Thunderbird Strike and the Fight Over a Pipeline Game

In late 2017 a short, hand-drawn video game about a thunderbird became, for a few weeks, a minor political scandal in Minnesota. Pipeline supporters and some state lawmakers said it encouraged attacks on energy infrastructure. Its maker said it was a story about protecting water, built from her people's own teachings. Most of the people arguing about it had not played it.

I have covered advocacy campaigns long enough to recognise the shape of that fight. Indigenous art about land gets read as a threat, the argument moves quickly to who paid for it, and the art itself becomes almost incidental. Thunderbird Strike is worth revisiting because the pattern it went through is one that organisers, artists and funders keep running into, and because the outcome contains some practical lessons for anyone making work about pipelines, water or treaty land today.

What the game actually is

Thunderbird Strike was designed by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe and Métis game designer and artist. You play a thunderbird flying from the tar sands of northern Alberta toward the Great Lakes. Below you, a black snake winds across the land. You strike it with lightning, and you also use lightning to bring life back to the land and its animals, from caribou to fish to manoomin, the wild rice that is central to Anishinaabe life. The game takes about ten minutes to finish.

The imagery is not invented for the occasion. Thunderbirds appear across many Anishinaabe and other Indigenous stories as powerful beings in conflict with underwater serpents. The image of a pipeline as a black snake became widely known during the Standing Rock movement, drawing on a Lakota prophecy, and Anishinaabe water protectors used similar language about pipelines crossing their territories. Our account of the Standing Rock movement covers that period.

The game appeared while Enbridge's proposed replacement of its Line 3 pipeline was being debated in Minnesota. The route crossed lands where Anishinaabe bands hold treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather, including wild rice lakes. That context is why the reaction was so sharp.

How the argument was framed

The criticism followed a familiar path. A pipeline industry group publicly attacked the game, calling it something that promoted eco-terrorism. Some Minnesota legislators joined in. The focus quickly narrowed to funding: LaPensée had received a small grant through a regional arts council, a few thousand dollars of public arts money, and critics demanded to know why taxpayers were paying for a game about destroying pipelines.

Notice what that framing did. It turned a question about content, which is open to interpretation, into a question about money, which sounds like accountability. It also made the arts council, not the artist, the target. Small arts funders tend to be cautious, and the pressure was clearly aimed at making them more so.

LaPensée's response, in interviews at the time, was that the game is about the land's resilience and about stories her community has told for generations, and that striking a snake with lightning in a mythic setting is not instruction for anything. Players do not attack people. The game does not depict any real company. Supporters pointed out that mainstream games routinely let players destroy far more specific targets without anyone asking about their funding.

When the content is hard to attack, the funding becomes the target. Advocates should expect that move and prepare for it.

The arts council stood by its grant. The game went on to win the award for best digital media at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto in 2017. And by most accounts, the controversy sent far more players to it than it would otherwise have reached.

The lesson I think people take wrongly

The common takeaway, and I have heard it from organisers I respect, is that controversy is good for this kind of work, because attacks bring attention. In Thunderbird Strike's case that was true, at least in terms of downloads.

I think it is the wrong lesson to plan around. The attention was real, but so were the costs. LaPensée faced a wave of hostile messages. Arts councils in other places watched what happened and drew their own conclusions about which projects to fund. A young Indigenous artist applying for a grant now might find a quieter version of that caution waiting for them, without any headline to show for it. Attention went to one game; the chilling effect spread wider and is much harder to measure.

The better lesson, to my mind, is about preparation. The game held up because its cultural grounding was real and could be explained clearly. LaPensée could point to the stories behind the thunderbird, to the water it protects, and to the treaty rights at stake. Work that cannot explain its own roots is far more exposed when it gets attacked.

What this means for advocacy work now

Pipelines, mines and other projects on treaty land have not gone away, and Line 3 was eventually built and began operating in 2021 over long opposition. Our piece on how sacred sites get erased by infrastructure projects follows that wider pattern.

Artists and organisers making work about these fights can take a few things from Thunderbird Strike. Write down, in plain language and before release, the cultural sources and community relationships behind the work, so you are not composing that explanation in the middle of an attack. Tell any funder in advance what the work depicts and why, so they are not surprised by a journalist's call. Separate the metaphor from any real-world instruction in how you describe it. And line up two or three people who can speak about the work's roots if you are not able to, or should not have to, carry every interview yourself.

The broader tradition this belongs to is a long one. Our piece on Indigenous resistance through art looks at that tradition beyond games, and more of our writing on games sits in the games section.

One step for this week

Play Thunderbird Strike. It is short, and it is still easy to find through LaPensée's own work. Then find out whether any pipeline, mine or major infrastructure project is currently proposed on or near treaty land in your state or province, and which nations are affected. Write their names down. Knowing who is on the land is the start of any useful conversation about it.