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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/12/13/indigenous-pipeline-oil-gas-insurers/">https://theintercept.com/2020/12/13/indigenous-pipeline-oil-gas-insurers/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Indigenous Groups Push Insurers to Abandon Fossil Fuel Projects</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Greta Moran - December 13, 2020<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>As oil and</u>
gas projects expand across the United States and Canada, often
imperiling Indigenous land without ever obtaining consent, land
defenders are increasingly pressuring the financiers of fossil fuel
infrastructure — banks, insurance companies, and asset managers — to
respect their sovereign land right. Amplifying the calls of this
grassroots movement, the largest organization representing American
Indians and Alaskan Natives passed a historic <a href="https://www.ncai.org/attachments/Resolution_YQHxwQjdcImnMBQHuvxuwXlCoTXaKnHftxZNNghmvnppWlvWMrM_PDX-20-036%20merged.pdf">resolution</a>
last month calling on “private insurance companies to end their
underwriting of the expansion of tar sands oil, Arctic oil and gas, and
LNG export terminals.”</p>
<p>The resolution, put forward by the National Congress of American
Indians, or NCAI, also asks insurance companies to adopt policies on
“free, prior, and informed consent.” This principle, <a href="http://www.fao.org/indigenous-peoples/our-pillars/fpic/en/">enshrined</a>
in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
is “really just a fancy way of saying that any corporation, any bank,
any agency that wants to engage in a project that impacts Indigenous
lands and treaty lands must get consent from that particular tribal
nation or Indigenous community,” said Matt Remle, who is Lakota and the
primary author of the resolution. “And if the community says no, that
project doesn’t happen.”</p>
<p>Remle is also the co-founder of Mazaska Talks, an Indigenous-led organization focused on campaigns to <a href="https://mazaskatalks.org/">divest</a>
from projects that violate human rights and treaty rights abuses, which
came out of an effort that began about five years ago to defund the
Dakota Access pipeline. This movement pushed the city of Seattle to
divest $3 billion from Wells Fargo in 2017, one of the main backers of
the pipeline, and sparked <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/these-cities-are-divesting-from-the-banks-that-support-the-dakota-access-pipeline/">similar campaigns</a> throughout the country. More recently, <a href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/every-major-bank-has-now-ruled-out-funding-arctic-drill-1845782346">every major bank</a> has agreed to not fund drilling in the Arctic after facing pressure from <a href="https://stopthemoneypipeline.com/">Stop the Money Pipeline</a>, a coalition of over 130 organizations which includes Mazaska Talks.</p>
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<p>Most Wall Street banks at least publicly acknowledge free, prior, and
informed consent while still financing projects, like the tar sands
pipelines, that face Indigenous-led opposition. Yet no major U.S.
insurance companies, the biggest insurers of oil and gas projects across
the globe, have released publicly facing statements about Indigenous
rights, let alone the principle of free, prior, and informed consent,
according to Elana Sulakshana, energy finance campaigner at Rainforest
Action Network. This is, in part, why there has recently been more
intense scrutiny of insurance companies’ enablement of fossil fuel
projects on Indigenous land.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/12/Photo1-1024x683.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="A 2016 action to divest the city of Seattle from Wells Fargo" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="261"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Activists
demand the city of Seattle to divest its money and banking business
from Wells Fargo, over the company’s investment in the Dakota Access
pipeline, in 2016.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Alex Garland</p></div><div><p>The resolution’s
passage builds on the grassroots Indigenous movements underway that
have been pressuring insurance companies, as one tool among many, to
defend their land.</p>
<p>For instance, last month, the Gwich’in Steering Committee wrote a<a href="https://ourarcticrefuge.org/letter-to-insurance-companies/"> letter</a> asking
insurers to not back the destruction of the sacred calving grounds in
Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife refuge. Drilling in the calving
grounds threatens the migratory <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/science/land-mammal-migrations.html">Porcupine caribou</a>,
which in turn “threatens the Gwich’in existence and way of life.” The
