A Tribe Just Beat a Pipeline Giant in Court — And Won

The Bad River Band proved Enbridge has been trespassing on their land for years. Now a federal appeals court agrees.

Photo Credit: Getty

I’m a bit late on this one, but nonetheless it’s significant enough that I have to write about it.

On July 30, a U.S. appeals court found Enbridge liable for trespass for running a pipeline under land belonging to a northern Wisconsin tribe: the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians just kicked a major pipeline company off its sovereign lands.

The vast majority of the oil flowing through Line 5 is light crude and synthetic crude oil produced from the tar sands and conventional fields of Western Canada, primarily Alberta. You know, the same tar sands that are basically financing this country, while at the same time suspected of poisoning the Indigenous waters, lands and air of Fort Chipewyan and other downstream communities. For years I’ve been reporting on the rare and high rates of cancer and disease in Fort Chipewyan, where even children have been fighting cancer, while the province of Alberta continues to look away.

But the Bad River Band just proved that Indigenous rights must be respected — and can be upheld in a court of law.

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What the Court Actually Decided

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago handed down its ruling on July 30, finding Enbridge liable for trespass for a stretch of Line 5 running under Bad River Band land. The case had come up on appeal from a federal district judge’s June 2023 order.

That original 2023 order was already a win for the Band: it required Enbridge to pay $5.15 million in restitution plus an additional sum for the ongoing trespass, and to move the pipeline within three years. That three-year deadline actually expired last month — but it had been put on hold while the appeal played out.

Now the appeals court has affirmed that Enbridge trespassed, while sending the damages number back down for a recalculation — one that has to account for the ongoing nature of the trespass, any interest owed, and how both sides have behaved around the reroute. Circuit Judge Michael Scudder made a point of pushing the lower court to make sure Enbridge reroutes the pipeline as soon as possible.

Not everything went the Band’s way. The appeals court declined to hold Enbridge liable for nuisance, ruling that federal law preempted that particular claim. And the easement picture is a patchwork: Enbridge’s rights to operate over some tribal parcels run through 2043, while its rights-of-way over other parcels expired back in 2013 — meaning the company has been operating without permission on at least part of this route for over a decade.

The Band first sued in 2019, after years of out-of-court negotiations with Enbridge went nowhere.

A view of the Imperial Oil refinery near Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline in Sarnia. Photo: Carlos Osorio/Reuters

Why this isn’t just a paperwork fight

This is Line 5 — a 645-mile pipeline carrying up to 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids a day from Superior, Wisconsin, through northern Wisconsin and Michigan, to Sarnia, Ontario. On the Bad River reservation, this isn’t an abstract legal question about easements and expired contracts. Band members have told courts that erosion has stripped away riverbank so fast that in places there was less than 15 feet between the pipeline and the Bad River itself. Experts have warned that an exposed, weakened pipeline in that position isn’t a matter of if it fails, but when.

So when I say this ruling matters, I mean it matters in the most literal, physical sense — water, land, the safety of a community that has been asking a multinational pipeline company to leave for years.

Enbridge’s track record speaks for itself

This isn’t a hypothetical risk. Federal pipeline safety data shows Line 5 has leaked at least 29 times since it went into service in 1968, spilling more than 1.1 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids along its route. One of the worst incidents happened in 1999 near Crystal Falls, Michigan, when over 220,000 gallons of oil and natural gas liquids gushed into a marsh. Responders ended up igniting the resulting vapor cloud, sparking a fire that burned for 36 hours and forced roughly 500 people to evacuate.

And Line 5 isn’t even Enbridge’s worst offense. In July 2010, a separate Enbridge pipeline, Line 6B, ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, and spilled more than a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River — still the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history. It took the company roughly 17 hours to even recognize a rupture had occurred, because staff monitoring the line from Enbridge’s control room in Edmonton misread the alarms.

That’s the company the Bad River Band has been fighting to get off their land. A company with a documented, decades-long pattern of pipeline failures, delayed detection, and underestimated risk.

The bigger picture

I keep coming back to Fort Chipewyan when I think about rulings like this one. Because this is what’s at stake at both ends of that pipeline. Upstream, in Alberta, tar sands extraction is tied to disease clusters and cancers in children that the province refuses to seriously investigate. Downstream, in Wisconsin, a tribe has spent years in court just trying to get a foreign company to stop trespassing on its own land before a pipeline rupture poisons its water too.

Same industry. Same disregard for Indigenous life. Different courtroom.

What the Bad River Band has done here is show that when Indigenous nations assert sovereignty and refuse to back down — through the courts, through years of litigation, through generations of knowing exactly what’s owed to them — the law can actually catch up to that truth. Not fast enough. Not without a fight. But it can.

Enbridge hasn’t said whether it will appeal further. The reroute — a proposed 41-mile detour around the reservation — still depends on permits that have not been finalized. So this fight isn’t over. But for one day at least, a tribal nation stood in federal court and made a pipeline company answer for trespassing on land that was never theirs to run through in the first place.

Brandi Morin is a multi-award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is the founder of Indigenous Insider on Substack and the author of the national bestselling memoir Our Voice of Fire.

Source: Reuters, “Enbridge pipeline trespassed on Wisconsin tribal land, must be moved, US appeals court finds,” July 30, 2026.