[Episcopal News Service] Earlier this week, thousands of people, including Episcopalians from as far as Oregon and Washington, D.C., answered an invitation from Anishinaabe women and traveled to the headwaters of the Mississippi River – Bear Creek, as the Anishinaabe call it – to join them in a nonviolent protest to stop construction on an oil pipeline crossing treaty land in northern Minnesota where the tribe hunts, fishes and gathers wild rice.

“From the Anishinaabe side, their interpretation is that the land is given by God; it is holy land, it’s sacred land. As co-tenants of that land, they are responsible for anything and everything that happens there; it’s not theirs to own, it’s theirs to care for,” the Rev. Matthew Cobb told Episcopal News Service on June 9. Cobb is a regional missioner for the Episcopal Church in Minnesota and serves four congregations in the northern third of the state: two on the Leech Lake Reservation, one on the Red Lake Nation and one in Bemidji.

The Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, as the Indigenous peoples in the upper Great Lakes region have been called, see themselves in covenant with nature, explained Cobb, who was invited by the Rev. Robert Two Bulls, Minnesota’s Indigenous missioner, to serve the church’s northern region. Through that covenant with nature, the Anishinaabe take care of the land and the water. Read more here

Posted on June 7, 2021 By Dave Kolpack, AP News

SOLWAY, Minn. (AP) — Hundreds of protesters vowing to do whatever it takes to stop a Canadian-based company’s push to replace an aging pipeline blocked a pump station Monday in northern Minnesota, with some people chaining themselves to construction equipment before police began making arrests.

Environmental and tribal groups say Enbridge Energy’s plan to rebuild Line 3, which would carry Canadian tar sands oil and regular crude from Alberta to Wisconsin, would worsen climate change and risk spills in sensitive areas where Native Americans harvest wild rice, hunt, fish, gather medicinal plants, and claim treaty rights. Read more here

Posted on Sep 18, 2020 by Ann Gerard Flynn, MASS Live

In an email this week to Episcopalians in his diocese, the Right Rev. Douglas Fisher, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts, urged eligible voters to “ensure that they are registered and, if possible, to vote early (in person or by mail), thereby avoiding long lines at polling places.”

“The November election gives Americans a precious opportunity to support candidates and policies that will build up communities, protect public health, encourage racial and social justice, and restore the web of life,” said Fisher in an appeal that was signed by other diocesan leaders about the Nov. 3 presidential election. Read more here