Pipeline Walkers: Excavating into Pipeline Surveillance along the Line 3 Pipeline in Northern Minnesota

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Resistance to the construction of crude oil pipelines on Indigenous sovereign lands has become recognized locally and globally as a decolonial practice that also addresses the realities of climate change. Braided together closely with Indigenous-led resistance movements to petroleum infrastructure are the many communities, stakeholders, and accompanying surveilling technologies-drones, planes, helicopters, and omnipresent law enforcement- that are collectively used to maintain the status quo of oil infrastructure. Over the past century and a half, oil pipelines have been surveyed, monitored, and surveilled due to a variety of risks-actual and perceived- including the threat of pipeline destruction, the loss of lucrative product, the implications for environmental contamination, and the local and global implications of decolonization. Over time, each new surveilling technological iteration highlights relationships among local communities and buried pipelines that otherwise go unseen. In this paper, I investigate the Line 3 Enbridge pipeline in northern Minnesota and demonstrate the importance of examining the hidden material histories of surveillance as an archaeological method of pipeline excavation. Through archival, photographic, and social network analysis, this paper explores material pipeline surveillance technologies over time and how their uses have transitioned from protecting pipelines against communities to being a method of decolonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53824