LEECH LAKE RESERVATION, MINN. – Canoes and poles are being prepped. Folks sit in their driveways, whittling sticks. It can only mean one thing: Wild rice season has returned to northern Minnesota.“You hear the buzz around Cass Lake and all around the reservation this time of year,” said Matt Frazer, with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s Division of Resource Management. “It’s the talk of the town right now.”Harvesting wild rice — the Ojibwe call it manoomin, meaning “the good berry” — is weather-dependent and varies each season. Aug. 15 marks the official start of wild rice harvest in Minnesota, but anyone who knows wild rice knows that’s an arbitrary date that has ebbed and flowed in state statute.“The manoomin makes its own schedule,” Frazer said with a laugh...Minnesota’s green rice law makes it illegal to harvest unripe rice. Even within harvest season, someone caught harvesting rice that isn’t ready may get 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.If that seems like a harsh penalty for grain, know that wild rice is sacred and a cherished way of life for Indigenous people. The abundance of wild rice has declined over time in Minnesota, where most of the world’s natural wild rice grows. Premature harvesting can damage stalks and ruin future harvests...Wild rice on reservations can only be harvested by tribal members or residents within the reservation. But nontribal members can harvest wild rice off reservations so long as they have a license.
More information at the StarTribune. The first embedded video offers an overall presentation; the second shows the process of the harvest.
Wild rice helped me buy my canoe. Back in the 1980s, Uncle Ben's Rice introduce a Wild Rice flavor ("instant" rice was a thing at the time, along with Rice-a-Roni). To promote their new rice product, Uncle Ben's ran a promotion in which three box tops from UB Wild Rice would get you $300 off a Grumman aluminum canoe. I guess the idea was that the native people used canoes to harvest the wild rice, thus canoes and wild rice go together. And so I bought three boxes of rice, kept the box tops and gave away the rice (even then I prefered to avoid processed foodstuffs) and I bought the 17-foot, double-ended, aluminum canoe that I own to this day. That canoe has since floated on waters in Chicagoland, Boston, and Seattle, although I have harvested no wild rice in it.
ReplyDeleteYou need a license to harvest wild rice? Even on your own property? I’d assume you’d need permission of the owner, but I guess these lakes are government(public) property.
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
I don't know, but I would guess that the licensing process involves some educational classes about the proper timing and technique for harvesting the rice. Similar to how you need a license to shoot a deer on your own property.
DeleteThere's an interesting side comment on this as well. Wild rice can be sown and grown in paddies and then harvested mechanically. Once this was discovered, wild rice is now grown in multiple other places including California, Texas, Louisiana, Canada, Hungary and Australia. Shifting to paddy production and mechanical harvesting increases the yield by about 6-10x per acre and decreases the cost from $25-50/lb to around $5-10/lb.
ReplyDeleteNot to take anything away from the original harvesters of wild rice, but the increase in production outside of its ancient grounds, and the decrease in price has made it available to many more people.
Amazing how indigenous have kept their focus on protecting/improving the land. I was wondering about the additional dams and water control structures... but it turns out that was just to alleviate the channelizing from certain people turning the area into farmland.
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