header title="Wild Rice: Connecting People to Place" author="Flora Klein" img=wc:Zizania_palustris_(20150206966).jpg

Introduction

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Known for its distinct flavor and chewy texture, wild rice has become a gourmet delicacy and health food staple throughout the United States. Today, many Americans encounter the plant in rice mixes produced by companies such as Ben’s Original. Northern wild rice, or Zizania palustris, is an aquatic grass species native to the Great Lakes region of North America. Evidence of human use dates to the Late Archaic and Early Woodland, around two thousand years ago.1 The Ojibwe are one of three tribes constituting the Anishinaabe, or “original people,” an Indigenous nation in the Great Lakes region of North America. For the Ojibwe, wild rice is not only a foodstuff and a medicinal plant; it is also considered a sacred being with cultural and spiritual significance. Wild rice stalks are known as manoomin, or “good berry,” in Anishinaabe language and as Psíŋ in Dakota. Dependent on highly specific landscape conditions for growth, the history of wild rice draws upon botanical and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and reflects a close interweaving between people, place, and plant.

image src=wc:Wild_rice_in_McGregor,_Minnesota.jpg caption="Wild rice flowers in McGregor, Minnesota." aspect=1.5

Botanical Nomenclature

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The Zizania genus is housed in the Oryza genus of the Poaceae (grass) family. Zizania palustris is one of four wild rice species native to North America, the other three being Z. aquatica, Z. texana, and Z. latifolia. Z. palustris is unrelated to the more commonly known Oryza white rice domesticated in Africa and Asia. The two species diverged twenty-six to thirty million years ago, with Zizania becoming established in North America about five million years ago and expanding across the continent using ice-age refugia.2 Unlike white rice, wild rice is not a “true” rice and is instead a species of aquatic grass whose seeds resemble white rice grains.

image src=gh:floraklein/Zizania-palustris/main/wild%20rice/KEW%20POW%20Z%20palustris.jpg caption="Zizania palustris type specimen" aspect=.74 image src=gh:floraklein/Zizania-palustris/main/wild%20rice/Kew%20POW%20Z%20palustris%20dist.png caption="Global distribution of Zizania palustris" aspect=3.5 image src=wc:The_book_of_grasses_-_an_illustrated_guide_to_the_common_grasses,_and_the_most_common_of_the_rushes_and_sedges_(1912)_(14576920329).jpg caption="Zizania aquatica and Zizania palustris" aspect=.65

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Z. palustris, whose specific epithet translates as “marshy” or “swampy,” was originally thought to belong to Z. aquatica, a species of wild rice native to the Eastern United States. However, in his Mantissa Plantarum Altera (1771), a book of botanical text and illustrations, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus distinguishes the two plants as separate species.3

image src=wc:Carl_von_Linné.jpg caption="Carl Linnaeus (1775)" aspect=0.83 iframe src=https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/42945403page/163/mode/1up aspect=

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The turn of the twenty-first century saw the release of the first wild rice genome map, and with it came concern over the flow of genes from cultivated to wild rice stands, or groups of plants.4 In the wild-rice waters of northern Minnesota, researchers have found that wild rice populations are genetically distinct from one another and that there is very little gene flow across watersheds.5 Concerns remain that genetically diverse wild stands, whose seeds are unable to be stored in ex situ repositories, will be overtaken by genetically modified wild rice supergroups.6

image src=wc:Zizania_palustris_15-p.bot-ziza.palus-3.jpg caption="Zizania palustris" aspect=.98 image src=wc:Wild_Rice_at_sunset_on_Big_Sandy_Lake_in_McGregor,_Minnesota.jpg caption="Wild Rice at sunset on Big Sandy Lake, McGregor, Minnesota (2021)" aspect=1.5

Wild Rice in Indigenous Prophecy

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The intertwined story of people and plant in North America begins around 950 C.E. The Anishinaabe nation received a prophecy from the prophets of the Seven Fires and a floating seashell, called the sacred miigis. The prophecy instructed them to travel westward to where the “food grows on water,” referring to wild rice.7 The Anishinaabe migration occurred over the course of approximately five hundred years and included several legs to the journey. The Ojibwe people of the Anishinaabe nation eventually settled in Gichigami, the area east of Lake Superior, in present-day Minnesota. This pushed the Dakota, the previous inhabitants of the region, to relocate to the south and west.

