Winona La Duke is an Ojibwe community organizer, economist and author who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, where she works on Indigenous rights and environmental issues. She is the founding director of both the White Earth Land Recovery Program and Honor the Earth. Winona ran as the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party in the United States presidential elections in l996 and 2000.

AM: What is wild rice?

Winona: We call wild rice manoomin in our language, which means “the good seed”. It’s a grain that grows on lakes and rivers in the central part of the continent. It used to be more widespread, but as they took out some of those areas or did recreational development or dredging, they destroyed a good portion of the rice. It’s my understanding that the range once was much greater. I talked to some traditional people from Maine, and they said in their language they had a word for wild rice. But the mother lode of where wild rice exists in the world is the great lakes region. The variety there doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s unique. It’s the only native North American grain. Wild rice is an immense part of an eco-system. And of course Minnesota’s the land of ten thousand lakes. They don’t all have rice on them, but many do.

AM: Could you describe the traditional practices of manoomin?

Winona: For Ojibwes, or Anishinaabeg is how we call ourselves, rice is a really central
part of our history. A long time ago prophets came to us. We were instructed to move
from the east, because we would perish. We were instructed to follow the shell which
appeared in the sky. We stopped in seven places along the way, and the fact is that we
are actually very closely related to like the Wampanoags and the Abenaki and the Lenni Lenape. They speak the same languages we do. So we did originate there in our
most recent migration, which may have been a thousand years ago or two thousand years
ago. We moved to the place where the food grows on the water, which was wild rice.
We were given the gift of wild rice and the knowledge of it in a month which is known as Manoominike Giizis, which is the wild rice making moon. I like to talk about that, because we also have Namebini Giizis the sucker moon, and we have Onaba Giizis, which is the hard-crusted snow moon, which is in March, when it freezes and thaws. Not everybody is on the Julius Cesar calendar.

We have an immense amount of wild rice on our lakes. The reservations in northern
Minnesota were created around the rice beds. You put your tobacco out, your prayers
out, and then two people launch out in a canoe. One knocks and one pulls. The
knockers on our boat are thirty inches long, and they are cedar, and they look kind of like
large drumsticks. The pole is a long, eighteen to twenty feet, with a duckbill at the
bottom. And you push out on the lake. You can’t paddle the canoe because for the most
part its quite thick. You have to be somewhat agile and athletic.

You knock the rice into the canoe with your sticks. You go from side to side and make
this swish, and then this clatter of seeds hit. It’s a beautiful sound. You start in the
morning early. You quit or knock off, as we say, around twelve or one. When the mist
has lifted you can hear across the lake your relatives or the people in
the village all riceing.

Then you come in and you haul it in and you put it in gunnysacks, and then you take
it to your processor. We’re the largest processor in the area. Then you lay it out to dry.
And then you put it in this equipment, to parch it for a couple of hours, and then you let
it out, and then traditionally you dance on it to get the hulls off and people do still dance,
but we also use a basher, which sounds quite violent. It takes the hulls off
and is run by a tractor motor. Then you winnow it. You use a fanning mill if you’re
doing 50,000 pounds, which is what we do. Then you sort it by size.

After that you have a feast. This is very important. You always feast your rice. We feast all of our harvests. We have a big thanksgiving feast for the first rice, and we have a big dance. We have a wild rice dance starting in August we also have our ceremonies, and powwows.

I say that because this is kind of the intersection between traditional values and industrialization. What happened to us is these anthropologists came. First they messed us up and then they came back in the 1920s and they watched us rice. Sammy Jenks had this worldview, his commentary was, “How could so majestic a grain be given to such a primitive people? They have to work so little to get it. It’s like Ojibwe Mardi Gras or kind of an early Christmas present. Then they dance and feast. They’re never going to become civilized, because they are not that productive.”

So from my vantage point, Jenks had this view of what industrialized agriculture is about. This separation of culture from growing. It was kind of a preview of that. Also added with it was this bent on colonization. “These primitive people are dancing too much and singing.” I don’t want to say a vendetta, but in its own way it was. So they set about trying to domesticate wild rice. They messed around at the University of Minnesota for about thirty years.

AM: This is in the 1920s, ‘30s?

Winona: Yes. They didn’t get it domesticated until I think the ‘50s. They started
growing it in diked rice patties to domesticate it. By the sixties, they had
created the advent for the paddy rice industry. In the ‘70s it really kind of took off.
The university declared it as this fantastic accomplishment of the green revolution. The
University of Minnesota’s quite involved with the green revolution. This is kind of their
– “Look what we’ve done in Minnesota.”

