Manoominike-giizis: Wild Rice Moon

From the prehistoric times of about one thousand years ago to the historic times of approximately four hundred years ago, the Woodland Cultures (Laurel People) of the western Great Lakes area of North America were settled on the shores of the lakes and rivers of land that includes what is now known as northern Minnesota. These peoples were processing wild rice, and developing pottery and burial mound technology. During the same period, the prehistoric peoples to the south, now called the Mississippian Cultures, strongly influenced by Mexican agriculture, were developing agricultural technologies.¹

During the last of the prehistoric period, the agricultural tradition made its way into what is now southern Minnesota, but the geographical exigencies of the western Great Lakes area did not favor its development further north. The harvesting and processing of wild rice, along with hunting and fishing, persisted from prehistoric into historic times.² Still, there remained a cross-fertilization of influences. Wild rice harvesting continued into the nineteenth century as far south as Nebraska and as far southeast as Illinois.³ Southern pottery influences are evident in the western Great Lakes area.⁴

ìHistoric timesî are marked in North America by the arrival of the Europeans, who kept written records, often in the form of diaries and reports. These Europeans arrived in the western Great Lakes area in the seventeenth century.⁵ The Minnesota area was then populated primarily by the Dakota tribe of the Sioux nation, and the Wisconsin area primarily by the Menominee tribe, meaning ìwild rice people,î of the Algonquin nation. Both nations harvested wild rice.

The arrival of the Europeans marked the beginning of a westward movement of the eastern populations of what would become the United States. As explorers and fur traders sought new territory, so did the Algonquin Ojibwe people. Originally from the Atlantic coast, they were forced to move west as their lands were appropriated by European settlers.

The transition from Dakota to Ojibwe predominance in Minnesota took nearly two hundred years. The period was marked by increasing strife and warfare between the two tribes, until 1851 when the Dakota were finally forced from the area. However, for a long time the Dakota continued to risk attack by returning to harvest rice in their old territory.⁶

The conflict between the two tribes was in great part over hunting lands that were also wild rice territory.⁷ With the incursion of the Europeans, wild rice had become a useful trade commodity in addition to its continuing use as a food staple. Later, it would even ìcome to be regarded as a luxury by white people,î according to a news item in a 1913 issue of the Scientific American.

The earliest written descriptions of wild rice confirm its value to any human living or traveling in the area. References to it are found in the 1633 memoir of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de la Verendrie (Verendrye);⁸ the 1673 writings of Father Jacques Marquette;⁹ and in a 1751 scientific tract by Peter Kalm.¹⁰ Perhaps the most eloquent entry comes to us from Pierre díEsprit sieur Radisson in 1668, in a missive to Charles II of England:

Our songs being finished we began our teeth to worke. We had there a kinde of rice, much like oats. It growes in the watter in 3 or 4 foote deepe. There is a God that shews himselfe in every countrey, almighty, full of goodnesse and y preservation of those poore people who knoweth him not. They have a particular way to gather up that graine. Two takes a boat and two sticks, by w^ch they gett y^e eare downe and gett the corne out of it. Their boat being full, they bring it to a fitt place to dry it; and that is their food for the most part of the winter, and doe dresse it thus: ffor each man a handfull of that they putt in the pott, that swells so much that it can suffice a man.¹¹

Knowledge of wild rice harvesting traditions comes to us today primarily from the Ojibwe. Until 1988, with the publication of Vennumís definitive work Wild Rice and the Ojibwe People, most of the stories came to us through the observations of non-Indians. Vennum, while drawing from previously published reports, also went to the Indian people and recorded their stories directly.

While there are some differences in detail between the stories recorded by non-Indian observers and those told to Vennum, and even among the stories told to Vennum, there is general agreement regarding the traditional methods of harvesting and processing wild rice.

Manoominike-giizis, the wild rice moon, or the month of making wild rice usually occurs in late August or early September. In the old times, when the rice set seed and developed toward maturity, the ricing chief of an Ojibwe village would go out frequently to check on its status. No harvesting of the rice would be done until this chief officially opened the season.¹²

Before the rice fully matured, however, the women of the community would usually go out into the rice fields and mark the stands that were theirs. They did this by gathering in a number of stems and binding them together using string made from bark. Each woman tied her bundles in a unique way, thus identifying her stand from others.¹³

The binding of the rice had other benefits as well. It kept the stalks secure and made them less vulnerable to wind, which could knock off ripened seeds, and to birds, which also knocked off seeds when they landed on the stalks to eat from them. And binding made harvesting easier and more efficient.

