Daniel Brown 2

Johnson knocks the wild rice, or Manoomin in Ojibwe, into his boat with two ricing sticks.

Johnson knocks wild rice, or Manoomin in Ojibwe, into his boat with two ricing sticks.

While the Wild Rice Still Grows, a Native Culture Struggles to Survive

As traditional crops decline due to climate change, Ojibwe fishermen in Wisconsin continue to be harassed—and even shot at—by local whites.

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Deep in the Lac du Flambeau Reservation, patches of wild rice sparkled in the late summer sun along a pristine lake. The rice was so abundant and thick that the sienna-colored water that it grew from was hidden by stalks. Though a rare sight now, this is how many of the lakes used to look in the North Woods, the thickly forested upper half of Wisconsin.

On an early September day, Greg Johnson and Leon Valliere—both members of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Ojibwe natives—drove here, to a lake they preferred not to name, with their friends and family. For several hours, they harvested the thriving wild rice from a canoe. 

Johnson, whose Ojibwe name is Biskakone (which means “Sparks of fire”) used two ricing sticks: one to bend the grass over, and the other to knock the rice hulls into his canoe. Valliere, whose Ojibwe name is Ozaawaagosh (which means “Golden fox”) maneuvered the boat around the grassy lake with a push pole. 

Wild rice has long been a source of spiritual and cultural importance to the Ojibwe. Between 3,000 B.C. and 1,000 A.D., tribal members migrated west from the East Coast, following a prophecy that the impending arrival of a light-skinned race should drive them to move west where food grows on water. That food was wild rice, and they found it all over what is today Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota.

But Johnson and Valliere say the wild rice is declining and they fear it may one day disappear, along with other facets of their traditional practices. “Twenty-five years ago,” Valliere tells The Progressive, “we were living in a different world.”

“When I first started ricing,” Johnson adds, “[wild rice] was on 100 percent of the lakes. We’ve probably got about half that right now.”

Current research backs up this fear. 

“I feel very confident to say, yes, [wild rice] has declined significantly in the last 100 years,” Dr. Annette Drewes, an author and wild rice ecologist, says in an interview. “It’s still declining.”

In a 2012 research paper, Drewes and Dr. Janet Silbernagel, a planning and landscape architecture professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote: “Watersheds with wild rice have declined by 32 percent since the early 1900s, and are now primarily limited to northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.”

“There has also been a significant decline over the past . . . ten to fifteen years,” says Sarah Dance, and a PhD candidate who studies environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Dance, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recently received a Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Grant to help bridge efforts between the university and Indigenous tribes in protecting and restoring wild rice.

Dance added that the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, an intertribal agency that represents eleven Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, collects the most comprehensive data on wild rice in the Badger State. 

In January 2020, the organization released a report by wildlife biologist Peter F. David, which showed that the volume of wild rice across forty bodies of water in Wisconsin had dropped below 1,000 acres over the last ten years. Those same forty lakes and rivers have been surveyed since 1985, when the waters supported more than 5,000 acres of rice. 

While it’s clear that wild rice populations are declining, Drewes and Dance agree that it’s difficult to precisely quantify the overall decline due to a dearth in data, the size of the area in which the plant grows, and its odd annual growth pattern. 

“Climate change is a big threat,” Drewes says. “We’re having heavier rainfall, and water level really plays a role in wild rice production and how abundant it can be from year to year.” 

If the water level is too high, then the wild rice doesn’t have enough energy to grow to the surface, effectively drowning the plant, Drewes explains, adding that climate change also affects pollination and causes disease, such as brown spotting.

Researchers and local ricers, however, attribute the decline to more than just one single effect. There are many other factors, too: dams (which also impact water level), logging, shoreline development, boaters accidentally or purposefully tearing up the grass, use of lawn fertilizer, and invasive plants and fish. “It’s super site-specific,” Dance says. 

Overall, more environmental protections are needed to prevent the wild rice’s decline. Otherwise, according to Johnson, “we are like just relatives of people who used to call themselves ‘Ojibwe.’ ” 

As wild rice harvests decline, the Ojibwe ricers, who often practice a traditional form of spear-fishing, are also facing another threat: attacks by their white neighbors in a longstanding conflict over fishing rights on Wisconsin’s lakes. 

For centuries, Ojibwe people speared walleye during their spawning season by shining lights—traditionally torches—on to the water, making the fishes’ eyes glow so they become an easier target. The band itself, Lac du Flambeau (which means “Torch Lake” in French) was named for this practice after French fur trappers first witnessed the Ojibwe spearing walleye by torchlight.

