For US Tribes , a Movement to Revive Native Foods and Lands
October 12 , 2015
Truth Out by Cheryl Katz wild rice field
On ancestral lands , the Fond du Lac band in Minnesota is planting wild rice and restoring wetlands damaged by dams , industry and logging . Their efforts are part of a growing trend by Native Americans to bring back traditional food sources and heal scarred landscapes .
Two by two , the wild rice harvesters emerge from the grass-filled lake and drag their canoes to shore . The harvesters , Lake Superior Chippewa , are reaping their ancestral food in the traditional way - one poling the boat through the waist-high tangle , and the other bending the stems and gently brushing ripe seed loose with a pair of batons . It ' s hard , dirty work on a steamy Minnesota late-summer day . They ' re caked with chaff and sweat .
But the canoes are loaded with the sacred grain they call manoomin . It was a good harvest , they say . For decades , this lake on the reservation of the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa , near Duluth , was choked with weeds and produced little of the so-called wild rice that once blanketed the upper Great Lakes . Huge swaths of the nutritious native plant - not actually rice but an annual aquatic grass ( genus Zizania ) - were reduced to remnants by dams , industry , logging , and other disruptive land uses over the past century-and-a-half . But with a blend of ancestral knowledge , modern equipment , and cutting-edge expertise , Fond du Lac natural resource specialists are bringing back the " food that grows on water ." Reservation lakes will yield an estimated 30,000 pounds this year ,
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