Photo by IRRI Images

The Wild Rice Moon

By Winona LaDuke
Contributing Writer

In the din of a large auditorium, the wild ricers of the White Earth reservation gather nervously. And, with a great deal of humor and friendly competition. It is the wild rice lottery on the reservation, allocating ricing permits to some coveted lakes in the middle of the reservation, lakes governed by specific laws and part of the National Wildlife Refuge. A hundred and fifty or so ricers gathered, having dug ricing permits and tribal ID cards out of their pockets…

“I’ve been ricing for forty years on and off“ says Bucky Goodman “We’ll start probably in a little over a week. I’ll start on Mitchell dam, start there and rice and if its not good there I’ll probably go onto one of the state lakes, but usually I just keep the rice for myself, so I’m not out there to see how much money I can make, just how many pounds I can get to finish… I’m getting up there in age where I don’t want to be out there for hours at a time.“ Bucky rices with his wife.

Elsewhere, Spud Fineday tells me “I’ve been ricing ever since I was bitty”. He hopes to haul in enough rice to feed his family and enough to sell to make some of the expenses for the fall and bitter cold of winter.

It is Manoominike Giiizis, the wild rice making moon of the Ojibwe - August and September’s time when the “food which grows on the water” comes home to the people. Wild rice, or Manoomin, is the only grain indigenous to North America and is one of the greatest gifts imaginable to the land and waters. Where there is wild rice, there are Ojibwe or Anishinaabeg people, and where there are Anishinaabeg, there is wild rice. Indeed, it was a part of the Anishinaabeg migration story and set of prophecies where the people were instructed to “go to the place where the food grows upon the water”.

A millennium later, the prophecies which formed the Anishinaabeg culture and way of life still remain. The Ojibwe or Anishinaabeg stretch across the northern part of five states and the southern part of four Canadian Provinces. With the exception of the far western reservations, where there is rice there are Ojibwe.

Manoomin is a supreme food for nutrition. It has twice the protein and fiber of brown rice, is the first solid food given to a baby (as Mazaan or broken rice), and is one of the last foods served to elders as they pass into the Spirit world. Wild rice is gluten free, and when served with blueberries, cranberries, and a meat, provides some of the most amazing cuisine from the continent.

There is no way to quantify the value of this food to the Anishinaabeg people. It is the most spiritual and essential of foods. This food feeds the belly and the soul, and is a major source of wealth for a people of the land and lakes. For these reasons, the Ojibwe struggles to keep wild rice are far ranging and have transitioned from warfare to treaties to battles in court room battles, regulatory hearings, and everywhere from the market place, University halls to corporate offices.

Historic territory battles over wild rice between the Anishinaabeg and their most honored enemies, the Dakota or Bwaanag, are legendary, and demarcate land throughout the north country from Sioux Lookout Ontario to the Brule River, Wisconsin and Battle Lake, Minnesota.  The Anishinaabeg inland navy dominated the region, and wild rice, and was an essential part of the stamina of the people. It was a consistent source of food, and could keep well when parched, even over several years. The Anishinaabeg grew strong with wild rice. This is in sharp contrast to the European experiences with famine and starvation, the value of a diverse wild food which preserved for years cannot be understated.The diversity of wild rice stands in part attributes to the significance of this food as a secure source of nutrition. Wild rice grows in rivers, creeks, and a multitude of shallow lakes. Some manoomin stands tall, some short, some looks like a bottle brush while other rice looks like a punk rock hairdoo. The diversity of the wild rice in location and appearance meant that there would always be manoomin…somewhere.

With the coming of the Europeans, wild rice became a major source of trade and income for the Anishinaabeg of our region. A fawn skin of wild rice was worth about two beaver skins or four dollars around 1820. The price went up from there. Wild rice became an essential source of cash for the Ojibwe for over a hundred years, but soon became a source of competition with American industrial foods. It also represents a conflict of cultures.

At the turn of the last century, a set of anthropologists descended on the Ojibwe and other Native peoples, measuring heads, collecting songs and stories, and digging up more than a few cemeteries. Several came to the White Earth reservation. Frances Densmore, an ethnomusicologist far ahead of her time collected songs and stories and, a hundred years later, has left a legacy of writings still used by Anishinaabeg scholars and teachers in writing, schools and legal hearings.