So then they declared it the state grain in, I think, 1977. They poured all this money into it in Minnesota, and about two years later the majority of the paddy rice industry moved to California. Today three-quarters of all paddy rice that is grown is grown in diked rice patties in northern California.

We, as Ojibwe, have been in this battle for many years, because you can’t compete with a guy with a combine. They use fertilizers and fungicides. The domesticated paddy rice doesn’t taste like a lake. It taste like a paddy. It’s similar to the fair trade issue in coffee, but different. It is a technology and a whole process choice. So we started battling them in the ‘80s, and in 1986 my reservation White Earth sued Anheiser-Busch. They had a picture of two Indians in a canoe on a lake full of wild rice that was called Onamia wild rice, which is a band of Ojibwe.

It was entirely from California, so we sued them. We ended up with a state labeling law in Minnesota, which requires that paddy rice producers in the state of Minnesota must label the paddy rice as cultivated. The loophole is of course you can drive the entire California production through that. Today millions of pounds of wild rice is produced in California without the labeling law. It’s shipping into Minnesota to get processed “green.” Then its labeled “Minnesota processed” to add to the gross misrepresentation of the product.

In the late ‘90s the University took up the idea of genetic work on wild rice. Ron Phillips, the researcher, cracked the DNA sequence in 2000 and began the mapping of it. All the Ojibwe bands and the Minnesota Chippewa tribe wrote them a letter that said, “This isn’t something you can tinker with. This is an essential part of our culture. This is who we are and we reserve this, and this is part of our treaty.” The treaty specifically said that we had the right to rice, and to harvest wild rice. The treaty did not say you have the right to genetically engineer the rice. We started battling them in the 1990’s and we’ve been battling them since.

AM: Can you talk a little bit about rice’s food, medicine, and spiritual purpose for your
culture?

Winona: At all our traditional feasts and ceremonies we have wild rice. We
always eat our traditional foods. I’m not a Christian, so I don’t have an equivalency on
this, but we have instructions, as Ojibwe people, on what it is that is essential about
being Ojibwe. A lot of that is related to these foods, and foods are considered
medicine.

We have a responsibility to take care of all of our foods, and to ensure their vitality.
My organization, the White Earth Land Recovery Project, has a pretty wide array of
food-related activities. We make maple syrup. Until about 150 years ago, most of the maple syrup came from Indian people. We were the producers. Now, that’s not so. We harvest all our medicines in the woods. Wild rice is really a good food for anybody who has allergies and it has a really high nutritional content. It’s high in fiber and high in vitamins.

The University of Minnesota has been engaged in analysis of various
elements of wild rice. In particular, they have been looking at the effect of it on
cholesterol. A study that came out last year said it had an astonishing
effect on diminishing cholesterol.

So it’s kind of the dichotomy of world-views. We would say, “You should eat rice,” and
they would say, “We can create a pill that has that essential element extracted.” From
our standpoint we know that it has an effect on us and so we eat it. My family eats 150
pounds of rice a year. For us there’s this teaching that food is our medicine.

From our vantage point, what we notice is that with the decline of traditional foods in these communities, because of loss of access to them, a lot of our people got sick. So today you have a really high level of diabetes. About forty percent of the adults over forty have diabetes in my reservation. As it turns out the best medicine for that is these traditional foods, along with exercising.

AM: When the commercialization of wild rice happened in California, was there an
economic impact on your community?

Winona: Huge, it devastated our rice economy. My family has always been involved in
riceing. My father met my mother selling wild rice. It was the way people made money.
That’s what the Ojibwe have. It’s always been a major source of trade and a major source
of income for our people.

My reservation has two of the poorest counties in the state of Minnesota. The people
who rice are people who do not have full-time jobs, and don’t want them. They actually
would prefer to harvest and live in the woods. Those people are the people who are most
impacted by this loss of income. The advent of the paddy rice industry totally destroyed
our market, which was a small market to start with. I’m not opposed to all paddy rice, if
Uncle Ben’s wants to sell that nasty old stuff, go ahead. You’re going to spend
eight bucks a pound, ten bucks a pound. Lake-grown wild rice is probably going for
twelve bucks a pound retail. It’s like the difference between fair trade and organic bird-
friendly coffee and Folger’s.

Native people are the poorest people in the country, and we’re the poorest people in the
state of Minnesota. What we have on my reservation is three things, as we say: we have
wild rice, we have wind, and we have really smart people. So I feel like we should get
the fair value.

AM: Can you talk about the attempts to patent wild rice.

Winona: The patenting occurred a few years ago. Norcal wild rice holds the
patents on a production system of creating sterile males that they created.

AM: Did they do this by a genetically engineered gene transfer?

Winona: Seed selection. There’s no genetically engineered wild rice anywhere. They did
this seed selection, and they created this patented variety. They have two patents.

