As part of our documentary, The Sweetwater Seas – North America’s Great Lakes, one part of the film covers the story of Line 5, a segment we aim to release this fall as a stand-alone 30-minute documentary. Our approach in telling the Line 5 story revolves around the rights of indigenous people in northern Michigan, who have both a moral and legal right to clean water in the Straits of Mackinac and elsewhere. Their rights to full use of the land and water, both inland and in the Great Lakes, was established in the 1836 treaty that created the state of Michigan. This is the backdrop of lawsuits that seek to shut down the aging pipeline—the treaty guarantees that the local environment will be preserved to use by indigenous people, but an oil spill in the Straits would destroy the resource for the five bands of Odawa and Chippewa people who live around the Straits and are directly impacted by Line 5.
