also brought escaped slaves into bayou communities, along with exiled Acadian French settlers from Canada. The amalgam of ethnicities and cultures led to what is known today as Cajun culture.

“My grandmother, who was born in 1910, told me stories about how the oil companies stole our land rights away, tricking elders to sign their X’s on papers they were unable to read,” says United Houma Nation tribal council member Monique Verdin. “They believed they were leasing land, but in the process they were evicted off their properties.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clarice Friloux., a Houma resident, says: ‘We had a tank explode right next to us, and where are we supposed to evacuate 300 people to?’ Photograph: Joe Whittle/The Guardian

In 1994, Exxon began dumping sludge in a waste dump installed next to the mostly Houma community of Grand Bois, Louisiana, making residents sick.

“We had only 100 women in our community, and probably 15 out that 100 had tumor hysterectomies,” says Clarice Friloux, a Houma resident who helped file a lawsuit against Exxon at the time. “We had two babies born stillbirths with cysts.”

Friloux says she was followed and threatened many times during the lawsuit. “Once, someone called me and said: ‘So, you’re 20 minutes from home, you’re alone, and you have to pass by our facility to get back home. Are you afraid?’”

Once at a gas station, she was accosted by a man she had never seen before. “Do you get sponsored by Levi’s?” he asked. When she said no, he replied: “Well, if I remember correctly at the Monday meeting you wore green pants, and Tuesday beige, and Wednesday black,” making it clear he had been keeping tabs on her. “I’ll never forget his face. I look for him in crowds sometimes,” Friloux says. “He rattled me.”

After Louisiana state senator Michael Robichaux, a medical doctor, took up the community’s cause, the state finally ordered a toxicology study in 1998.

The state-appointed toxicologist demonstrated a litany of health issues affecting residents, such as breathing, kidney and eye problems, skin rashes, birth defects, learning disabilities, cancer and high lead levels. She cited environmental contaminants as the likely culprit yet ultimately, she did not testify in court to a conclusive link to the site. (In 2015, after two decades of legal battle, Exxon was cleared of most charges in the lawsuit, but was ordered to pay a total of $30,000 to residents closest to the site. The waste pits site owner, Campbell Wells, settled a separate lawsuit for a reported $7m.)

And then, in 2010, the BP spill happened. It is estimated that 3.9m barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf.

“The BP spill was a disaster for our communities,” says Friloux. “It shut down our livelihood and the ability to provide for our families.” It destroyed the shrimping industry which is vital to the local economy. Similarly, clear-cutting ancient cypress forest and the disruption of sediment patterns by dredging canals and trenches to lay pipeline has choked out the crawfish population.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oil refineries next to the Mississippi river in St James belch unknown emissions into the night sky. Photograph: Joe Whittle/The Guardian

‘Cancer alley’

It is against this backdrop that people are organizing to fight the Bayou Bridge pipeline, demanding that alternative energy be aggressively pursued and fossil-based production be curbed.

“I know we are not getting off oil and gas anytime soon, but we have to start working towards it,” says Verdin, who is on the Indigenous Women’s Council of the L’eau Est La Vie Camp. “If we don’t believe clean energy is possible, then we’ll continue to witness the fallout, from rising seas and black tides washing into our fishing grounds to toxic drinking water.”

The refinery corridor along the Mississippi river in St James – where the pipeline would end – is known as “cancer alley”. The mostly African American community is surrounded by refineries, and reports many of the same health issues seen in Grand Bois. No evacuation route exists should disaster strike, and the only bridge across the river was recently damaged by a barge carrying oil industry construction equipment, which closed the bridge for two months. Hemmed in on all sides by industry and the Mississippi, residents were forced to drive 40 miles round-trip to get essential supplies and to commute across the river for work.

“Forty-one percent of the United States’ water drains through our mighty river,” says Verdin. “The Mississippi Delta is a power point for the planet, a place where water comes to be purified. Yet we are a sacrifice zone.”

Eminent domain was used by ETP to seize numerous tracts of land from property owners. Unable to afford a legal battle against a petroleum giant, most acquiesced, but a few didn’t.

The common ETP practice when a landowner refuses a buyout is to file an expropriation claim, then begin construction on the assumption it will be approved. In one instance however, the claim was not filed before construction began.

The landowners invited activists to set up camp on their property and mount resistance actions. Officers then arrested the activists, who were on land they had written permission to be on (trespassing on pipeline domain is a felony punishable by five years in prison according to a “critical infrastructure” law recently passed in Louisiana).

Construction of the pipeline is now complete on the disputed property, and 18 felony charges remain pending. A lawsuit recently concluded wherein the landowners hoped to win redress. The judge ruled that ETP acted without lawful authority to be on the land. However, he approved the eminent domain claim post-construction, and ordered ETP to pay each landowner $150 for damages and land seizure compensation.

The landowners intend to appeal the ruling to the Louisiana supreme court, and a challenge to the critical infrastructure law could go all the way to the US supreme court.

