“I don’t understand why I like it because it really is hard work! I’m serious! When you get up the next day you feel like somebody beat you up, you know. But you can’t stop doing it because…I don’t even know how to explain this, it’s like it gets in your blood, you can’t stop… you really get hooked on it. And it’s a very spiritual thing.”
– Clam Lake, WI wild rice harvester
In late summer across the rice growing region people begin to pull out canoes, find their ‘ricing sticks’ and prepare for the annual gathering of wild rice. A few individuals rent planes to fly over the beds prior to harvest to check rice lakes; others call local friends and fellow harvesters to assess conditions; for some it’s an early morning drive or boat trip to check the ripening of the seed heads. Once gathered exclusively by American Indians, the hand-harvest of wild rice now includes people of Euro-American descent and other ethnic groups. However, participation in wild rice harvesting, represented by license sales in Minnesota and Wisconsin, has declined since the 1980’s.
* Information presented below comes from interviews and site visits on tribal, state and treaty ceded rice beds in 2005 and 2006 with more than 100 wild rice harvesters on six different lakes. A.L. Drewes
Harvesters
Harvesters on average began harvesting wild rice at an average age of 20 years. The earliest age reported for first time harvesting of wild rice was six years, while the oldest was 58 years. Fully 70% of all harvesters in this study began harvesting wild rice by the time they were 21 years of age.
Harvesters typically gather wild rice in pairs. Historically, wild rice gathering was an activity often done by pairs of women during the time of rice camps. Beginning in the 1930’s, two-man teams and husband-wife partnerships became more common as wild rice developed as a commercial enterprise.
Today we see a variety of partners harvesting wild rice, and even some who go it alone. Friends and relatives are the most common pairs found across the region, with parent/child and spouse combinations occurring less often.
Traditionally, the gathering of wild rice plays an important role in the Ojibwe seasonal harvest cycle and is still passed on from generation to generation through families. In the early 1900’s wild rice grew as a market commodity and families, in addition to harvesting for personal use, harvested wild rice and sold it unprocessed to pay for new school clothes and other needed items. During this time harvest by non-traditional groups also increased.
Introduction to harvesting wild rice
“Well, I got started, my dad started me. I guess my mom was too tired or refused to go one day or something and he talked me into going and that’s how I got going. Then my wife [sic] got going by marrying me.” – Mallard Lake
“I was with my Uncle Ray… He came up from Milwaukee and he wanted to go out but there were no other adults around the village at the time would [sic]go picking […]and so he asked me to go pole him around in the old rice boats so I did.” – Rice Lake
“My grandmother... we knew a lot because we baby-sat and we had to hand-parch the rice when they got off the lake so you were happy to go ricing because you didn’t have to baby-sit.” – Big Rice Lake
Whether opting out of babysitting, filling in for absent family members or marrying into a ricing family, over a third of harvesters were introduced to harvesting by family members and/or friends.
“I began 10 years ago and I learned it from Harry Smith, who was an old man, he would be in his 70s now... And he was a very traditional man, had grown up in traditional Ojibwe camps… So he knew a lot about the culture and the stories behind it, how things are done, how to make wild ricing poles and knockers and stuff like that…We had become friends and he invited me. I had expressed interest in it and he said I’ll take you out and show you.” – Mud Lake
“…so I had a good friend at work and I was working in Hudson for Nyro and one of my friends told me that he was going to go ricing. Well I started asking questions and the next thing I know, I gathered up a partner and we went ricing. First time, with no experience whatsoever.” – Clam Lake
Harvesters also reported learning to gather wild rice by watching others and just going out and trying it. If they were lucky they hooked up with an experienced ricer who showed them the techniques or invited them along when a regular partner was absent.
“Yeah, we’d heard about it and it always kind of intrigued us but didn’t know how to get started and didn’t know where to find rice that was pickable and had never been shown how to do it, the technique. And we weren’t sure what to do with it after we picked it either, so we found some experts and they kind of held our hand and walked us through the whole process.” – Mallard Lake
“…then finally we all got together and …no, not all of us …just us ambitious people, we went out there and we gave it a try.” – Big Rice Lake
“…me and a buddy of mine had talked about it a little bit, and heard about wild rice and we just decided one year we were going to take the canoe and find out what it was all about and that’s kind of how we started and decided to get into it.” – Upper Rice
Incentives for starting
The fact that harvested wild rice can be sold the same day for cash was a strong incentive for many individuals to begin gathering wild rice.
“It was a source of income for me when I was in high school. I remember saving money to buy my first shotgun, my first deer rifle, to buy shotgun shells on hunting trips, to help pay for college. It was an important source of income.” – Mallard Lake
“ So for kids back then, there was no money,… we didn’t have a whole lot of small jobs or anything like that so when that time of the year came up it was like Woohoo! I’m going to go out and make $20 today.” - Clam Lake
“…then we did it for the money-wise, we could make approximately about 5 to 600 dollars a year for school clothes. Then we always kept some for eating purposes.” – Clam Lake
“I was a young teenager. And my parents riced you know, it was supplemental income for them, back in those days. So, you know, in them days we didn’t save any of it for ourselves, we sold it all.” – Mud Lake
Lack of equipment didn’t deter others from joining in the harvest, even using their hands to strip rice from the stalks.
“I was really young, I was probably 10 or 11, and I walked with the oars to hit the rice and I got like 10 pounds… The first time I just waded with a washtub.” – Clam Lake
“Oh, I picked just like a pound or two. I didn’t even use sticks. I didn’t know how to use sticks. I just stripped it off… then I was able to sell a few pounds to the Watt rice buyer because she was so nice.” – Big Rice Lake
“We had no rice sticks or nothing, and we picked rice by our hands. We was taking it all by the stalk ‘cause we didn’t have no rice sticks or nothing.” – Rice Lake
“…we used to take our big boat, our big fishing boat and go out there with bread bags and pick rice [by hand]. And we … you know… rice was $.50 a pound and we could pick 6 – 7 pounds after school and to get $3.00 or $4.00 in your pocket in them days was lots and lots of money. You know, you could buy a candy bar for a nickel.” – Upper Rice Lake
Motivation
Harvesters gather wild rice for a variety of reasons:
“picking rice and logging are the last two vestiges of cowboys in Minnesota” [a Minnesota harvester]
Harvest amounts
Wild rice production varies from year to year and from lake to lake. Harvesters regularly talk about ‘good’ and ‘poor’ years and direct their harvest accordingly across lakes and years. Depending on whom you ask across the rice growing region, estimates of individual harvest vary widely, from those harvesting only a few pounds for personal use to those selling hundreds of pounds of harvested wild rice to buyers for processing and resale.
“The only ones that you see in the rice beds are the ones that are eating the rice and a handful of them that are selling it but they… for the most part people you see on the lake today are eating rice, you know.” - Clam Lake
Average wild rice harvest by individuals tends to be less than 500 pounds in a season, with smaller harvests of 300 or less more common. However there are harvesters who gather 1 to 2,000 pounds in a season. In 2006 in a Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Survey, 80% of harvesters reported harvesting between 0 and 500 pounds of wild rice. Wisconsin tends to have smaller average harvests (107 pounds per person reported).
