Bad River Band documentary screening highlights love and resiliency  

Five people sit in chairs on a stage with a large screen behind them that reads "Bad River: A Story of Defiance."

Panelists and moderators discuss the Bad River film screening. From left to right: Julia Gnadt, Misty Jackson, Patty Loew, Aurora Conley, Lily Rudolph.

Grandma Josephine Mandamin, an elder of the Anishinabek Nation, was known as the Water Walker.  According to the Great Lakes nonprofit, FLOW, Grandma Josephine dedicated her life to raising awareness about water issues through “water walks.” Since beginning the walks in 2003, she logged more than 25,000 kilometers, or over 15,534 miles, walking around Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie, completing each in a different year. She passed away in February of 2019.  A few years before Grandma Josephine passed away, Misty Jackson was living in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, the traditional land of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. When Jackson was asked if she would like to spend a few days with Grandma Josephine Mandamin, she accepted immediately.   “I got to watch Grandma Josephine wake up three hours before the crack of dawn every morning,” Jackson said. She compared being around Grandma Josephine to being in the presence of the Dalai Lama, saying that listening to her stories was like being around someone who “was on a different plane.”   Jackson had previously been a participant in the Standing Rock Protests, which between 2016 and 2017 opposed the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline due to its threat to the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. As Jackson came to terms with the constant threat Indigenous communities face in the name of fossil fuel extraction, she asked Grandma Josephine about her purpose.   “I went to Standing Rock, and I just don’t understand what it is that calls me,” Jackson confided in Grandma Josephine. Staring back at her, the Water Walker said, “It is really simple… the water’s calling you.”  On November 18, 2024, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies held a free screening of “Bad River: A Story of Defiance” at Shannon Hall in Memorial Union, as a part of the Institute’s Native November programming. Three women featured in the film participated in a panel discussion after the event, including Jackson, who is currently the American Indian Science & Engineering Society coordinator for Madison Metropolitan School District; Aurora Conley, the vice chair of the Anishinaabe Environmental Protection Alliance and Bad River tribal member; and Patty Loew, a professor emerita at UW–Madison and Northwestern University and retired inaugural director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern.  Looking out into the crowd during the event, Jackson said, “The water calls to me, to the people in this room, people that came to see this film, people that have supported and done things like voting in various elections… That’s what it is: the water called you.”  The panel was moderated by two UW–Madison students, Julia Gnadt, a sophomore majoring in psychology and American Indian studies, and Lily Rudolph, a senior also majoring in psychology and social work.   The film follows the Bad River Band of northern Wisconsin, one of six Ojibwe bands in the state, and their fight for land sovereignty against the Canadian oil giant Enbridge. The Band’s reservation was established along the shores Chequamegon Bay on Lake Superior by the 1854 Treaty of Lapointe with the U.S. government. However, the film gives insight into how those treaty rights have not been respected over several decades, situating the Band’s battle with the oil giant as one bead in a string of injustices.   The documentary, directed by award-winning filmmaker, Mary Mazzio, shows the “David and Goliath” battle of the tribe against an oil pipeline reconstruction, Line 5. Enbridge has a history of oil spills, most notably its 2010 spill into the Kalamazoo River — the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history. According to the company, the burst caused 843,000 gallons of crude oil to spill into the Lake Michigan tributary. The ongoing battle against Line 5 seeks to prevent the same tragedy from happening in the Bad River watershed and, eventually, Lake Superior.   The fight with Enbridge started in the 1950s when the Bad River Band was not consulted by the U.S. government for the oil pipeline to cross their land and was given a meager payment as recompense. Decades later, Enbridge struck another agreement, this time with the Band directly. However, after that agreement expired and the Band became worried about the possibility of another spill, they decided that they did not want the oil giant to operate on their land or within the watershed. Nevertheless, the company has adamantly advocated against a shut down.   Despite the efforts of the powerful Canadian company, in 2022, a federal judge ruled that Enbridge had illegally trespassed on the tribe’s land. Currently, Enbridge wants to reroute the pipeline around the tribe’s land, but the project remains contentious because the Band argues that the reroute still endangers the watershed.  While the film is about a specific instance of injustice, it also makes clear that the battle started long before Enbridge, with forced cultural assimilation. The film goes back and forth in time, portraying the Enbridge fight against the backdrop of racist laws during the Termination and Relocation period. Removing Native people from their lands to urban areas, these policies had disastrous effects on Indigenous communities and are directly correlated with high rates of homelessness, poverty, and drug and alcohol use then and now.   By situating the pipeline fight within the context of Red Power – the Native American civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s – and the Walleye Wars, a contentious protest for Ojibwe hunting and fishing rights in Wisconsin during the 1980s and early 1990s, the film places environmental protests into the broader fight for treaty rights, a necessity for the survival of Indigenous communities the aftermath of Termination and Relocation.   Despite the difficulty of its subject matter, the documentary also allows the humor and love of the activists it showcases—like Eldred Corbine, Edith Leoso, Alton Sonny Smart, and former Chairman Mike Wiggins—to emerge, giving audiences the space to laugh, cry, and reckon with the continuous abuse of land and Treaty Rights.   “There is something to be said about grassroots activism, and I think it starts with our own relationship to our environment,” Loew said during the panel discussion.   “We need to get out there and develop personal relationships with water, with our rivers, with our lakes, go hiking, go fishing, go hunting,” she added, encouraging the audience to share that relationship with others to increase allyship. “Unless you have that personal relationship with the natural world, you’re going to continue to view water and air and plants and animals as commodities and not as relatives.”  In November, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved Enbridge’s wetland and waterway permits. The documentary ended before these latest developments but ensured that the fight is far from over. It displayed the tribe’s resiliency within the years-long battle, allowing them to leave messages for the “7th generation” — their great-great-great grandchildren they hope will still be stewards of the land and champions of justice long after they are gone.   Aligning with the University’s Native November theme – love – the documentary underscores how love of one’s community, land, and Earth can catalyze change. As an organizer and public speaker, panelist Aurora Conley regularly drives five hours to Madison. She said that’s how she shows her love. She recalls making that drive while eight months pregnant with a band of elders in her car to testify during a court hearing concerning mining on the Bad River tribal land.  Conley’s kids “didn’t understand it in the beginning, but now they are 12 and 14, and they understand that this is the work that we do,” Conley said. “[Love is] as simple as a prayer and our offering of tobacco, and sometimes even as simple as just taking a drink of fresh water and accepting that water into your body.”  By: Miquéla Thornton