Ojibwe Ricing and the Glade Top of Chequamegon

Wild rice is not rice. It is a tall aquatic grass, Zizania palustris, that grows in the shallow lakes of the upper Great Lakes and is harvested in late summer by canoe. The harvester poles slowly through the standing stalks, bending them over the gunwales and knocking the grain loose with wooden flails. The process has not changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The Ojibwe word for it is manoomin, and it is central to Ojibwe cosmology, economics, and diet in a way that has no equivalent in the European agricultural tradition.

The wild rice beds of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota were guaranteed to the Ojibwe bands as a treaty right when the ceded-territory agreements were signed in the eighteen forties and fifties. The right was contested for most of the following century, was reaffirmed by the Voigt Decision of nineteen eighty-three, and is now managed through the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which sets ricing quotas in cooperation with the state of Wisconsin.

The ricing that happens in the lakes of the Chequamegon-Nicolet watershed each September is a continuation of a practice that the forest, in its current second-growth form, surrounds and protects. The lakes where the rice grows are filtered by the watershed that national forest management has spent ninety years restoring. The treaty rights and the land management are entangled in a way that neither the tribal governments nor the Forest Service can fully separate.

The Chequamegon-Nicolet also holds the northern unit of the North Country National Scenic Trail, which runs about four thousand eight hundred miles from North Dakota to Vermont. Sections through the forest pass through ricing country and the forest's lake district, a landscape that looks like northern Minnesota and extends, without visible boundary, from one forest unit to the other.