“One thing I learned the hard way is that I can’t collect rainwater from the roof in my rain barrels. It turns pink, probably from fungicides. I no longer fish in our local lake, which is a half-mile from the nearest field, or in the two nearby rivers or streams – one of which children swim in – that run through the village because of pesticide drift. I can no longer pick sage on the prairie for ceremonial purposes. Instead, I have to go deep into the last remaining wilderness areas where RD Offutt doesn’t spray. I can hear them spraying from helicopters as early as 6:30 a.m.”
—Evelyn Bellanger, Anishinaabe, Pine Point Village
Agribusiness giant RD Offutt has surrounded the Anishinaabe village of Pine Point with monoculture fields for decades. Now the company is trying to undermine tribal sovereignty by suing the White Earth Band: On May 3 RD Offutt filed suit in federal court to stop the Anishinaabe from regulating groundwater permits on their own reservation. RD Offutt claims that their “groundwater withdrawals have not had and will not have any direct impact on the political security, economic security, or health and welfare of the White Earth Band.”
We know that is INCORRECT.
The story of Pine Point begins with corporate greed. In 1889, families of the Wolf Clan, Sturgeon Clan and Bear Clan were forced from their ancestral lands when logging companies invaded. justified and legalized by Minnesota’s own Knute Nelson. Over the decades, the village became a textbook example of Native poverty due to colonial policies, with a consistent pattern of economic discrimination and land dispossession. The opioid epidemic has hit the community hard, and the housing projects built during LBJ’s War on Poverty look run-down.
But more importantly, this is the story of the land and water we love; this is the story of our home. A few murals decorate the buildings, there’s a workforce development center, an on-site store and a number of small Indigenous businesses, a music festival and a powwow, and plenty of village pride. Pine Point has also sent many of the most prominent Anishinaabe into academia and Indigenous organizations in the Twin Cities and beyond. This community – and the White Earth Tribe that represents them – wants a chance at clean water and a little less air pollution from big agribusiness over the village.
Over the past thirty years, RD Offutt has steadily expanded its operations on the White Earth Reservation. (They can only own reservation land because of a series of illegal land transfers that violate long-standing treaties. Currently, the Anishinaabe have complete legal control over less than 10% of the reservation, making it look “checkerboard-like.”) In 1997, RD Offutt produced potatoes on 55,000 acres of land; today the company farms 190,000 acres in Minnesota and several other states, including North and South Dakota, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. About 40% of the agricultural land east of the village of Pine Point is under contract or owned outright by RD Offutt..
RD Offutt achieves yields that are twice the average for this region, and In 2021, it ranked second among the largest agricultural systems in the United States. according to The Land ReportThe company is a major supplier of McDonald’s fries and prides itself on its continued growth. But this growth comes at a high price: nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and state-of-the-art irrigation systems are poured into waterways and land, leaving a bad taste everywhere.
In 2019, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency conducted a study on the Straight Riverthat flows from the Pine Point landscape into the basin of the upper Mississippi. The researchers found that nitrogen fertilizer pollution was 100 times higher than in areas not near industrial potato cultivation. In addition, Chlorothalonil, Mancozeb and Metribuzin are used on 79%, 56% and 68% of all RD Offutt planted areas, respectively.
This issue affects the region. In November 2023 EPA instructed three Minnesota state agencies — the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Minnesota Departments of Health and the Department of Natural Resources — to address the “immediate and significant health threat” to thousands of southeastern Minnesota residents exposed to high levels of nitrates in their drinking water. That may be the case in southern Minnesota, but nitrates are everywhere in water.
The community of Pine Point is particularly hard hit by the Offutt expansions. Every spring, a huge influx of heavy equipment floods the prairie with toxic chemicals that then seep into the water and the homes of Pine Point residents. County roads resemble a war zone, filled with planes, helicopters and industrial sprayers racing through the fields. Tractors that resemble mutated insects crawl into the fields and the air stinks of pesticides.
It is not a normal spring of rebirth and joy. It is more like Rachel Carson’s The Silent Springwhere life is poisoned by chemicals.
The White Earth Anishinaabe were once a healthy people. At the turn of the century, there was almost no cancer among the Anishinaabe. That is no longer the case today.
A Minnesota Department of Health for 2022 report found that “over a 15-year period, the total number of newly diagnosed cancers among American Indians in the White Earth region was 60% higher than expected compared with white, non-Hispanic men in Minnesota.” These include cancers of the oral cavity, pharynx, stomach, colon, liver and intrahepatic bile ducts, lung, kidney, and renal pelvis.
Among indigenous women, the rate of new cancer cases is 30% higher than expected. Four specific types of cancer are particularly common among them: colon cancer, liver cancer and intrahepatic bile duct cancer, lung cancer and bronchial cancer, and kidney cancer and renal pelvis cancer.
What causes these cancers? Well, many things, but think of the high levels of nitrates in drinking water and exposure to toxins in the air. A 2020 study from Wisconsin study A study of nitrates in drinking water found a significant increase in colon, ovarian, thyroid and kidney cancer in people exposed to these chemicals.
In addition, a 2018 Study by the Minnesota Department of Health found that the Central Sands region “had more total emergency department visits for pesticide poisonings compared to the state over a ten-year period (2005 to 2014). Approximately 30% of these emergency department visits for pesticide poisonings involved young children.”
We bury more people than are born in our village of Pine Point. This is now true across much of the reservation. Nevertheless, RD Offut writes on his website: “As a family-run farm, we have been growing crops with the White Earth Nation for over 40 years and consider the tribe an important neighbor.”
The Anishinaabe have nowhere to go if our water is poisoned. This is our last land, our reservation.
And now it appears that RD Offutt is even trying to take the water itself, from our rivers, our fish and our people. In 2021, during the severe drought, the company left the pumps running, violating water withdrawal permits. Together, RD Offutt and other companies 22 billion gallons of water pumped — about $2.5 billion more than the entire City of Minneapolis water treatment plant, which serves about 500,000 people, used. In the same year, “the average RD Offutt permit violation allowed 43 million gallonsThose who exceed the limit but still produce less than 50 million gallons would not have to pay more than the minimum amount of $140.” Fairly cheap groundwater.
In May 2023, in response to these actions, the White Earth Nation issue a regulation Farmers with irrigation wells within the reservation boundary or within a five-mile buffer around it must apply for a permit from the White Earth Division of Natural Resources.
In addition to taking groundwater, the company is now trying to suppress the tribes’ ability to protect water and people by asking a federal judge to rule that the White Earth Nation does not have the authority to require farmers to obtain tribal water permits. This is the same water that the people of Pine Point drink. There is no other water. There is no other land. The people of Pine Point have been continually displaced from their homes, by laws, by logging, by poisoned water, and now perhaps by a lack of potable water. at allAs Don Wedll, a treaty rights historian, noted in an interview, “Offutt seems to want ‘justice’ in court. There is no standard large enough to measure the injustice done to the reservation.”
As I write this, it is summer in the north country and the helicopters are spraying the potato fields. The tribe has backed down from its demand for the regulations, but the lawsuit and ultimately the question of whether a tribal nation has the right to protect people’s water remains. We will see how it plays out between big agriculture and the tribe trying to protect its groundwater. The fish, mussels and Anishinaabe hope they have enough water to keep going.
