The Food That Grows On The Water

For our next course, we’re going to travel North, near the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota. It’s one of the few places in the country where the grain known as wild rice still grows, well, wild.

NATHAN: These days, it’s pricey. Those long black grains can fetch as much as $10 a pound at upscale supermarkets. But Minnesota Public Radio reporter, Dan Crocker, says wild rice is much more than a gourmet food.

DAN: Like many Minnesotans, I’ve eaten my share of wild rice. Plain, in soups, in casseroles. If you’ve never tasted it, it has this rich, nutty flavor. Almost all the naturally-growing wild rice in the country is from Minnesota. It’s our official state grain. But to most of us, it’s just a food. To the Chippewa or Ojibwe people of northern Minnesota, though, wild rice, or manoomin in their language, is much more than that.

THOMAS: A lot of people will say that if we don’t have that, then we cease to exist somewhat culturally as a people.

DAN: This is Thomas Howes, the natural resources manager for the Fond Du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He says he has a 20-pound bag of wild rice in his pantry and a 40-pound bag of rice in his basement waiting to be processed for regular meals and for special ceremonies.

THOMAS: From the time a baby is born, there are ceremonies until the way we send people off to make their journey into the afterlife. Manoomin is a central component of those and everywhere in between. Every spring, every fall, there are certain ceremonies we hold. And manoomin has to be part of that.

DAN: The Fond Du Lac band is one of seven Ojibwe bands in northern Minnesota. And the reason they’re all here in Minnesota is because of wild rice. They migrated to the Great Lakes region from the Northeast about 500 years ago. Their oral traditions tell of a prophecy that told them to journey west until they came to a place where food grew on the water.

THOMAS: You know, we came here from the East Coast of the United States and were told that we’d find our permanent home where we found this wild rice or this manoomin, this food that grows out of the water. And that’s held to be true.

DAN: Earlier this fall, I met Howes at a canoe landing of a small lake on the Fond Du Lac reservation, which was created in 1854.

THOMAS: Today, I am looking at what we call [INAUDIBLE], [INAUDIBLE] or Dead Fish Lake in English.

DAN: It was almost completely covered with the tall green stalks of wild rice plants.

THOMAS: You know, you essentially don’t see water when you’re looking at this. You just see what looks like a field of grasses.

DAN: That’s because wild rice is actually a grass. Early explorers dubbed it wild rice. What looks like a rice kernel is really the slender, black cereal grain inside the top of the plant that grows out of the muck in the bottom of shallow lakes and rivers. As we talk, a pair of men pull up in a canoe, including 58-year-old Ed [INAUDIBLE]. He says he’s been ricing as long as he can remember.

ED J.: Yeah, 40, probably 45 years for me.

ED: His partner, Jared Ojibwe, helps scoop about 80 pounds of green rice out of the canoe bottom into big plastic bags. To harvest it, one man pulls the canoe through the rice. His partner uses wooden sticks to knock the grain off the stalks into the bottom of the canoe. It’s hard work. And once it’s dried and processed, it will be a much smaller pile. Ojibwe says he worries that young people nowadays aren’t willing to put in the work needed to keep the tradition alive.

JARED: The younger ones are all on Facebook somewhere.

ED: Or they’re scared of the water, scared of bugs, he says. The annual harvest of rice on the reservation is actually a revival of a tradition of a sacred food that nearly disappeared.

THOMAS: This particular lake at dead fish, before 20 years ago, rice like this wasn’t very common. And so you’d have rice here, one out every six to eight years. It just depended, you’d have to get lucky with the weather.

ED: Howes says in the early 1900s, the county government began digging a network of drainage ditches, part of a failed effort to make the land more suitable for conventional farming.

THOMAS: The idea was that you were going to make land more settle-able, basically make some of this landscape less wet. It’s 50% wetlands, roughly, out here on the reservation. And so that’s a tough challenge.

ED: But those drainage ditches disrupted the flow of water in and out of the lakes and nearly destroyed the wild rice. In the 1990s, the tribe began experimenting with ways to revive rice habitat. They put in dams and holding ponds to try to mimic the area’s hydrology before all the canals were put in.

THOMAS: And that’s really seemed to work. And then now what we see, you know, for the last 20 years is that rice, essentially, is here almost every year, except for real catastrophic precip events.

ED: And not just here. The Fond Du Lac Chippewa have cleared out aquatic vegetation that’s crowded out the rice in other lakes. They’ve spread seed to help it grow back. And now, the band is helping other tribes restore wild rice elsewhere in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

THOMAS: : We’re on to something. Much of wild rice management is left to nature. But there is– for bringing rice lakes back– there is a little piece at that certainly humans can play. So it’s, in our mind, it’s like we want to try to keep these lakes as healthy as possible for as long as possible, because we have so few lakes that have it. But you can see from talking with the community members how important it is. It’s so much of our unique sort of Ojibwe, Fond du, Lac, Ojibwe identity.

ED: Later, another canoe pulls up to the landing at Dead Fish Lake. 28-year-old Bruce Martineau heaves it on to shore. He says it’s his fifth year ricing, first with his grandfather, now with his dad, Francis Martineau. He’s definitely not afraid of bugs and not spending all his time on Facebook. I ask him why he does it.

BRUCE: Once we lose this, then we lose being as a people, I guess. Can’t lose this or the language.

MALE SPEAKER: It brought us here, the food that grows on the water. Yeah.

BRUCE: It’s my culture.

ED: The first rice he harvested this year went to his grandmother, a young person helping an elder keep the tradition alive.

NATHAN: Dan Crocker is a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio.

JOANNE: A few years ago, Dan met a Fond du Lac tribal elder named Jim Northrup at a wild rice camp. Tribal members had gathered to dry and process their wild rice harvest. Next to a crackling campfire, Northrup recited his poem about rice and ricing.

JIM: It’s called “Manoomin.” Tobacco’s swirled in the lake as we offered our thanks. Calm water welcomed us, rice heads nodded in agreement. Ricing again, [SPEAKING OBJIBWE] Cedar caress the heads, ripe rice came along to join us in many meals this winter. The rice bearded up. We saw the wind move across the lake, an eagle, a couple of coots.. The sun smiled everywhere. Relatives came together. Fingers stripping rice while laughing, gossiping, remembering. It’s easy to feel a part of people that lived here before. It felt good getting on the lake. It felt better getting off, carrying a canoe load of food and centuries of memories.

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JOANNE: That’s Jim Northrup, reciting his poem “Minooman.” Northrup died last year. He was 73.

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