IMAGE: Anishinaabe migration map - TBD

The wild rice, called manoomin, was considered a special gift from the Creator that tied Anishinaabe people to the lands, and became a part of Anishinaabe materia medica, serving both ritual and medicinal purposes. Considered the most sacred mashkiki, or medicine, manoomin contains not only a material presence, but also a spiritual one, providing both nourishment and healing,8 and was used to promote recovery from sickness through ingestion or topical poultices. The rice harvest became a ritualized practice—gathering it and other mashkiki from the Gichimanidoogitigan, or “Creator’s Garden,” was timed to coincide with the autumnal harvest and was often overseen by a rice chief.9

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image src=wc:Zizania_palustris_macro.jpg caption="Zizania palustris" aspect=1.51 image src=wc:Manoomin_picking,_1905,_Minnesota.jpg caption="Manoomin picking, Minnesota (1905)" aspect=1.6

Traders, Treaties, and Usufructuary Rights

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The first Europeans to arrive in the Great Lakes region were the French explorers and missionaries in the 1620s. The Ojibwe acted as their guides, interpreters, and trading partners, often using the Ojibwe language as the lingua franca in trading. Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit missionary and the first European to map the northern part of the Mississippi River Valley, described the wild rice as folle avoine, translated as wild oats or fool oats, or as a “sort of grass” that resembled the leguminous tare grass growing amid wheat in France. European travelers also compared the aquatic growing conditions of wild rice along lake and stream margins to the flooded paddies used for rice cultivation in Asia. The Menominee tribe was referred to as manoominiig, the “wild rice people,” by both the Ojibwe and the French.10 As scholar Thomas Vennum wrote, “Each of these groups had a diversified economy and therefore depended upon wild rice for food and trade to differing degrees.”11 For the Anishinaabe, the wild rice provided the means to avoid trade dependencies with entities such as the Hudson’s Bay Company by becoming a surplus trade good.12

image src=wc:A_map_of_the_British_and_French_dominions_in_North_America_-_with_the_roads,_distances,_limits,_and_extent_of_the_settlements,_humbly_inscribed_to_the_Right_Honourable_the_Earl_of_Halifax,_and_the_NYPL434076.tiff caption="A map of the British and French dominions in North America : with the roads, distances, limits, and extent of the settlements, humbly inscribed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Halifax, and the other Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations' (1773)" aspect=1.42

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Several land treaties between the Ojibwe and the United States were signed in the mid-nineteenth century, including the Treaty of 1836, the Treaty of 1837, and the Treaty of 1842. The land treaties gave the Ojibwe usufructuary rights, or the “right to use legal property,” which included the right to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory. Despite those treaties, the Dawes Act of 1887 forcibly removed the Ojibwe from their land to boarding schools, camps, and mills. It also implemented the process of privatized land allotment and led to the creation of reservations.13

IMAGE(S): Map of Territories ceded (Treaty of 1836, 1837, 1842, and Dawes Act of 1887)

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In the decades after the signing of these treaties and the passage of the Dawes Act, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built a series of dams in the upper Mississippi watershed to control and maintain a predictable water flow for downstream mills. This hydrological alteration to the landscape resulted in the destruction of wild rice habitat due to construction-related flooding. The colonial violence of assimilation and reallocation, along with forced removal and land cession, directly led to the breakdown of Ojibwe knowledge and kinship systems.14

image src=MNdams.jpg caption="Dams in Minnesota" aspect=.75

Cultivation for Consumption

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Both Americans and Europeans fostered ambitions to cultivate wild rice outside of its native habitat. Pehr Kalm, a well-known disciple of Carl Linnaeus, undertook a collections tour of North America between 1747 and 1751. Under Linnaeus’s instructions—and as part of a project to build a larger mercantile empire within Europe, and commissioned by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences—Kalm’s task was to collect a “kind of Rice… used by one Nation… as food instead of grains, which grows without cultivation there in all marshes and lakes.”15 Kalm returned to Sweden with over one hundred plant species, including Zizania aquatica, with the intention of domesticating the plant species in Scandinavia and trading it as a crop used for livestock feed and human consumption within greater Europe.16