Albert Jenks and Ales Hrliska were far less positive in their practice and legacy. Hrliska was a physical anthropologist who specialized in measuring cranial capacity, measuring heads and scratching skin to create eugenics based data on racial inferiority and classifications. Much of his data would be used to deprive the Anishinaabeg of land, although he did comment that the Anishinaabeg of White Earth were “pleasant.” Dr. Albert Jenks joined with Hrliska, but his work from the University of Minnesota became focused on manoomin, noting, “ the primitive Indians do not take production very seriously…In the case of wild rice, they could gather more if they did not spend so much time feasting and dancing every day and night during the time they are here for the purpose of gathering“. Indeed, Jenks considered wild rice a major impediment towards the Ojibwe progress towards civilization, not understanding that the Anishinaabeg practice of feasting, praying and dancing was an essential part.  “Wild rice …which had led to their advance thus far,” he would write, “held them back from further progress, unless, indeed, they left it behind them, for with them it was incapable of extensive cultivation”.

So it seems, the University of Minnesota found it’s mandate: to domesticate wild rice, if it could not domesticate the Ojibwe.

In 1968, with the help of the University of Minnesota, aggressive production of paddy wild rice production began. That year, it represented some 20 percent of the state’s harvest. The suggestion that the Ojibwe were not assimilating into the mainstream economy was reiterated. A 1969 report to the Minnesota legislature, commissioned by the Minnesota Resources Commission, disparaged the Anishinaabeg relationship to wild rice as a “September Santa Claus”, a “ good berry Mardi Gras,” and “the excuse and provision for a spending spree”.

There were also corporate profits to be made. By 1973, paddy rice production had increased the state’s yield from less than a million pounds to some 4 million pounds. The increase in production and subsequent interest by the larger corporations such as Uncle Ben’s, Green Giant, and General Foods, skewed consumers’ perceptions and altered the market for traditional wild rice. The new market produced a long grained black hard wild rice which, to this day, is presented as “real wild rice”, a far cry from the soft brown and tan hues of a rice harvested from a lake and parched over a fire.

In 1977, the state legislature designated wild rice as Minnesota’s official state grain – a move that may well have been the kiss of death for the lake based Ojibwe economy. Financed by an outpouring from the state coffers, the University of Minnesota began aggressively to develop a domesticated version of wild rice, and by the early 1980s, production of cultivated wild rice had outstripped that of the indigenous varieties. Then the industry moved to California. By 1983, California’s crop, at 8.3 million pounds, easily surpassed Minnesota’s, at 5 million pounds. By 1986, more than 95 percent of the “wild” rice harvested was paddy grown, the vast majority produced in northern California.

When the glut of paddy-grown wild rice hit the market in 1986, the price plummeted, dampening the emerging domestic market and devastating the Native wild rice economy. Lakeside prices crashed. This had a huge impact on the Ojibwe, who, having been forced into the cash economy, found that they had to compete with a man on a combine in California. The source of wealth which came from a fawnskin of manoomin was largely lost.

The Anishinaabeg fought back. First in protests, then in court. In 1988, Wabizii v. Busch Agricultural Resources was filed essentially on the issues of misleading advertising. Busch (a division of the beer conglomerate) marketed a product called Onamia Wild rice. White Earth plaintiffs, Mike Swan (Wabizii) and Frank Bibeau charged that this was a California grown paddy product “disguised as a Minnesota lake rice”.  A labeling law was passed as a result of the lawsuit. The law required that paddy grown wild rice be labeled as such in letters no less than 50% the size of the words wild rice. The problem was a loophole; the law did not apply in California, so 95% of the crop available can still be represented.

In the early part of this millennium, another battle ensued - this one on genetic engineering. Again the University of Minnesota appeared as the protagonist, seeking options to genetically engineer wild rice based on their success in “cracking the DNA sequence“ of wild rice, or zizania aquatica. Met with opposition again from the Anishinaabeg in the form of protests, meetings and legislative hearings, the debate raged for most of a decade, resulting finally in state legislation in Minnesota prohibiting the introduction of any genetically engineered wild rice paddy stands without a full environmental impact assessment. Thus far, there is no genetically engineered “wild rice”. Indeed, the two phrases seem quite oppositional.

