By Katie Thoresen
Sitting in the stern of a canoe, Nathan Podany tosses handfuls of wild rice seed into the air, letting them fall into Spur Lake and sink to the bottom.
It's just some of the more than 400 pounds of wild rice seeds he and a small group of Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources staff and volunteers are reseeding in this northern Wisconsin lake.
When Podany first started working as a hydrologist for the Sokaogon Chippewa Community a decade ago, the rice chief took him to this lake to talk about wild rice, or manoomin, in the Ojibwe language.
“One of the first things he did and talked about was the importance of this lake,” said Podany. “The last chief of the Sokaogon Chippewa Community would shuttle tribal members here. They would have rice camps, because this was such a prolific lake.”
Wild rice once grew so thick on the lake, you couldn’t see the water from shore. Then in the 1990s, it started to disappear until it was gone altogether.
Today’s reseeding is just a small part of the work that’s gone into restoring wild rice on Spur Lake. This year, the plant started growing again, though it’s not harvestable yet.
“The goal, or the dream, is in a few years to have [the tribal youth] harvest out on the lake and kind of return that activity to Spur Lake,” said Podany.
On Spur Lake and other waterbodies across Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, people have watched as wild rice beds have disappeared. A study published in 2012 found that “watersheds with wild rice have declined by 32% since the early 1900s, and are now primarily limited to northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.”
The work being done by the Sokaogon Chippewa Community and Wisconsin DNR on Spur Lake is not a one off. There are restoration efforts across the region to bring back wild rice in places where it once grew thick.
Wild rice is important in the Great Lakes region.
It helps water quality and wildlife. It’s a food source that has huge importance to the Ojibwe people.
“It's a big spiritual component of who we are and how we came here as a people,” said Kathy Smith. She is a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan and works for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Her title is Ganawandang Manoomin, which means “she who takes care of the wild rice” in the Ojibwe language. Her job is to incorporate culture into the work GLIFWC does.
Smith says her ancestors came to this region because of wild rice.
“That prophecy, it was told to our people to go where the food grows on the water," she said. "Not only has our people really relied on manoomin because of our faith and our belief system, it also brings a sense of community, and brings people together."
Yet there’s no one reason wild rice is declining.
Changing water levels, extreme weather, and human activity all seem to be playing a role.
Gretchen Gerrish is the director of the University of Wisconsin’s Trout Lake Research Station in the northern part of the state.
Starting four years ago, she and other researchers at Trout Lake started studying wild rice in partnership with Lac du Flambeau Tribe, Wisconsin DNR, GLIFWC, and North Lakeland Discovery Center. They were looking at rice beds that were thriving, just doing okay, as well as ones that were doing poorly.
Wild rice seemed to be more abundant on lakes that had continual water movement, which confirms what many already know about wild rice. Gerrish noticed that in the struggling rice beds, there were nearly always competing plants like lily pads.
“It seems like rice will come up and, even in those early phases as it tries to compete with these, they'll shade it out and over compete and create sparse stands,” said Gerrish.
According to Gerrish, lakes with sparse stands almost always had an increase in waterfowl, usually swans, that would eat the wild rice plants.
“If you have a nice, thick rice bed, the birds will eat along the edge. But if you have kind of sparse patches, they seem to be very efficient at munching off the top,” she said.
The rise in plants like lily pads in once abundant rice beds left her with a lot of questions: Was this a natural transition of plants? Was it driven by climate change? Had transitions been managed in the past by people who cultivated wild rice?
“I think wild rice itself is an amazing being that's prominent on the waters, that has really long standing human connections, and that, like other kind of key residents in these waters, it’s important to understand why it might be lost,” she said.
The push to protect wild rice has grown over the last decade. There’s evidence restoration projects between Tribes and conservation organizations and agencies are working.
Kathy Smith has seen that work pay off in the Michigan Upper Peninsula where she helped reseed the Net River.
This year Smith harvested the manoomin with her son for the first time.
“That's what restoration is all about, is to be able to pass that knowledge on to our young ones, our future ancestors is how I like to kind of put it,” said Smith.
While they harvested just enough for a couple of meals, Smith said it was a success; one she hopes others will get to experience across the region.
”It was just so gratifying,” she said.
At the Bois Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota, last year was one of the best rice production years that anyone can recall on Nett Lake in the last 30 years.
Chris Holm, the natural resource director for the tribe, says overall rice production has increased on Nett Lake since the 1990s.
He attributes that to low human pressure and the intact ecosystem around it.
Still, there are things out of their control. While last year was a great year, the year before there was a total crop failure because of the weather.
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