image src=wc:PehrKalm.jpg caption="Pehr Kalm (1764)" aspect=.81

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Many travelers to the Great Lakes region following Kalm’s expedition viewed wild rice as a productive crop well-suited for potential cultivation in the analogous climates of Northern Europe. After traveling to the western Great Lakes region in the late 1760s, Jonathan Carver, an explorer and captain in a Massachusetts colonial unit, entertained the idea of producing wild rice as a domesticated crop in the “infant colonies” of the United States.17

image src=wc:Carte_des_voyages_du_Cape._Carver,_dans_la_partie_intérieure_de_l'Amérique_septentrionale_en_1766,_et_1767._LOC_74695016.jpg caption="Map of Carver’s travels in North America (1768)" aspect=1.28

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In his 1803 “Observation on the Zizania aquatica,” British botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert described the transportation of Z. aquatica seeds from Canada to Europe in glass jars. Long considered a “desideratum among the botanists of [England],” he noted his desire to grow the seeds in the “many shallow pieces of water” in Great Britain and Ireland.18 Beginning with French botanist André Michaux, few, if any, were able to grow wild rice in Europe.19

iframe src=https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/756477#page/317/ image src=wc:Aylmer_Bourke_Lambert._Stipple_engraving_by_W._Holl,_1805,_a_Wellcome_V0003335.jpg caption=xxx aspect=0.73 image src=wc:François_André_Michaux_(1770–1855).jpg caption=xxx aspect=0.74

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In fact, botanists were beginning to understand that seeds alone were not enough to ensure that the plant would flourish in Europe. Indeed, because of the highly specific habitat conditions required for wild rice growth, these early cultivation attempts failed. In an 1852 United States geological survey, American geologist David Dale Owen wrote: “This grain has been frequently introduced to the attention of cultivators, and is worth of notice, not only for the value of its products, but the peculiar nature of the soil to which it is adapted, being necessarily unfit for any of our ordinary cultivated grains.” He later specified, “It is in these situations best exposed to the proper degree of inundation, and finds a suitable bed of the slimy sand, in which [wild rice] grows most readily. It is rarely met with on inland lakes which have no outlet.”20 Owen described the specific features of wild rice habitat, including the regular inundation, steady water flow, and relative water depth required for wild rice growth in aquatic habitats, painting a picture of the unique landscapes that proved critical to the plant’s successful growth.

image src=wc:Photograph_of_Wilbur_Isaacson_Looking_out_over_the_Wild_Rice_Area_of_Waboose_Bay_-_DPLA_-_0942bc9d8377dda177629e2f35393908.jpg caption="Photograph of Wilbur Isaacson Looking out over the Wild Rice Area of Waboose Bay (1958)" aspect=1.27

Harvest Histories

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Cultural traditions involving wild rice were linked to the seasons. Anishinaabe harvesters would set up harvest camps, or Manoominikewin, for “ricing.” In 1820, Henry Schoolcraft, on an expedition to find the source of the Mississippi River, noted the role of wild rice as a foodstuff closely linked to seasonal change: “The necessity of changing their camps often, to procure game or fish, the want of domesticated animals, the general dependence on wild rice, and the custom of journeying in canoes, has produced a general uniformity of life.”21