letter calls upon oil and gas companies, banks, and insurance companies
to “stand with the Gwich’in Nation by not initiating any oil and gas
development in the Arctic Refuge.”</p>
<p>This letter was prompted by the Trump administration rushing to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/16/arctic-refuge-drilling-trump/">auction off drilling rights</a> in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Under <a href="https://www.doi.gov/pmb/cadr/programs/native/Executive-Order-13175">federal law</a>,
all agencies are required to respect Indigenous nations’ right to
self-governance, which means consulting with communities about drilling
projects. The Bureau of Land Management, the agency that administers
federal land, did not engage in any form of meaningful consent, said
Bernadette Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich’in Steering
Committee. She noted that the agency held public meetings in only three
of the nine Gwich’in communities in Alaska and did not hold meetings in
communities accessible only by boat or plane.</p>
<p>“They only had hearings in certain communities. They did not have the
government-to-government consultation that they’re supposed to,” said
Demientieff. “They basically came to our community and told us what they
were going to do. That was it.”</p>
<p>The Bureau of Land Management pushed back against the claim that it
did not engage in government-to-government consultation, stating that it
held more than 25 meetings “with tribal governments with the potential
to be directly affected by an oil and gas leasing program.”</p>
<p>The Gwich’in Steering Committee also reached out individually to the
22 insurance companies addressed in the public letter to request a
meeting. So far they’ve had one meeting in which Demientieff spoke about
the environmental devastation they have been witnessing, she said, such
as the erosion of the land beneath coastal villages and “thousands and
thousands of<a href="https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/06/warming-rivers-salmon-die-offs/"> dead fish</a> in our lakes and rivers.”</p>
<p><u>Other Indigenous nations</u> have also been seeking to meet with
insurance companies. On September 2, the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s
Association, which represents 16 tribal nations, sent <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/15U6RJsOlV5VCvv7V2NNSWTejmkrXpvvz/view">a letter</a>
to David Long, the CEO of Liberty Mutual, urging the insurance company
to “immediately end its relationship” with the Keystone XL pipeline.
This pipeline is expected to carry bitumen oil from Alberta’s tar sands
into the United States in a proposed route that would violate Indigenous
<a href="https://www.ienearth.org/new-map-shows-kxl-pipeline-route/">treaty rights and sacred sites</a>. Long and Liberty Mutual did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>Liberty Mutual is providing financial backing to the Keystone XL pipeline with a publicly filed<a href="https://puc.sd.gov/commission/dockets/hydrocarbonpipeline/2009/hp09-001/bond.pdf"> surety bond</a> worth $15.6 million. An additional $15.6 million bond is <a href="https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/4464733-transcanada-files-bond-keystone-xl-pipeline-prepares-2019-construction">required</a> after construction begins.</p>
<p>The company did not acknowledge the letter, so Indigenous activists delivered a <a href="https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/liberty-mutual-end-your-support-of-tc-energy-meet-with-tribal-leaders?source=direct_link&">petition</a> and <a href="http://libertysclimatecrisis.com/indigenous-climate-activists-demand-liberty-mutual-stop-insuring-destructive-tar-sands-pipelines/">staged a protest</a>
on October 2 outside of Liberty Mutual headquarters in Boston,
constructing a mock pipeline covered in red handprints to signify the
Indigenous women who have been <a href="http://www.honorearth.org/man_camps_fact_sheet">sexually assaulted and murdered</a>,
often in connection with fossil fuel extraction and pipeline workers
moving near their homes. On October 19, over 40 Indigenous women signed <a href="https://d99d2e8d-06c9-433b-915d-f6e381b1acd4.usrfiles.com/ugd/d99d2e_d74cf8f06b194a8cb1c96b6c07ee7713.pdf">another letter</a>
to global financiers backing the tar sands fossil fuel projects that
will harm their communities across the United States, including by
increasing the spread of Covid-19 with an influx of out-of-state
workers.</p></div><div><div><p><img alt="Photo2jpg" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/12/Photo2jpg-1000x715.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="280"></p><p><img alt="Photo4" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/12/Photo4-1000x714.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="280"></p></div><p><span>Left/Top:
Activists in front of Liberty Mutual headquarters in Boston deliver a