In 1837 and 1842, the Ojibwe signed two treaties with the United States that handed over much of the native land to the federal government. The treaty also gave the Ojibwe the right to fish, hunt, and harvest wild rice and maple sap off of their reservation. Though guaranteed by law, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the state of Wisconsin slowly rolled back these rights.

In 1983, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that Ojibwe tribal members could hunt and fish in their traditional ways off-reservation, an area now known as the “ceded territories,” which spans several counties in northern Wisconsin. The ruling, known as the Voigt Decision, was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court rulings sparked a wave of violent protests, known as the “Walleye Wars,” in the 1980s and early 1990s across northern Wisconsin. For nearly a decade, white protesters—who are not legally allowed to spear fish or hunt deer using “shining” methods—harassed and assaulted native fishermen, often at boat landing sites.

Johnson, Valliere, and other tribal members who the The Progressive spoke to, allege that such attacks—which include rock throwing, verbal harassment (such as being called “timber ni**er”), being followed along the shore, and more—are widespread and have regularly continued since the Walleye Wars.

In May, Johnson, Valliere, and two of their friends were spearfishing for walleye on a lake in Saint Germain, Wisconsin, when a white man allegedly fired a shotgun at them. 

The fifty-eight-year-old alleged shooter has since been charged with two misdemeanor crimes, including disorderly conduct and operating a firearm while intoxicating, both of which carry a hate crime modifying charge. He has since pleaded not guilty.

Johnson and Valliere were reluctant to discuss many of the details of the case, but they said that such types of harassment regularly happen. 

“That incident,” Johnson recalls, “that’s been years in the making…I mean, you have to [report] everything in a timely manner, because those [alleged shooters] can just get up and leave and then it’s their word against ours, and they always get it.”

“The level of harassment is pretty large-scale,” Dylan Jennings, a spokesperson for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, notes. “If you surveyed a wide array of tribal harvesters and asked them quite plain and simple, ‘Have you ever been harassed?’ and went down the list and described everything that encompasses harassment, you’d probably get a pretty big response.”

“It’s not really that uncommon for a native person to be violently attacked at some point,” Johnson adds. “I got shot at four times this year…before that incident over on Lake Saint Germain.”

Johnson explained that tribal members often do not report these incidents because “nothing gets done” and it gets “swept under the rug.” 

And often, even when reports are filed, the remoteness of the North Woods makes it difficult to prove what happened.

“It’s early spring in northern Wisconsin,” Jennings says, highlighting the region’s far-flung character. “It’s the middle of the night, oftentimes into early morning, that tribal harvesters are out spearing,” and sometimes they’re “out in the middle of nowhere where there’s no cell service or there’s no adequate way to document things.”

Johnson and Valliere add that reporting incidents can also be difficult because the alleged shooters will often run away after throwing rocks or firing weapons in their direction.

“Are there people who oppose treaty rights that are racist?,” asks Valliere, who’s been shot at nearly two dozen times since the Walleye Wars, “yes.” But, he continues, “there’s diversity with regards to individuals that oppose off-reservation treaty rights. Some people oppose all hunting and fishing. They’re pacifist-type people that wouldn’t like to see a mosquito harmed.” 

For Valliere, opposing the Ojibwe’s spearing rights on the belief that it hurts fish populations or the local economy is simply inaccurate. And, as Megan Sheridan, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (which collaborates with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission in compiling an annual spearfishing report), confirmed in an email, “the numbers of fish speared by Ojibwe members are in no way damaging to fish populations or local ecology.”

In fact, Sheridan wrote, “Data collected since tribal spearing began in Wisconsin shows repeatedly that anglers will harvest substantially more walleye than spearers annually from the same lake.” 

But, along with spearfishing and wild rice harvesting, another of the Ojibwe’s traditional crops, maple syrup, has also recently been put in jeopardy.  

Ojibwe people have long harvested maple sap, which they then turn into maple sugar and used as an ingredient in traditional foods. Like wild rice, this form of maple sugar has declined, primarily due to climate change and warming temperatures. 

Johnson and Valliere were still processing and bagging wild rice when this article was published, and therefore they didn’t know the exact weight of their harvest, but Johnson assumes the harvest will be low. 

One day, “[the wild rice] will disappear,” Johnson says, “but we’re ready for that . . . we have other agricultural things that we can do to replace that wild rice.”

“We are very fortunate to be in this life together,” Valliere adds. “We all have the same need and we all have the same desire, and we need to put aside [our] differences and work harder at coming together for the future.”