In “Gathering Wild Rice, 1849–1855,” Seth Eastman, an artist and U.S. Army commander at Fort Snelling, depicts three women, most likely Anishinaabe, in the process of harvesting wild rice. The watercolor drawing, the first known painting of wild rice, depicts one woman paddling a canoe and two others beating rice stalks with flat paddles. American anthropologist and ethnographer Frances Densmore later captured the multi-step harvesting process in her photography from the early twentieth century. In her 1928 “How Indians Use Wild Plants for Food, Medicine, and Crafts,” Densmore describes the process of establishing harvesting camps and the act of “ricing” itself, in which Ojibwe women would harvest by traveling in birchbark canoes.22 When ricing, one person would paddle the canoe using a push pole (Gaandakii-iganaak), while another would knock rice stalks with special sticks (Bawa’iganaak) so that ripe rice seeds would fall into the canoe and into the lake water. After harvesting, the rice was dried on birchbark sheets, parched to loosen the husk, and pounded with wooden paddles. It would then be winnowed and trodden upon and later stored. In the lakes and streams that had not been disrupted by dam construction, year after year over the course of centuries, the knowledge and practices of ricing had been kept alive and passed down through generations of Ojibwe.

iframe src=NL000379_o2.jpg image src=wc:Wild_rice_harvesting_and_processing_-_NARA_-_285183.jpg caption="Wild rice harvesting and processing" aspect=1.7 image src=wc:Winnowing_the_wild_rice_in_a_birch_bark_basket.jpg caption="Winnowing the wild rice in a birch bark basket" aspect=1.5 image src=wc:Parching_the_wild_rice_over_an_open_flame.jpg caption="Parching the wild rice over an open flame" aspect=1.5 youtube vid=SH_YYyw9yF8 aspect=1.8 youtube vid=6tjd7H1iQWY aspect=1.8 youtube vid=EFW5QE6ahOU aspect=1.8

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Historically, both Ojibwe men and women performed wild rice harvesting, with men steering the canoe and women knocking the grains into the canoe. In the decades following land cessions, forced migration, and colonial settlement, the labor relations and gender roles involved in harvesting changed. During the early twentieth century, the state of Minnesota created wild rice camps, and state control over wild rice harvesting was codified in 1939.23 According to Ojibwe historian Brenda Child, the wild rice waters and ricing camps were gendered spaces where women expressed autonomy through the labor and organization of creating and maintaining wild rice economies. Indeed, the wild rice waters themselves became a gendered landscape through women’s involvement in and jurisdiction over harvesting and ricing.24

youtube vid=HvLvwo3a5PU aspect=1.8 image src=wc:Wild_rice_harvesting_and_processing_-_NARA_-_285183.jpg caption="Wild rice harvesting and processing" aspect=1.7

Landscape as Collaborator

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Wild rice plays an important part in the aquatic plant communities of the northern Great Lakes region. It benefits local food networks and wetland ecology by participating in the water nutrient cycle, stabilizing coastal river wetland sediment and providing habitat for other species. Rooted in sediment, the plant grows along the margins of small streams and shallow lakes. Albert Jenks, a University of Minnesota professor of anthropology, noted the landscape conditions required for its growth in his Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes (1907): “Wherever the last glacier left little mid-bottomed, water-filled hollows, there wild rice has established itself, if other conditions are favorable. Such ponds and lakes are characteristic of the alluvial apron spread out over Wisconsin and Minnesota.”25

image-compare before=wc:Wild_rice_plants_-_NARA_-_285206.jpg after=wc:Northern_Wild_Rice_(Zizania_palustris),_Coventry,_RI_(39518308664).jpg caption="Swipe across images to view the conditions of wild rice habitat in 2010 and 1937" aspect= iframe src=https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/wildricegatherer00jenk/wildricegatherer00jenk.pdf

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Like other grasses, a crucial phase of the wild rice’s life cycle is the shattering of the mature seed, which occurs when the seed drops off the plant once it ripens. Seed heads are located at the top of the plant, and ripe seeds drop from the plant into the water, sinking to the soil where they remain dormant over the winter. They usually germinate in the following spring. By early summer, wild rice forms floating mats of leaves and seeds cross-pollinated by wind. After reaching maturity in late summer and being harvested in late summer or early autumn, the grass dies. Seed shattering occurs over days to weeks, which allows for multiple harvests to take place.

image src=wc:Z_palustris_in_seed.jpg caption="Zizania palustris seed" aspect=1.63

