Free Radio 3

A listening booth for Radio Free 3.
www.tinyurl.com/radiofree3

For the duration of the International Roundtable (Oct 14-16) students and other participants will be able to listen to Radio Free 3 on campus by stopping by the booth and borrowing a radio.

Line 3 is a pipeline project to transport nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. Proposed in 2014 by Enbridge, a Canadian company responsible for the largest inland oil spill in the United States, Enbridge seeks to build a new pipeline corridor through untouched wetlands and the treaty territory of Indigenous Anishinaabe peoples, through the Mississippi River headwaters to the shores of Lake Superior, where it will be transported to refineries in the Gulf Coast.

Protests have dogged Enbridge’s proposal since its plans were announced, and protest activities have accelerated in intensity and number since construction started in December 2020. From organizing and joining protests and designing banners, flags and fliers, from constructing and maintaining frontline camps to the national Line 3 divestment campaign, students have been integral to the movement. The concept for Radio Free 3 and some of the preliminary programming was created by Macalester students as well.

Dissimilar to Standing Rock’s Oceti Sakowin (2016-2017), Line 3 resistance camps are distributed across the pipeline’s route, making it more complicated to cultivate a sense of common purpose. An intention for Radio Free 3 is to create opportunities for mutual aid and solidarity across geography, borders and other potential lines of division. The station also aspires to reach beyond the Upper Midwest. By rebroadcasting content from around the world, the transmission is a missive for solidarity with the multitude of decolonization movements around the world. An electric handshake with Hawaiʻi via the All My Relations podcast and their three part series on Mauna Kea resistance camps; with the Pacific Northwest and the for the wild podcast on Queer nature; with exile communities in Uganda and other intergalactic homelands.

Radio Free 3 broadcasts original content from the Stop Line 3 movement as well as redistributing pieces about comparable movements worldwide. On the station you’ll hear about diverse aspects of the movement from Missing Murdered and Indigenous Women (MMIW) and historical Enbridge oil pipeline spills to transformative ecological visions of alternative futures. There are also recordings of memorable speeches and discussions at various pipeline actions. Radio Free 3 is inspired by other radical deployments of radio, such as Radio Free Alcatraz, Radio Mercur, Radio Alice, and Sankara Future Dub. What these stations have in common is a desire for an alternative organization and social role for the media other than its oligarchical control for the extraction of maximized profit. 

#stopline3