Photo: mlive.

By Sheri McWhirte from mlive.com • October 7, 2022

Edith Leoso sat in the bow of a metal, flat-bottomed research vessel slowly making its way toward Lake Superior and recalled family memories of places along the Kakagon River Slough as the boat eased by.

“The manoomin here has taken care of us. For an area that’s economically oppressed, we have relied on the land and the water to feed our families. I mean, I know several times that’s all we ate was deer meat and wild rice,” she said.

“We had a garden, and we had our own potatoes … I don’t remember my grandma ever saying, ‘I got to go to the grocery store.’”

Leoso is the historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, keepers of the largest and last remaining extensive coastal wild rice beds in not only the Great Lakes, but the world.

“Only recently with climate change have we had to do some re-seeding.”

Manoomin is the word for wild rice in Anishinaabemowin, the Native language of the Anishinaabeg peoples of the Great Lakes – such as the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi tribes of Michigan.

Wild rice grows in the most pristine waters in Michigan and Upper Great Lakes region, but only under certain conditions. The species remains susceptible to damage across its life cycle.

In Michigan, Native tribes increased efforts in recent years to restore manoomin to suitable waterways, trying to regain what was lost when European colonization destroyed most of the state’s keystone aquatic grass.

New challenges from climate change exacerbate already difficult, labor-intensive work to overcome widespread historical loss of the once bountiful and nutritious grain that sustained Michigan’s Native peoples for centuries.

Recent years brought climatic changes to the whole Great Lakes region: hotter temperatures, stronger storms, more frequent floods. Some of that the wild rice can handle. Some can’t.

“The temperature change is fine. The hot sun is fine. But it’s the occasional flooding events that come in,” Leoso said.

Climate change-fueled thunderstorms more commonly rip across the landscape and drop colossal amounts of rainfall; for example, 2016 brought a storm in which nine inches fell in 12 hours at the Bad River Band’s reservation in Wisconsin.

Such events don’t simply swell the waterways. Rushing water racing through wild rice beds can tear the delicate plants loose from the substrate, particularly during the most vulnerable “floating leaf” phase. That’s when in spring the plants only have a single tap root holding them to soft bottom sediments in 6 inches to 3 feet of water.

Along with flooding, strong winds and hail can also damage manoomin as it grows through summer months, first blowing away pollen and later partially developed rice kernels.

The annual plant requires a portion of fully developed rice to drop into the water during the autumn harvest so that six months later it will germinate in spring. Plants that die any time before developing seeds halt the cycle of re-growth.

Large stands of manoomin indicate a healthy and functioning aquatic ecosystem.

“It’s called a keystone species because it benefits the water quality,” said Roger LaBine, tribal elder with the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Michigan, where he also works as a longtime water resource technician.

“It’s actually known that if you have wild rice, then you have high-quality water because otherwise it wouldn’t be able to grow there.”

LaBine has been learning about and tending to wild rice his whole life and spent the last four decades advocating for state protections for the delicate and culturally important plant.

Currently, there’s a legislative effort to designate the species as the Michigan state grain, just like Minnesota. The bill has not yet been brought to the Senate floor and time is running out for the current legislative session.

Meanwhile, the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative recently received a $100,000 state grant to develop a statewide stewardship planintended to protect what manoomin stands remain and restore what can be to suitable waterways.

“It is being revived. It’s becoming very important to the tribal communities. It’s becoming understood by the tribal communities,” LaBine said.

“We honor it, and it actually is now part of our identity very much like our language. My mentor, who asked me to continue doing this work after he walked on, told me to fight and restore this just like the tribes are doing for our language, because if we lose this rice, it’s part of our identity that we lose.”

Other challenges

Tawas Lake near Michigan’s Lake Huron shoreline is home to the largest intact manoomin beds in the state. Much of the shallow, 1,600-acre lake includes naturally growing wild rice.

Misinformation about the ecological benefits of wild rice and competition with invasive species are the biggest hurdles for manoomin in the Lower Peninsula lake, said Jennifer Bailey, natural resources specialist and citizen of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan.

Some lakeshore residents consider the manoomin to be “weeds,” she said, and argue for chemical treatment or dredging the lake to encourage less wild rice growth. Other riparian landowners prefer an overgrown lake for duck hunting.

But the biggest threat is Eurasian watermilfoil, an invasive species that creates large mats of floating vegetation that shade out native plants like manoomin. The tribe is working on a 20-acre section of the lake to manually remove the watermilfoil.

Bailey said she is a certified diver who hand plucks the invading aquatic plant and entirely removes it from the lake using a revamped pontoon boat to haul load after load to shore. Just cutting the plant actually causes it to spread more rapidly, so it takes the more labor-intensive process to make any substantive removal progress.