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Harvesting was not only a process of gathering but also a process of reseeding the plant for future harvests. Jenks wrote that “the plant, unless it is artificially sown, is gradually being extinguished in such beds as are continuously used.”26 The significant portion of seeds being knocked back into water rather than harvested in the canoe was not waste, but an active management strategy. Responsive to changing environmental conditions, the reseeding during harvest treats the landscape as a collaborator: to remain viable, wild rice seeds require submergence in the soil during undisturbed dormancy. The aquatic landscape remains an active participant in the reseeding process, highlighting the importance of the landscape itself in maintaining a relationship between wild rice and humans. Defined by ecologist Fikret Berkes, TEK is a knowledge-practice-belief complex comprising experience gleaned from thousands of years of direct human contact with their environment.27 The artificial sowing of wild rice seeds is one example of the activation of TEK.28

youtube vid=WpfTvLMNqvg start=5 aspect=1.8

Cultivation, Commodification, and Commercialization

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Wild rice cultivation was spearheaded in the 1950s by University of Minnesota scientist Ervin Oelke, who collected germ plasms from twenty-four natural stands, or a community of organisms growing in a specific location, that fell within the 1837 treaty area.29 The university established an official wild rice breeding program in the 1960s to cultivate wild rice with disease and pest resistance and to produce nonseed-shattering varieties. This would facilitate mechanical harvest and increase the yield size. The program produced four strands of cultivated “wild” rice between 1968 and 2000. By 1969, the Minnesota state legislature provided funding for Z. palustris cultivation, and in 2017, appropriated recurring funding for the Northern Wild Rice breeding and genetics program.

image src=wild_rice_lakes_dnr.jpg caption="Wild rice lakes in Minnesota" aspect=.75

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In the early 1960s, food product company Uncle Ben’s Inc.—now called Ben’s Original and owned by Mars, Inc.—began incorporating wild rice into its rice blend. Cultivated wild rice production in northern California’s Sacramento Valley began in the 1970s.30 In the 1980s, both Uncle Ben’s Inc. and NorCal, another California cultivator, established patents for their cultivated hybrid wild rice varieties. Between 1983 and 1986, wild rice production had surpassed Minnesota, and by 2020, California was producing 95 percent of all cultivated wild rice. Wild rice was also commercially cultivated in Canada, where, by 2023, the crop’s revenue surpassed $5 million CAN.31

Cultivation is domestication occurring in real time. Cultivated wild rice, or wild rice that has been selectively bred by humans for certain characteristics, is grown in several states, including California, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Wild rice has also reached an international market, with the United Kingdom serving as the largest export market for U.S.-grown cultivated wild rice. Indigenous growers mainly sell uncultivated wild rice directly to domestic consumers, while commercially cultivated wild rice is sold to large retailers. While the wild rice grown by Indigenous growers remains undomesticated, increased consumer access in the U.S. to wild rice through commercialization of cultivated wild rice, often at a lower cost to consumers, has also transformed the plant’s identity from a delicacy to an everyday staple as more people can incorporate wild rice into their diet.

image src=wc:Wisconsin_Wild_Rice_(31038061852).jpg caption="Wisconsin Wild Rice" aspect=1.5

Recognizing the Rights of Nature

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With rising temperatures and less ice cover, the proliferation of wild rice is severely threatened by climate change. Its seeds, which require frozen temperatures during their dormancy, cannot germinate as well or at all in warm weather. In addition, rapid fluctuations in water depth due to severe weather events, like concentrated rainfall events and droughts, disrupt plant growth, and as a result, the amount of suitable habitat shrinks.

youtube vid=46XHxnjGs4o start=1:25 aspect=1.8

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Serious threats are posed to naturally occurring wild rice stands by the potential expansion of copper and nickel open-pit mining and their toxic discharges. The amount of sulfate in the St. Louis watershed has increased over the past half-century, adversely affecting the plant’s growth. Today, pipelines like the Enbridge “Line 3” and others threaten the health not only of wild rice habitats, but also of the entire St. Louis watershed and the ecosystems contained therein.

image src=st_louis_watershed.jpg caption="St. Louis Watershed lakes, wetlands, and peat deposits" aspect=1.5

