Community Garden Magazine Issue Two October 2015 | Page 28

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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