“I’m pulling out these plants, sending them through this hose and it’s going up to the surface where they’re bagged in onion bags for disposal,” Bailey said. “It’s a very slow moving but efficient way of removing the Eurasian watermilfoil.”

Tribal natural resources officials also recently confirmed a macroalga called starry stonewort within the Tawas Lake manoomin beds – the latest invasive threat.

It’s not always invasive species, though.

Just west of Duluth in Minnesota, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa struggle with a perennial native plant called pickerel weed crowding out traditional manoomin beds.

It’s not because of climate change yet still involves human-caused problems. In this case, it’s using river dams to control what otherwise would be naturally fluctuating water levels.

“Sometimes when we think we’re going to manage something, we’re actually detrimental,” said Tom Howes, the tribe’s natural resources manager, as he stood at the shore of the reservation’s Perch Lake.

“In the 70s and 80s people were … managing the lake, or picking its sort of desired water level, and got hung up on this as the elevation the lakes should be, because one year rice was really good, maybe for other reasons. And they stuck at that elevation. Well, stability in these systems is what drives it toward the perennial dominance.”

He said pickerel weed, also called moose ear, thrives in the same conditions as wild rice. It eventually takes over without regular water level fluctuations and requires physical removal, like at Perch Lake.

Other challenges to wild rice involve fish and birds.

In Waishkey Bay where the St. Marys River meets Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, researchers are studying damage done to manoomin by common carp and Canada geese, said Frank Zomer, a biologist for Bay Mills Indian Community in Brimley.

They learned there is “complete overlap” between the manoomin during its most sensitive springtime period and the spawning season for common carp, and they favor the same areas, he said during a Great Lakes Coastal Symposiumsession in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

“Carp when they’re spawning their backs are out of the water, right? They’re thrashing around. So, it’s a really visible thing I kept hearing from people,” Zomer said.

Then during summer, Canada geese become voracious eaters of the aquatic grass.

Zomer said the plants “finally get nice roots going down into the substrate, stand up out of the water, and then geese come along, and they just really love to chop, you know? They eat the whole top of the plant. So, it’s never going to flower. It’s never going to produce seed.”

The tribe is now experimenting with fences built around manoomin beds, which he said are effective against both carp and geese but are extremely labor intensive.

“You’re wading around and trying to drive fence posts and it just takes a while.”

Michigan’s history of pollution also takes a toll.

One Michigan tribe is working to restore suitable habitat for manoomin to areas damaged by historical copper mining and the legacy effects of a type of mine tailings called stamp sands. Elevated levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, copper and aluminum were found in wild rice tested by researchers working with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community – rendering it unsafe to eat.

Plotting the future

LaBine is a 67-year-old great-grandfather who hopes to retire soon but is more widely known as Michigan’s most knowledgeable wild rice expert. He is encouraged by a reclaiming of interest in wild rice restoration and educationamong Michigan’s younger tribal people.

Growing restoration efforts continue the work of LaBine’s mentor and uncle who had a “vision of bringing back wild rice to our traditional waters, into our traditional homelands,” he said.

Manoomin is central to the tribes’ migration story from the Atlantic Coast. The once widely abundant grain was integral to the Anishinaabeg peoples choosing to settle in the Great Lakes, LaBine said.

“Finding this food that grows on the water not only fulfilled that prophecy, but it enabled us to survive,” he said from a rice-filled canoe on Brule Lake in the farthest stretches of the western Upper Peninsula.

Anishinaabeg peoples could endure long, cold, snowy winters in the Upper Great Lakes region, so long as they maintained sufficient stores of water, manoomin, and maple sugar.

LaBine hopes to see the species gain back at least some of the thousands of acres lost to harmful post-settlement logging, industry, and agricultural practices. Settlers in the 1800s even wrongfully believed water bodies caused malaria, which led to the systemic ditching, draining, and destruction of critical wild rice habitat across much of Michigan.

The best chance for widespread recovery of manoomin across the Great Lakes likely will involve careful assessment of prime habitat, LaBine said, maybe even spreading wild rice to places it historically grew or waterways where it never has but could.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers researchers are amid a six-year project to study factors in wild rice production at Lac Vieux Desert, like precipitation, water quality and temperature, competing plants, and soil content.

They are focused on nutrient concentrations in the water column and in sediment, soil physiochemical properties, and hydrology. The goal is to find the best possible places to attempt wild rice restoration.

“We’re hoping that the data that we collect will give us a good indication of future sites and what conditions would be best to pursue an introduction,” LaBine said.

“I think that this plant has the adaptability to continue to stay around as long as we care for it.”

Reporting portions of this article was partially supported by a fellowship program through the nonprofit Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

To see the original report and read related stories, follow this link to the mlive.com website. https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2022/10/part-of-tribal-identity-great-lakes-wild-rice-threaten...