How a 137-Year-Old Seed Helped Stop a Pipeline
In this Dispatch, Equation Campaign co-founder Rebecca Lambert describes how leaders in Nebraska are using their strength to protect the land and our collective future.
Courtesy of Bold Nebraska
As someone whose family amassed great power from the Earth's fossil resources, I understand firsthand how power is connected to land. Today, the science is clear: we cannot burn all the world’s reserves of oil and gas if we want to halt climate catastrophe. That’s why I’m investing my power, which is derived from the Earth, in the power to protect it.
For frontline communities, fossil fuel expansion is an existential threat. But when these communities derive strength from the land – whether that is through legal standing, financial power, spiritual and ancestral strength, and physical footing to stand their ground – grassroots efforts can win the battle to “keep it in the ground,” even against great odds. With this Dispatch from the Frontlines, I am introducing a series of articles to be run over the course of this year, written by people who gather their strength from the land. They use this strength to protect that land and our collective future.
Last fall, I traveled with Equation Campaign, grantees, and funders from across the country to Nebraska, to participate in harvesting Ponca sacred corn. Our destination was the Tanderup farm in the Sandhills in north-central Nebraska, where a “Cowboy-Indian Alliance” of ranchers and Indigenous Tribes has been planting “resistance corn,” as the Ponca call it. For the past decade, the planting has helped to fight the Keystone XL (KXL) Pipeline. Our objective was to learn from their success, to learn from each other, and to strategize in the fight against oil and gas.
After the long bus ride from Omaha, Art and Helen Tanderup welcomed us into their big red barn with a large “Protect Land and Water” banner on it. Buffet tables were laid out with corn and buffalo stew and pulled pork, brownies and Rice Krispie Treats. A Lakota man and his family welcomed us with prayers and song, and smudged us with sage, tobacco, and cedar. Then, Art led us to the field in a tractor-trailer and explained the origin story of using corn to fight a pipeline.
Rebecca Lambert (center) traveled to Nebraska last fall to participate in the Ponca celebration.
The Tanderup farm was threatened with an “eminent domain” easement by TC Energy, the Canadian company laying the KXL route. Once the Tanderups discovered that the proposed pipeline intersected with the Ponca Trail of Tears–the route the Ponca nation took some 140 years ago when they were forcibly removed to Oklahoma–they agreed to hold a Spirit Camp on their farm. At this camp, the Ponca leader Mekasi Camp-Horinek had a dream that the Ponca corn–whose seeds had been kept for 137 years–should be planted back in ancestral Ponca territory as “medicine for the land”.
It turned out to be a brilliant legal strategy. The Tanderups, along with Mekasi Camp-Horinek, certified the sacred corn with the USDA in 2015, and later the Tanderups deeded a portion of their land back to the Ponca. Now TC Energy could not simply assert eminent domain over an individual farmer to lay its pipeline. It would have to go into federal-level consultation with the Tribe. This legal protection helped delay pipeline permitting and construction through the Trump administration, until President Biden could finally cancel it in one of his first Executive Actions in 2021. “The corn could stop that pipeline, not us,” Art said before we started harvesting. “This land is a church. That corn is sacred. This is a church. That pipeline couldn’t come across here. There’s no way.”
Mekasi Camp-Horinek’s dream led to the formation of a powerful alliance of ranchers, Indigenous people, and environmental activists, and provided the annual rituals that bind it: planting and harvesting the corn. KXL is now dead, but the alliance continues its fight against a new threat: carbon pipelines. While some in the climate movement believe that funding these “magic bullet” carbon capture and storage solutions are the answer, we at Equation Campaign think very differently. This Dispatches from the Frontline series is curated to show you why. People like Art and Mekasi teach us that to counter the threat to our land and our water and our very existence, we need to stand our ground and manage a transition away from oil and gas, rather than finding ways to let the fossil fuel industry carry on exploiting it.