The binding of the rice was perhaps the first aspect of traditional harvesting to be lost to the changing ways of the middle to late nineteenth century. The Ojibwe speaking to Vennum attribute the decline and cessation of binding to the ìbreakdown of tradition, premature harvesting, and the incursion of whites.î¹⁴ As wild rice became a commodity for sale and trade, competition for the rice beds increased. At the same time, the social restrictions of the Ojibwe villages were in decline. Ricers began going out before the rice was ready for harvest, and the role of the ricing chiefs became diminished.

The problems with ricers who did not fully respect the crops escalated into the first half of the twentieth century, and reached its apex when harvesters, especially non-Indians, started harvesting rice mechanically. Ralph K. Andrist describes the situation in a July 1951 Readerís Digest article: ìIt took the white man a while to discover that wild rice might be worth exploiting. When he did, motorboats chugged through the rice beds with the effect of an elephant in a field of corn. A mechanical harvester, devised to get more grain in a hurry, ruined many rich beds and the crop was facing destructionî (July 1951).

In 1939, the State of Minnesota passed a Wild Rice Act. It restricted harvesting to traditional methods, requiring that a license be purchased, and that harvesting be done from a canoe propelled by a pole, and that ricers use knockers (flails) to release the rice from the plants. The Act also sought to restore order to the ricing process by establishing local ricing committees that would designate the opening of rice fields, a recognition of the vital function of the ricing chief.¹⁵ Today, sixty years later, these same restrictions generally apply, except that the opening of the rice fields is determined by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) on non-reservation waters, and by tribal officials on reservation waters.

Although the binding of the rice is known today, even to the Ojibwe, only through stories, most other elements of the traditional ricing harvest have remained in tact. Around the turn of the last century, Indian families still gathered at their traditional ricing camps to knock and process rice. They would have come there from their summer camps where they had gardens, and would go from there to their winter camps, where they continued hunting and fishing. From the winter camps they moved to their sugaring camps, where they made maple syrup, and then on again to the summer camps.¹⁶

The wild rice camp originally was operated mostly by women. The men could not participate as they were off on their fall hunt. As the Ojibwe became more involved in the European-style economy taking hold in Minnesota, and as wild rice became a valuable cash crop, the men joined the women in the fall harvest.

The first task of the harvest, after the binding of the rice, was the gathering of the grain. For this the canoe was the perfect vessel. When pushed with a long pole, it slid with relative ease through the tall, thick grasses, where paddles were of little or no use. The poler stood at one end of the canoe; the knocker sat in front of or behind the poler.

The poler pushed the canoe along, and the knocker reached into the rice with one stick and pulled some rice over the canoe. The other stick was used to gently strike the heads of the rice, knocking the ripe kernels into the canoe. A gentle stroke was necessary, as wild rice ìshatters,î i.e., the kernels on a given head do not all ripen at the same time.

Although the shattering nature of rice is a primary problem today for commercial harvesting of wild rice in cultivated paddies, it was not a problem for traditional harvesters. The team simply returned to the stands two or three more times over the course of ten to fourteen days, until the subsequently matured rice was captured. To insure easier and more effective passage through the rice on later passes, the poler was careful to direct the canoe through the stand in a row-by-row pattern. This way, on return trips, the canoe glided more easily through the previously made channels.

Although a rice bed was harvested several times, not all of the kernels ended up in the canoes. Many fell into the water, and served as seed for the next yearís crop, and some was just not harvested. It was estimated in 1969 that only five to twenty-five percent of available rice was gathered.¹⁷ Estimates today indicate that now forty to sixty percent of rice is harvested.¹⁸ This increase is perhaps due to the increased commercial value of wild rice, which attracts more ricers to the rice beds and makes it worthwhile for them to harvest as much rice as possible.

The rice that falls into the canoe is encased in a hull that has a barbed awn at one end. As every ricer knows, this awn not only helps pull the rice seed down into the muck on the bottom of the lake or river, but allows it to stick to a ricerís hair and clothes, and even, somehow, to migrate under clothing where it pokes and itches and irritates, reminding the ricer of long ago and of today that this is a wild crop.

The volume of rice taken in by a team of harvesters on a given day is estimated to be between one hundred and three hundred pounds raw (green), equivalent to about forty to one hundred and twenty pounds finished, a ratio of two and a half pounds to one.

The volume of rice taken is affected, as are all crops, by the vagaries of that particular year, and the overall annual take varies considerably. Over a four year period ìa stand can be expected to produce one bumper crop, two fair crops and one failure.î¹⁹ Crop failure can be affected by four conditions: (1) high water levels and fluctuation in water levels; (2) alteration of environmental conditions by a bumper crop; (3) poor pollination (due to weather factors; and (4) insect pests and diseases.²⁰

Getting the rice into the canoe is only the first step of getting wild rice to the table. Processing raw rice involves four major steps: drying (curing), parching (scorching), hulling, jigging, and winnowing. These steps are followed not only in the traditional ricing camp, but in the processing of cultivated paddy rice.

