The History and Story of Wild Rice
(Page 4 of 4)
January/February 2002
By Janet Cass
Receiving the rice are Ronnie Chilton, Pat Wichern, Pete Thompson, and a few other men who gather under some tarps at the offices of the White Earth Land Recovery Project on Round Lake. The sweet smell of parching rice wafts through the dusty air. Ancient machines shift and creak as the husks blow off, and the rice slowly moves through a long chain of events, at the end of which the shiny dark green, tan, and brown wild rice glimmers in the September sun. The equipment is virtually antique, and much of it handmade: a 1940s Red Clipper fanning mill, a handmade thrasher, a 1980s set of George Stinson’s parching drums (George is a Deer River celebrity), a 1950s-vintage gravity table. The men fiddle around with the machines, fine-tune the gravity table. The air is filled with dust from the rice. Ronnie, Pat, and Pete look a bit like Anishinaabeg chimney sweeps, covered in rice hulls, but smiling beneath all of it. They are local producers, and this is the quality perfection of the small batch, and the simple joy of this life. They are doing their job, and that rice, like that of their ancestors, is going to feed families, and feed spirits.
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To Pat, Ronnie, Spud, Tater, and the rest of the ricers of White Earth, the Ojibwe Wild Ricing Moon is the season of a harvest, a ceremony, and a way of life. “I grew up doing that,” reflects Spud. “You get to visit people you haven’t seen for a whole year, because just about everyone goes ricing.” Far away, a combine is harvesting wild rice somewhere in California, and consumers are eating a very different rice. The Anishinaabeg would not trade for that rice, or for the combine. In the end, this rice right here tastes like a lake, and that taste cannot be replicated.
—Excerpted with permission from Whole Earth magazine, Winter 1999.
Winona LaDuke is Anishinabe from the Bear Clan of the Mississippi Band of the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota. She is the author of All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (South End Press, 1999).
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