TEXT/PHOTOS BY WECOPWATCH
On October 23, 2017 Water Protectors from Camp Makwa Front Line Camp blockaded Wells Fargo Bank branch in Duluth, Minn. to oppose the bank’s investments in the Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline. Wells Fargo currently has $743 million dollars in corporate lending to Enbridge LLC. Enbridge has proposed building the Line 3 “expansion” project. The new route would cross the wild rice beds and pristine lakes in Minnesota.
Water protectors carried red dresses painted with dark hand prints to high-light the thousands of indigenous women that disappear each year following the influx of male oil workers associated with fossil fuel extraction. The port of Duluth has been a center for sex trafficking.
Wells Fargo Bank is also a financier of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, and remained 
invested despite calls for divestment. Resistance to these investments has sparked a global movement calling for communities to with-draw from banks funding fossil fuels. To date Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica have divested from Wells Fargo, and BNP Paribas bank recently announced it will cease business with tar sands, fracking, and Arctic drilling.
Tara Houska, Anishinaabe water protector and attorney from the Makwa Initiative stated “Divestment works. Banks are public facing agencies that need our money to operate. It’s time to divest from fossil fuel destruction and invest in our futures.”
For more info, see their facebook page at: http://facebook.com/campmukwa.