“The critical infrastructure law infringes on the constitutional right to protest,” says Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University who’s representing landowners and activists pro bono. “The statute also violates due process,” he asserts. “A further problem is that it was rammed through the legislature by the oil and gas lobby, who admitted they wrote it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cherri Foytlin and Waniya Locke were arrested at an Energy Transfer Partners shareholders meeting on 18 October 2018. Photograph: Joe Whittle/The Guardian

A resistance led by women

The strongest voice of resistance leadership belongs to Cherri Foytlin. She is a Diné (Navajo) and Latina mother, and a longtime local of south Louisiana.

Living within an hour of the main camp, Foytlin is there almost daily. In addition to being a movement leader, she’s raising her six children to become the heart and success of the resistance. Her 15-year-old daughter Jayden is part of a group of youths suing the federal government over failing to take action on climate change. Their lawsuit alleges that the government has “violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources”.

At camp, Foytlin serves as the timeless Indigenous matriarch role of “aunty”. Her guidance, leadership and wisdom are essential to the community; whether in helping to resolve day-to-day social dynamics, or strategizing the next course of action in their ongoing struggle.

While activists from all backgrounds are welcome, the camp is led by Indigenous women like Foytlin, who guard the ethics guiding matriarchal care for land and water in the Americas since time immemorial. Their bond is not dissimilar to that of any group of warriors on any page in time: they say they are a “frontline family” tied together by intense experiences, some of which have nearly turned deadly.

Foytlin became an environmentalist when she volunteered on the BP spill clean up. “I remember pulling a dying pelican out of the water covered in oil, and thinking that pelican didn’t have a voice and neither did the fisherfolk I was with – who were on their knees crying like children”, she says.

“Our goal is to create space where justice can be found”, she says. “Initially, we had three objectives besides stopping the pipeline. First, to establish an evacuation route for St James (the state says it is evaluating options). Second, to lift up the needs of the Atchafalaya Basin. Third, is to activate a group of people to make a better future for themselves.”

They recently added another goal: to bring light to the brutal tactics being used to attempt to intimidate them into submission.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A warning sign marking the location of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline stands across the road from the L’eau Est La Vie Camp. Water often pools and gathers over locations where the pipeline has been buried in the wetlands of southern Louisiana. Photograph: Joe Whittle/The Guardian

Foytlin and others in the camp have endured the same type of threats and harassment that Clarice Friloux experienced, and worse. Cherri’s cat was poisoned. She had a brick thrown through her window. She says she was assaulted outside of her home when two masked men stepped out of the bushes and brutally beat her.

Things have escalated beyond assault. Early morning on 15 October 2018, while traveling lawfully on navigable waterway near construction sites, two activist boats were swamped by a larger boat. A dozen people went in the water while the large boat did not stay to help, but instead raced off. Some had to swim to shore, where they were all stranded in the swamp for eight hours.

In a letter to the US Coast Guard and the state requesting an investigation, attorney Bill Quigley stated: “Instead of slowing down and passing safely, the big boat veered very close and made several maneuvers to create large waves … The people in the boats are ready and willing to give statements about this action. [They] have information about the person who captained the boat.”

Anne White Hat, a Sicangu Lakota (Sioux) matriarch, was there. She’s been having recurring nightmares since. “It’s your worst fear to have your boat sink in the bayou with all those alligators and poisonous snakes out there,” she says.

Witnesses insist they recognized the assailing boat as pipeline security. Nearly two months after the incident, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries law enforcement officers responded to interview victims of the assault. In a statement to the Guardian, a department spokesperson said the incident had been turned over to the US Coast Guard, adding that “the boat or boats in question of allegedly causing the swamping are all commercial vessels involved in commercial operations”.

“Living through my worst nightmare, while traumatic, was really kind of empowering,” says White Hat. “We had prayers, our wits about us, and we are familiar with the swamp. I truly believe the spirit of the swamp was with us. It was so incredibly beautiful in that darkness before dawn, with a light mist and stars reflecting on the glasslike water, and the glow of red gator eyes peering just above the waterline. I’ll never forget those minutes before we went down.”

Three days later activists traveled to Dallas, Texas, to disrupt an ETP shareholders meeting at a downtown Hilton. Foytlin, and an Ahtna Dene/Standing Rock Sioux woman named Waniya Locke, gained entry into the meeting, where they confronted CEO Kelcy Warren. They called out unscrupulous actions by the company, pleading with shareholders to curb their brutal tactics.

Both women were arrested by uniformed Dallas police officers working off-duty at the meeting. They were jailed for the night, and Cherri was put in solitary confinement. Approximately one month later Dallas police dropped the charges.

“I’m not going to pretend like the intimidation tactics haven’t been harsh”, says Foytlin. “However, the support and love from local folks who are scared to speak publicly has been much more moving. What I’ve been sad about are the people who believe the same as me, but are terrified to let others know that.”

Despite the monumental challenges, Foytlin keeps her head held high, and the battle continues: “Intimidation works,” she says, “but witnessing courage is like an immunization to that fear. That’s who we are at L’eau Est La Vie.”