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On New Year’s Eve 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe formally recognized the legal rights of manoomin, Zizania palustris, in tribal court. This declaration of tribal law was an attempt to establish legal rights for the plant by enacting legal personhood for manoomin, a nonhuman person according to Indigenous worldview. The recognition of wild rice’s legal rights in tribal court is one of many cases in a global movement aimed at recognizing the rights of nature. The Rights of Manoomin case reflects the close relationship between plant, people, and landscape predicated on an understanding of kinship and mutual reliance according to Indigenous worldview.32

image src=wc:A_Protect_Wild_Rice_sign_outside_Aitkin_County_Courthouse_in_Aitkin,_Minnesota.jpg caption="A Protect Wild Rice sign outside Aitkin County Courthouse in Aitkin, Minnesota" aspect=1.5

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On August 4, 2021, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and manoomin filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR).33 Manoomin v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources argued that the DNR had violated treaty rights by putting manoomin at risk by issuing an amended permit to the Enbridge corporation, which had temporarily pumped five billion gallons of water out of wild rice habitat, and asked for the DNR to nullify the pipeline water permits.

image src=wc:Pipeline_Free_Manoomin_(Honor_the_Earth).jpg caption="Pipeline Free Manoomin" aspect=0.64 .small

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Because manoomin is a nonhuman person according to Ojibwe worldview, with its own rights, it was able to serve as the plaintiff in the court case. The expansion of legal protections and human rights-type legal protections to nonhuman species and ecosystems incorporates elements of TEK worldviews by highlighting the connections between human and nonhuman persons. Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer characterizes this relationship as one of reciprocity, “rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume… Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us.”34 The link between people, place, and plant, evidenced in the relationship between the Ojibwe and wild rice, serves as a framework for expanding notions of care and conservation across worldviews.

While the case was dismissed in March 2022 by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals, Manoomin v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources sets an example for how the legal rights of nature may be invoked in order to protect both individual species and entire ecosystems. It is one example of how human and plant relationships based upon this expanded worldview may be used as leverage within larger conservation efforts, and points out larger power dynamics and their ethical frameworks that still consider plants and nonhuman species as property.

image src=wc:2_Protect_Our_Water_No_Line_3_%2B_No_Pesticides_sign_outside_of_Palisade,_Minnesota.jpg caption="Protect Our Water No Line 3 No Pesticides sign outside of Palisade, Minnesota (2020)" aspect=1.5

The Continuous Interweaving between People, Place, and Plant

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From early botanical attempts at domestication in Europe and its role in newly created trade economies, to the more recent commercialization and breeding programs, wild rice serves as a key example of the entanglement of plant, people, and landscape in Indigenous worldviews. The unique growing conditions and reciprocal dependencies between the Ojibwe and wild rice acknowledge the plant’s role within larger environmental, social, and moral contexts, evidenced in early travel accounts, visual representations, and ethnographical works. More recent legal recourse both complicates and denies this worldview, asking us to reconsider how the moral frameworks central to TEK might allow us to better acknowledge the agency of plants and the impact of human and plant relationships on our ecosystems and landscapes today.

image src=wc:Chippewa_wild_rice_harvesting.jpg caption="Wild rice harvesting" aspect=1.5 image src=wc:Processed_wild_rice_at_Wild_Rice_House_in_Finland,_Minnesota_(51432379817).jpg caption="Processed wild rice at Wild Rice House in Finland, Minnesota" aspect=1.5

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  1. Lillian McGilp, Claudia Castell-Miller, Matthew Haas, Rennet Millas, Jennifer Kimball, “Northern Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) breeding, genetics, and conservation,” Crop Science 63, no. 4 (2023), 1907. ↩

  2. McGilp et al., “Northern Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) breeding, genetics, and conservation,” 1905. ↩

  3. Carl Linnaeus, Species Plantarum: exhibentes plantas rite cognitas ad genera relatas, cum differential specifics, nominibus trivialibus, synonymis selectis, locis natalibus, secundum systema sexuale digestas 4, pt. 1 (1753), 396-397. ↩