petition calling on the insurance company to stop supporting the
Keystone XL pipeline. Right/Bottom: Eva Blake, who is Wampanoag and
works at the Indigenous Environmental Network, delivers a petition to
Liberty Mutual headquarters on Oct. 2, 2020.</span><span>Photo: Courtesy of Kayana Szymczak/Indigenous Environmental Network</span></p></div><div><p>“We
want insurance companies like Liberty Mutual to meet with Indigenous
leaders, tribal leaders, chairmen, and presidents. We want them to meet
with grassroots people. We want them to hear our stories,” said Joye
Braun, a signatory of the October letter, a community organizer with the
Indigenous Environmental Network, and a land defender and water
protector for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.</p>
<p>Fossil fuel infrastructure poses especially devastating risks to
Indigenous people, given that the “Indigenous economy is everything from
the land, everything that flows from the land, everything that feeds us
and nourishes us, clothes us and houses us, that’s been able to give
all of our basic human needs,” said Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc land
defender with the Tiny House Warriors, a <a href="http://www.tinyhousewarriors.com/">movement</a> and village of mobile tiny homes placed strategically in the path of the Trans Mountain pipeline in western Canada.</p>
<p>By failing to take into the harm posed to Indigenous communities and
the ongoing Indigenous-led resistance, Manuel points out that insurance
companies are also putting their own business in jeopardy. “It’s bad
business to not properly know the risks associated with a project,” said
Manuel.</p>
<p>The pipeline’s largest insurer <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-pipeline-climate-insurance/zurich-insurance-drops-cover-for-trans-mountain-oil-pipeline-idUSKCN24N2MU">Zurich</a> dropped the project in July 2020, shortly after <a href="https://www.worldpipelines.com/business-news/30062020/insurer-talanx-drops-support-for-trans-mountain-munich-re-could-follow/">Talanx</a> had dropped the pipeline. Yet a number of insurers listed in the 2019-2020 <a href="https://docs2.cer-rec.gc.ca/ll-eng/llisapi.dll/fetch/2000/130635/3921594/C05894-1_Ltr_Trans_Mountain_Compliance_to_Order_AO-001-FRO-002-2017_2019_Annual_Report_-_A7F0T0.pdf?nodeid=3921595&vernum=-2">certificate of insurance</a> are still underwriting the pipeline, including Chubb, AIG, and Liberty Mutual.<strong> </strong>Chubb and AIG declined to comment on the record.</p>
<p>The Tiny House Warriors have presented insurers with a <a href="https://www.secwepemculecw.org/risk-assessment">risk assessment </a>of
the Trans Mountain pipeline, conducted by the Indigenous Network of
Economies and Trade, that outlines the risks associated with Indigenous
jurisdiction. Over half the pipeline will cut through unceded Secwepemc
territory, spanning 180,000 square kilometers. The Canadian government
did not seek consent from the Secwepemc, whose land defenders are
prepared to stop its construction through “any means necessary,”
according to the assessment.</p>
<p>“We are the biggest risk,” said Manuel. “We are the biggest financial
liability against this project right now, just our pure presence of
occupying our land and asserting our Indigenous jurisdiction and
territorial authority to our lands.” She noted that even delays in the
pipeline’s construction pose a financial risk, which she believes
insurers are failing to fully anticipate in their decision to underwrite
it.</p>
<p>Manuel was trained to assert the right to the land by her late
father, Arthur Manuel, the well-known author and Secwepemc leader. “He
told me when you go over to the United Nations, when you go to The
Hague, when you go to these international banks and insurance
companies,” Manuel said, “you walk in like you are the owner and title
holder of 180,000 square kilometers of land because you are.”</p>
<p>The Tsleil-Waututh Nation, whose unceded territory centers on the
Burrard Inlet in southwestern British Columbia, also conducted its own
risk <a href="https://twnsacredtrust.ca/assessment-report-download/">assessment</a>
of the Trans Mountain pipeline. The assessment concluded that oil
spills are inevitable, which will undermine the Nation’s obligation to
steward the land. The <a href="https://twnsacredtrust.ca/">Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust Initiative</a>,
which was formed to stop the pipeline, reached out to all of the
pipeline’s insurers about a year ago, according Charlene Aleck, a
liaison to initiative. No insurance companies have agreed to meet, said
Aleck.</p>
<p>“We’ve maintained that we’re opposed to this pipeline because it does
irreparable damage,” said Aleck. “We will continue to do so as long as
we need water, as long as we need fresh air and a place to live.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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