#WildRice and the #Ojibwe
by Jessica Milgroom
"Wild rice is a food of great historical, spiritual, and cultural importance for Ojibwe people. After colonization disrupted their traditional food system, however, they could no longer depend on stores of wild rice for food all year round. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this traditional staple was appropriated by white entrepreneurs and marketed as a gourmet commodity. Native and non-Native people alike began to harvest rice to sell it for cash, threatening the health of the natural stands of the crop. This lucrative market paved the way for domestication of the plant, and farmers began cultivating it in paddies in the late 1960s. In the twenty-first century, many Ojibwe and other Native people are fighting to sustain the hand-harvested wild rice tradition and to protect wild rice beds.
"Ojibwe people arrived in present-day Minnesota in the 1600s after a long migration from the east coast of the United States that lasted many centuries. Together with their #Anishinaabe kin, the Potawatomi and Odawa, they followed a vision that told them to search for their homeland in a place 'where the food floats on water.' The Ojibwe recognized this as the wild rice they found growing around Lake Superior (Gichigami), and they settled on the sacred site of what is known today as Madeline Island (#Mooningwaanekaaning).
"In the Ojibwe language, wild rice (Zizania palustris) is called manoomin, which is related by analogy to a word (minomin) meaning 'good berry.'” It is a highly nutritious wild grain that is gathered from lakes and waterways by canoe in late August and early September, during the wild rice moon (manoominike giizis).
"Before contact with Europeans and as late as the early twentieth century, Ojibwe people depended on wild rice as a crucial part of their diet, together with berries, fish, meat, vegetables, and maple sugar. They moved their camps throughout the year, depending on the activities of seasonal food gathering. In autumn, families moved to a location close to a lake with a promising stand of wild rice and stayed there for the duration of the season.
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RESTORATION AND REGULATION
"As far back as the 1930s, the health of wild rice beds has been a serious concern. In 1939 Minnesota passed a law outlawing mechanized harvest and limiting how and when wild rice could be harvested. Since then, it has enacted other protective policies, including limiting the number of hours in the day during which it is permissible to rice and limiting the length of the canoe used for ricing. In the 1990s, wild rice was identified as an endangered food. The plant is sensitive to water levels altered by dams as well as road construction, pollution, poor harvesting practices, invasive species, genetic engineering (genetic contamination of the wild rice from the paddies), and climate change.
"In response to these threats, Ojibwe and other Native people organized. For example, in 1994, the Fond du Lac and Bois Forte bands developed a '#WildRiceRestorationPlan for the St. Louis River Watershed' designed to restore lost stands of the crop and manage its harvest. In the same decade, the company Native Harvest (part of the White Earth Land Recovery Project) began to sell hand-harvested wild rice, and multiple bands formed reservation wild-rice committees to manage harvests.
"In the 2020s, Ojibwe people continue to defend and protect this vital plant and the cultural, health, and spiritual importance that it holds. Individuals as well as tribes organize ricing camps to teach traditional practices of ricing, parching, and finishing. Others are actively fighting against the Enbridge #Line3 #OilPipeline replacement project that would cross wild rice habitat, or collaborating in a movement for Native food sovereignty."
https://www3.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/wild-rice-and-ojibwe
#SolarPunkSunday #FoodSovereignty #WaterIsLife #FoodIsLife #NativeAmericanFoodSovereignty #FoodSovereignty #Foodsecurity #TraditionalFoods #IndigenousPeoplesDay #IndigenousFood