In the traditional ricing camp, processing almost always took place at the ricing site. As late as 1924, such camps were still being used in northern Minnesota, as Donald Hough describes in ìAncient Harvest in Our Own Northwestî (to an easterner in 1924, the Midwest was still the west). ìMore than one visitor to the Minnesota woods has wondered at the strange skeletons, made of saplings, which gleam in the sunlight on the shores of so many lakes. They stand there all summer long; shiny weather-beaten poles and bark withes.... They are usually in groups; two or three here, three or four there. They vary in shape from the conical wigwam to a rounded mound....î

But in the autumn, says Hough, the frames overnight ìhave mysteriously grown a skin of shining birchbark .... Smoke comes from the openings at the tops ... and yellow bark canoes appear on the sand beaches....î

In 1924, by the end of the first day of ricing, processing equipment will also have appeared: tarps for curing the rice, an iron kettle for parching, and birch bark baskets for winnowing. In the old times, skins or woven mats were used instead of tarps, and drying racks instead of iron kettles that came west to Minnesota with the Ojibwe. But the work remained the same.

When the rice was brought in from the lake or river, it was in a vulnerable state.²¹ If it was not dried within a few days, it would become moldy, and would be useless. However, if it was kept wet it would not be vulnerable to mold. Thus, rice that was not immediately dried was usually kept wetted with water until it could be properly spread out.

For the drying process, the rice was spread about six to twelve inches deep on tarps in the sun. It usually was dried for a day so that some moisture could escape from the kernels, and rice that was not fully ripened could finished. The rice was turned frequently during the drying period, and was picked over to remove leaves and other detritus.

When the rice was sufficiently dried, it was parched. Parching ìserves two main purposes: destroying the germ prevents the kernel from sprouting so that it can be kept indefinitely; hardening the kernel loosens the tight-fitting hull so it can be broken off and discarded.î²²

Hand-processed wild rice was parched in cast iron kettles or in metal wash tubs. Prior to these conveniences, the rice was parched in a variety of ways. Usually it was dried and smoked on racks. Sometimes it was parched on hot stones, or in clay pits.²³

In any situation, parching usually took about fifteen minutes to an hour. A small amount of rice was placed in the kettle, which was set at an angle over a fire. The rice was stirred continually with a paddle until it was done. Doneness was determined by breaking open a kernel. It would have gone from soft white to crystalline white.

Once the rice was parched, it was ready to be hulled. Hulling was perhaps the most difficult part of traditional processing. Enough pressure had to be applied to the kernels so that the now crisp hulls broke away, but not so much pressure that the kernels themselves broke. This delicate balance was accomplished by ìjiggingî the rice. A container the size of a large bucket was fitted into a hole in the ground. Parched rice was placed in the bucket, and then was treaded by a person wearing special moccasins who leaned on two poles placed at angles over the jig pit.²⁴ When the hulls were loosened and had fallen off the kernel, the hulling was done.

There were many variations of the jig pit, including a clay pit discovered in Michigan that dates back to the prehistoric Woodland period.²⁵ Other variations included pits lined with skins, wood slat pits and, more recently, wash tub pits. Occasionally, rice was hulled using pestles.²⁶

When the rice had been jigged, the hardest of the work was done. Winnowing, the next and final stage, removed the dust and broken hulls from the rice. For this, the rice was placed in a shallow basket or tray and was tossed up gently into the air in a breeze. The chaff blew away, and the rice was finished.

Finished rice was stored in many ways, including in grass or birch bark baskets, or in skin baskets or sacks.²⁷ Later, gunny sacks were used, and now a woven plastic sack is popular.

At the traditional Ojibwe ricing camp, the first finished rice was cooked and served at a ceremonial feast of thanksgiving, which paid homage to the spirits that gave wild rice to the people. Maude Kegg describes such a feast in Portage Lake: Memories of an Ojibwe Childhood: ìWhen she finished the rice, no one was supposed to eat any, so I was forbidden to eat any. First she gave a feast in which she offered tobacco and talked about the manitous and thunderbirds, and the sun, and all such things, and put tobacco out. When she finished speaking, we ate the rice.î²⁸

Even among hand-harvesters, it is rare today for wild rice to be hand-processed. Rather it is sold for cash outright to large processors, or is taken to smaller, local processors where it may also be sold outright for cash. Ricers who want to keep their rice for personal use take it to small operations for processing, as my husband and I did. Hand-processed rice is rarely sold, but rather is kept and used within the community.

Small processors carry out three of the four major steps of wild rice processing using mechanized equipment. The rice is still dried on tarps, but it is parched by turning it in large, metal barrels heated by a wood fire or sometimes by propane gas. It is then hulled and winnowed by machine.