Art of the Rural 2025-2026 Spillway Fellow
Healing Phase
Relationships require action, the land requires your protection
Mni Sota Makoce, the land now called Minnesota, is a place that carries stories of creation, migration, harm, and healing. This land is covered in scars from colonial expansion, resource extraction, and industrial development— scars that are proof of a lack of relationship to the land. These wounds have become background noise to the cadence of modern life, whether because the abuse is hidden in depopulated and rural places, or because extraction, industry, and urban expansion are seen as progress instead of colonial violence. The last five hundred years of colonization have conditioned us to accept harm as necessary. We’re used to the white noise of colonial injury. We often do not recognize the violence that is happening around us, to our relations, our kin. We need a paradigm shift.
Healing Phase is a collaborative exhibit that asks what it would take to reject the current status quo, the constant bleeding of the land and its people, and move forward with radical optimism into an Indigenous future focused on Land Back and reciprocal relationships. Through Bee Kakac’s drone photography and Nipinet Landsem’s illustrations, it asks us to reimagine our relationships with eight places across the state, sacred places, Dakhota and Ojibwe and Michif places that have been transformed by the impacts of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, industrial agriculture, and the constant growth of settler colonial spaces. It asks us to build relationships with these places, to learn to see them, and to move forward with different priorities.
We cannot go back. We can’t turn back time. We can only move forward in a good way, and build relationships that heal.
Enbridge’s Line 3 Damages
This is a “site tour” of 11 locations along Enbridge’s Line 3/93 corridor in northern Minnesota. Line 3 is a tarsands pipeline that crosses over 200 bodies of water in Minnesota alone. Construction began in late 2020, the resistance against it began years prior and is ongoing today.
This footage shows a variety of Enbridge’s construction damages beginning on the west side of Minnesota, along the Red River of the north; and ending on the east side of the state 400 feet west of the Fond du Lac Reservation. Most of this footage is from summer, in 2023.
So far, MN state agencies and the media have publicly acknowledged four aquifer breaches caused by the construction of Line 3/93: the Clearbrook Terminal in Clearwater County, LaSalle Creek also in Clearwater County, Moose Lake in Aitkin County, and at Fond du Lac in Carlton County. Unfortunately, there is evidence of many more aquifer breaches which we will see in this video.
Enbridge's Line 3 Crosses Walker Brook- Fall 2023
This video is about Walker Brook, a wetland that was destroyed by Enbridge and its contractors during the construction of the Line 3/93 pipeline.
On November 11th, 2024, an oil spill was reported to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Initially, Enbridge reported a 2 gallon spill at one of their pump stations located just south of US Highway 18, about 5 miles east of Cambridge, Wisconsin.
The next day the amount spilled was revised to 126 gallons, which was revised again to almost 70,000 gallons.
News of the spill reached the public a month later, around December 12th.
Enbridge’s Line 6 Oil Spill
On December 17th, 2024, I published the first aerial images of Enbridge’s oil spill in southern Wisconsin. These photos have been shared hundreds of times on several social media platforms and news outlets.
Read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article here.
Between December 12th and December 15th, I read many articles about this oil spill, almost all of them featured stock photos of Enbridge’s storage tanks in Superior, Wisconsin. There were no photos of the site that I could find.
After learning the location of the oil spill from their Accident Report made with the U.S Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, I drove four hours to the site to get drone photos.
On December 17th, I published these photos from my personal account, not knowing what impact they would have.
Since posting, these photos have been shared hundreds of times on multiple social media platforms and by several media outlets, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, whose article about the spill you can read here.