As we moved along the cornrows, I listened to the chilly October wind and footsteps through the stalks. These sounds told a story of the terrible drought caused by climate change last year, making this harvest so very thin, and of the resilience of my fellow-harvesters, so diverse and yet so connected in their love of the land. What I had always known, conceptually, manifested in our purposeful communion: Equation Campaign’s philanthropy provides a vital strand in the braid of Americans, from landowners to Tribes to urban victims of pollution, who derive power from the land by standing on their land: spiritual power, ancestral power, legal power, scientific power – and strategic power.
I picked up far more burrs than corn that afternoon. But each rare ear we gathered rewarded us with gold and obsidian kernels, and a sense of community and victory in the fight against fossil fuels. Surrounded by Equation Campaign grantees from all over the country – people you will hear from directly in these Dispatches in the months to come – I thought back to the genesis of this campaign, and my own decisive encounter with the land.
It was almost four years previously, in the fall of 2018, while guiding a retreat to help connect people with nature, on an island in Maine. The welcome drizzle after months of heat and drought prompted me to recall the sense of wrongness I’d felt over the summer. I’d witnessed the spruce and fir cringe in drought, the moss shriveling in heat, kids splashing about in coves that used to be ice water worthy only of a shrieking plunge. The increase in disease-carrying deer ticks made my skin crawl. So did the headlines broadcasting devastating wildfires and torrential hurricanes elsewhere in the world.
I have a master’s degree in climate policy, and for years I worked trying to mobilize governments and corporations to take climate action. Whatever I and my colleagues and fellow-activists had been doing just wasn’t working fast enough. The International Panel on Climate Change had just released a report stating that we had to act so much faster than previously believed: if we wanted a safe future for our children, we would have to cut fossil fuels in half by 2030.
I am also a philanthropist, and it was in this moment in the drizzle that I realized that the traditional model of philanthropy was equivalent to throwing an ounce of water a year on a blazing fire. If I wanted to play a part in putting out that fire, I would have to tap deeper into the well of my own privilege; I would have to give much more, much faster. I would have to throw the water in a different direction too: to find others who, through their direct engagement with the land, had the power to stop oil and gas at the source. This was the missing part of the equation: we needed to get back to the land and to support the people standing their ground against the fossil fuel expansion.
This vision is the seed of the ten-year Equation Campaign: funding movements on the ground to keep fossil fuels in the ground. I re-connected to that vision, now, as I harvested the Ponca corn. People united by their fierce love for the land and their families could come together – no matter how different we were in other respects – and build a formidable movement that would succeed by listening to the land and standing up for it.
Looking at the people around me in the Ponca cornfield, I was struck by how connected we all were to the land, for a range of intersecting reasons: for some, it was their livelihood, for others it was their ancestral inheritance, but for all it was their “medicine” and the source of their strength. I also thought about how conquest meant cutting people from this source of strength.
If cutting people from the land weakens the people, what happens when people are connected – and reconnected – with land? And what can we learn from those who have always been connected to the land, like property owners such as the Tanderups or members of Indigenous Tribes such as Mekasi Camp-Horinek? They show us how resilience and strength grows when people have ground to stand on. They also show us a powerful strategy that we need for climate victory.
The Ponca “seeds of resistance” provided enough legal protection to delay the KXL and contribute to its demise, and this way of finding power by standing your ground is not unique. In Louisiana, descendants of enslaved people are stopping industry by enforcing laws that protect their ancestral burial grounds and cemeteries; across the Midwest, landowners are litigating against “eminent domain for private gain” one farm or ranch at a time; across the nation, tribal nations are demanding legal enforcement of sovereign treaty rights to control their lands and waters; in polluted areas, communities of color are using environmental justice legislation to stop pipeline expansion.
In all the above instances, these Equation Campaign grantees did not set out to fight climate change or to be climate warriors. They set out to stand on their land, to fight for what they love, and what keeps them alive. But in the process, they are both doing good and fighting bad, and they have become our surest redoubt against fossil fuel expansion.
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