AM: So it’s the beginning of outside entities owning the genetics of the plant that was
nurtured by your community for maybe thousands of years.

Winona: Right. So that occurred, and then a DNA study mapping the genome of
wild rice the University of Minnesota also occurred. Around 2001 we held some
meetings in our communities, including meetings with the very traditional and the
religious leaders of our communities. I brought in someone from the Center for Food
Safety who worked on the basmati rice case.

AM: With Vandana Shiva?

Winona: Yes I know Vandana and I asked her what to do. I told her we had a similar
problem and she told me who to talk to. We held this meeting and explained to our
people. The questions asked were “Who gave them that right?” “How’d this happen?”
“Did Nanaboozhoo give them that right?” which is one of our half-
man, half-spirit people.

AM: That’s where the cultural law originates?

Winona: Right. They asked, “What are they doing?” Which is the supreme rift.
The University continued on and was generally patronizing.

AM: Who funded the university to map the genome?

Winona: The USDA. The University’s response to us is once the Ojibwe understand,
they’ll be comfortable. The general argument that basically if we were smart enough
we’d be happy. The Ojibwe didn’t really care for that. We feel like we’re good on rice.
We have a little more knowledge than the university does. We have a 2000-year
relationship with the rice, we get it. Not that we’re not open to discussions on
knowledge.

AM: This reminds me of a quote that I read by Charles Muscoplat, from the
University of Minnesota, which embodies a Eurocentric world-view. He said “European
Scientific tradition is to dig, explore, and to gain knowledge. The Anishinaabeg accept
wild rice as a gift from the creator.” What’s your response to that?

Winona: First of all, I guess on some fundamental level there’s this presumption on his
part that Anishinaabeg is not a vital culture. That we don’t change anything.
His perception and analysis of our culture is shallow. He has no concept of who we are. Essentially, there’s this divergence and this perception that we’re primitive, which continues to this day, and that somehow science is infallible and that science has a right. Our perspective is that you don’t have all rights. At some point there should be a question of university ethics. They like to hide behind this cloak of academic freedom and say we’re limiting their academic freedom. The university people make claims like “What the Ojibwe are proposing to do would restrict our ability to combat bioterrorism.” Which I thought was totally cheating. We didn’t say they couldn’t stop anthrax or botulism. We’re just talking about rice.”

AM: Going back to the quote by Muscoplat, it’s really at best a cultural ignorance
around the wisdom embedded in traditional knowledge. Or you could even say the
science embedded in traditional wisdom. It doesn’t see it or it chooses to ignore it.

Winona: Right, there’s an entire cultural bias. There’s this presumption of this right
that science has got, and essentially that science should have all rights. Our strategy is to
say, “From our cultural perspective, you don’t” and to question that. We also have
a treaty.

We have this legal right, which we believe is worth something. You know, the United
States may not believe that treaties are worth anything, but we actually believe that our
treaties are worth something. But a larger cast of the discussion is that we believe that
the mother lode of biodiversity is worth protecting. In this case, the only place
where wild rice grows proximate to paddy rice is in the state of Minnesota. So what
we are sure of is that they should have no right to contaminate [by cross pollination of
genetically engineered rice] the natural lakes of Minnesota. The argument that I’m
making is that people probably don’t want ten thousand genetically engineered lakes.

So it turns out that even a very conservative park rep at city council
said, “We don’t always agree with Winona, but she one hundred percent right on this.”
It’s an Ojibwe driven strategy, because that’s our responsibility. But I’m calling on Minnesota loyalty to an ecosystem and pride in what it is to be a Minnesotan.

One of our deepest concerns though is California. California has no sense of responsibility towards the lake rice. Sometimes in marketing of California paddy rice, they say that the Ojibwes, or the Indians, used to be involved with wild rice- they use the past tense on some of their marketing. But now the Indians are gone. Like the Indians are gone and moved on and became Casino-owning Indians. Implying that riceing was something we used to do, but we still do it. Millions of pounds of California paddy rice come into Minnesota. And that’s live seed. It’s still green. It’s not processed, and there’s a risk of contamination.

AM: Would you explain the initiative you are working on to prevent the genetic
modification of wild rice?

Winona: The University has said that they aren’t intending to genetically engineer wild
rice, but they want the right to do that. What I’m after is an ethics agreement with the
University, because that’s the most likely place that it would originate. We’re
trying to get a piece of legislation passed in Minnesota that would ban the introduction of
genetically engineered wild rice. My responsibility is to protect our rice. I’d like to
protect all things, but right now this is my job.

For more information:
www.savewildrice.org
www.nativeharvest.com