The Mines and the Wild Rice

This decade a new set of threats has come to the Anishinaabeg and the wild rice. This time it is in the form of new mining proposals in the north country, from Michigan’s Keewenaw Bay to the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. A new set of mining proposals revisit century old projects, as the world minerals market scrapes the bottom of the ore deposits .

Instead of the battles with Gatling guns and bows and arrows of a hundred and fifty years ago, today the Ojibwe and their neighbors on the lakes face a set of regulatory battles, at the center of which is wild rice. It’s a simple set of chemical realities. Mining transforms aquatic ecosystems. Wild rice cannot grow in water high in sulfates. That is a fact. In all studies over the past fifty years “sulfate concentrations above …[l0 mg/L] are detrimental to the growth of wild rice”. Mining changes that chemical balance. There are “no large and important natural and self perpetuating wild rice stands where the sulfate ion content exceeded l0 ppm”. In fact, the only studies which state otherwise are either in test paddies or paid for by industry.

Mines proposed in Minnesota include the Franconia Mine and the Polymet mine, both of which will create sulfide contamination of the water. To the east, a similar challenge to the famed wild rice of the Kakagan Sloughs of Bad River is found in the Gogebic Mine proposal, an iron mine which would tackle up to 20% of estimated U.S. iron ore resources. It is found in the Penokee Mountain Range of Wisconsin. In that state, mining proponents are seeking a rewrite of Wisconsin mining laws to allow for sulfide discharge into the pristine waters of the Bad River Watershed, Kakagan, and ultimately Lake Superior. Finally, a RioTinto Zincmine at Yellow Dog on the Keewanee Peninsula in Michigan will also impact the wild rice, sacred sites and the Ojibwe

Mining projects release sulfuric acid. The mix of air, water and bacteria means the sulfur will turn into sulfuric acid. This changes the pH of the water system, and liberates heavy metals including mercury out of the rock formation. That’s why wild rice and mines do not co-exist.

Minnesota mining proponents alone have spent over $20 million including land, advertising and studies, and a 1500 page environmental impact statement. Turns out that money can’t buy you a clean bill of health. This is to say that despite industry’s money, for the first time in the past decade the EPA has donned a very negative E2 rating on the Polymet mine proposal.

Meanwhile, back on the reservation, a pick-up truck pulls up at the rice mill at Native Harvest on Round Lake. Eugene Davis and Tony Warren, tired, wet, and happy, have brought 300 pounds of rice off South Chippewa Lake. “This is the only job we can make $50 an hour at up here,” says Eugene, a young man of 20.

He doesn’t mind the rain, either. “I like it when it rains out there. It’s nice. You can’t hear anything but the rain.”

That quiet and peace is what brings the ricers back – along with the memories. I ask him if it matters that five generations of his family have riced on South Chippewa Lake. He smiles. “I like knowing that they was on the same lake. It makes me feel good.”

The sweet smell of rice parching wafts through the dusty air. The shifting, creaking machines are ancient, some handmade: a 1940s Red Clipper fanning mill, a handmade thrasher, a 1980s set of George Stinson parching drums (a regional celebrity), a ‘50s vintage gravity table. Most new equipment is made for the big operations in California, not for here. The men fiddle with the machines, fine tune the gravity table. Then the rice pours out – a stream of dark green, tan, and brown grains. This is the perfection of the small batch, and the simple joy of this life.

To the ricers of White Earth, the Ojibwe Wild Rice Moon, Manoominikegiizis, is the season of harvest, a ceremony, and a way of life. “I grew up ricing,” reflects Spud Fineday. “You get to visit people you haven’t seen for a whole year, because just about everyone goes ricing.”

For another year, the traditions, the ecosystems and Manoominike Giizis the Wild Rice Moon continues. The battles will rage on, in the genetic labs and in the mining corporate headquarters. The Anishinaabeg of White Earth, however, who have pulled their harvest tags, intend to rice.

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