The Taming of the Grain 
North America’s native grain, wild rice, has finally been domesticated 
by Raymond Sokolov 
Unmolested worked the women, 
Made their sugar from the maple, 
Gathered wild rice in the meadows 
Longfellow, 
The Song of Hiawatha 
Sitting in Cambridge, Massachu- 
setts, in the big Brattle Street house 
his father-in-law had given him, Long- 
fellow presumed to write an epic of 
Indian tribal life in northern Minne- 
sota. How true a general picture of 
Native American civilization by the 
shores of Gitche Gurnee he may have 
managed to draw I cannot say. But 
it is certain that the real Minnehahas, 
when they harvested wild rice for their 
Hiawathas, did not do the job on any 
meadow. 
Wild rice, the only native North 
American grain, grows in the lakes 
and rivers of Minnesota, Upper Michi- 
gan, Wisconsin, and adjoining parts 
of Canada. Wild rice is an aquatic 
grass, appropriately labeled Zizania 
aquatica in scientific nomenclature. 
At least the second half of the bo- 
tanical name is appropriate. Zizania, 
picked as wild rice’s genus name for 
no reason I can fathom, comes from 
a Greek word for a weed, probably 
the darnel, that grows among wheat. 
The vernacular name is even more 
misleading, since wild rice is not some 
uncultivated version of domesticated 
rice, Oryza, but closer in nature to 
wheat. The early French explorers of 
its native range did not help dispel 
the general confusion when they 
dubbed it folle avoine, or “crazy oat.” 
With so much misinformation sur- 
rounding wild rice, perhaps Long- 
fellow should be pardoned for his rel- 
atively trivial error. It is a shame, 
though, that he did not know about 
the exceedingly poetic, traditional 
Ojibway technique for harvesting wild 
rice, which would have made a splen- 
did episode in Hiawatha. 
Instead of striking out over dry land, 
the Indian women, two to a canoe, 
collected the rice while entirely wa- 
terborne. An observer, writing in 1820, 
described harvesting on Big Sandy 
Lake: 
It is now gathered by two of the women 
passing around in a canoe, one sitting 
in the stern and pushing it along, while 
the other, with two small pointed sticks 
about three feet long, collects it in by 
running one of the sticks into the rice, 
and bending it into the canoe, while with 
the other she threshes out the grain. This 
she does on both sides of the canoe al- 
ternately, and while it is moving. 
On a good day the women went 
home with a canoe full of grain. And 
that is still the way wild, so-called 
lake rice is harvested in Minnesota. 
State law regulates every aspect of 
the rice harvest, setting an opening 
day for the season, protecting Indian 
rights over waters on their reserva- 
tions, and forbidding the use of any 
harvesting tools other than Indian- 
style sticks. Such rules were intended 
not only to perpetuate a charming 
technique but, principally, to safe- 
guard the interests of Indians and in- 
dividuals against competition from an 
extremely efficient harvesting ma- 
chine perfected in 1923 and then 
quickly outlawed after a public outcry 
went up against it. 
As a result, the rice harvest on Min- 
nesota lakes, which normally begins 
in late August, is what you might call 
a grass-roots phenomenon involving all 
manner of folk — Indians and white 
hobbyists alike. The total crop of lake 
rice is not immense, averaging about 
500,000 pounds a year in the seventies. 
But the local, atomized nature of the 
harvest lends it an appealing, com- 
munal quality. On the other hand, the 
scarcity of the grain and its prestige 
among gourmets have made wild rice 
an expensive item outside the state, 
one that is too valuable for many poor 
Indians to keep for their own use. 
That, at any rate, is what some Native 
American radicals charge, yearning 
perhaps for the return of precolonial 
days when wild rice played a crucial 
role in the survival of the 50,000 Ojib- 
ways who lived in the forests of the 
Upper Great Lakes. 
Even today it is still possible to ob- 
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