  4. The Z. palustris genome was assembled in 2021. Aurelien Bouayad, “Wild rice protectors: An Ojibwe odyssey,” Environmental Law Review 22, no. 1 (2020), 33. ↩

  5. Jennifer Kimball, “University of Minnesota Annual Wild Rice Breeding and Related Research Progress Report to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture,” Report, January 15, 2023. ↩

  6. Winona LaDuke, “Manoomin: It’s worth protecting,” The Ojibwe News (St. Paul, MN), June 16, 2006. ↩

  7. Brittany Luby, “Treaty through a Planting Lens: A Study of Manoomin Harvesting Rights in Anishinaabe-Aki, 1873–Present,” The American Indian Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2023), 352–387. ↩

  8. Michael McNally, “Where Food Grows on the Water: Manoomin/Wild Rice and Anishinaabe Peoplehood,” in Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods, ed. Michelene Pesantubbee and Michael Zogry (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2021), 82. ↩

  9. Ibid. ↩

  10. Ibid., 5. ↩

  11. Ibid. ↩

  12. Ibid., 82. ↩

  13. “1837 Treaty,” Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, accessed August 1, 2024., https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/aboutdnr/laws_treaties/1837/index.html. ↩

  14. Marie Schaefer, “Whose Knowledge Matters? Shifting Knowledge Systems and Gender Roles in Manoomin (Wild Rice) Revitalization in the Great Lakes” (PhD thesis, Michigan State University, 2020). ↩

  15. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 114–117; Anya Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change,” accessed August 1, 2024, https://sophiecoeprize.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/zilberstein-e28094-sophie-coe-winner-2015.pdf. ↩

  16. Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire,” 3. ↩

  17. Jonathan Carver, Travels through the interior parts of North-America, in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (Charing-Cross and Pater-Noster Row: London, 1778), 522. ↩

  18. Aylmer Bourke Lambert, “Observation on the Zizania aquatica,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 7 (1804), 264–265. ↩

  19. Zilberstein, 3-4. ↩

  20. David Dale Owen, Report of a geological survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota: an incidentally of a portion of Nebraska Territory: made under instructions from the United States Treasury Department (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1852), 620. ↩

  21. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Narrative of an expedition through the upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake, the actual source of this river embracing an exploratory trip through the St. Croix and Burntwood (or Broule) rivers in 1832, under the direction of Henry R. Schoolcraft (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 34, 79. ↩

  22. Frances Densmore, How Indians Use Wild Plants: For Food, Medicine and Crafts (New York: Dover, 1974). ↩

  23. Aurelien Bouayad, “Wild rice protectors: An Ojibwe odyssey,” Environmental Law Review 22, no. 1 (2020), 25–42. ↩

  24. Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (London: Penguin, 2013). ↩

  25. Albert Jenks, The wild rice gatherers of the Upper Lakes: a study in American primitive economics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 1033. ↩

  26. Ibid., 1026. ↩

  27. Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 1999). ↩

  28. Luby, 358–362. ↩

  29. Winona LaDuke, “Ricekeepers” Orion Magazine, June 25, 2007. ↩

  30. Daniel B. Marcum, “Cultivated Wild Rice Production in California” (California: University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, 2007). ↩

  31. Luby, 354. ↩

  32. “Press Release: Federal Appeals Court Denies State of Minnesota’s Bid to Take ‘Rights of Nature’ Case Away from Tribal Court.” Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. Accessed May 24, 2025, https://www.centerforenvironmentalrights.org/news/press-release-federal-appeals-court-denies-state-of-minnesotas-bid-to-take-rights-of-nature-case-away-from-tribal-court. ↩

  33. Kirsti Marohn, “Line 3: White Earth argues DNR water permit violates wild rice rights,” Minnesota Public Radio News, August 5, 2021, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/08/05/line-3-white-earth-argues-dnr-water-permit-violates-wild-rice-rights; Jessica Douglas, “Wild rice sues to stop oil pipeline,” High Country News, September 2, 2021, https://www.hcn.org/articles/latest-justice-wild-rice-sues-to-stop-oil-pipeline/. ↩

  34. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 180-190. ↩