Manoomin, the Ojibwe word for wild rice, is a hearty species. Every year, the plant grows from seeds, surviving months of muzzling by sheets of ice brought by intense Upper Midwest winters, fending off hungry waterfowl in the spring, and thriving in heat and aquatic habitats all summer long. Manoomin is sensitive and growing increasingly vulnerable to the dual forces of habitat destruction and climate change. 

For millennia, manoomin has grown in the Great Lakes region, thriving in freshwater lakes found in and around what’s now known as Minnesota and Michigan. Its significance is fundamental to Ojibwe identity, drawing back to the creation story that instructed ancestors to migrate to the land where food grew on water. For generations, Ojibwe elders passed on the traditions of ricing: how to harvest the “good berry,” how to practice ceremonies that incorporate manoomin, and how to cook the grain that is as much food as it is medicine. 

But since the 1990s, manoomin has experienced devastating losses in the region, by as much as 50% according to some accounts. The culprit is manifold. Land loss dating back to the first contact with settlers in the mid-1800s prevented peoples of the 11 Ojibwe tribes from unencumbered access to ancestral territories, obstructing traditional stewardship and care. The annexation of land to create Midwestern American territories led to further ecosystem destruction from logging, wetland drainage, and housing development. Since the 1990s, manoomin has also experienced its steepest drop-off, likely due to the accelerating consequences of climate change. Shorter, warmer winters, coupled with increased precipitation, have rendered manoomin a fraction of its once abundant growth. 

That’s why Leanna Goose, a mother, educator, and enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, helped draft a bill to enshrine manoomin’s right to thrive in Minnesota. The Wild Rice Act, the first of its kind, recognizes manoomin’s cultural significance, its role in providing habitat and food for dozens of other species, and the economic impact for those who sell it for income. 

In early April, language from the Wild Rice Act was incorporated into the state Senate’s environmental omnibus bill. Some phrases, like “inherent rights” were replaced with “innate significance.” Other provisions were excluded, such as protecting rice through enforcing stricter permitting standards and preventing boating on uncultivated wild rice beds. 

“We’re not giving up,” Goose told Prism. “We’re going to continue to organize and do what we can to get [it] passed next year.”

Why manoomin needs legal protections

Because manoomin grows on water, it’s highly responsive to changes in water quality, such as increased rain, less ice pack, fewer influxes of water in the summer months, pests, and reduced pollinator presence. There are even threats to cultivation, such as increased reports of “ghost hulls,” or casings of manoomin with no actual grain inside. There’s also competition from other species to contend with, such as geese and other animals that also rely on the increasingly scarce presence of rice. Typically, manoomin is harvested over a two-week period, but changing weather patterns and earlier season rains may jeopardize this too.  

But for Goose, the Wild Rice Act, while not adopted in its full form, has the potential to address something deeper: how the state understands and approaches its relationship to manoomin. 

In Anishinaabe culture, we understand that if we care for the land, the land will care for us.

Leanna Goose, wild Rice Act drafter

“In Anishinaabe culture, we understand that if we care for the land, the land will care for us,” Goose told Prism. This marks the start of a new chapter in the state, with Minnesota incorporating some Indigenous lifeways and wisdom into the Western legal framework, borrowing teachings that the state has historically benefited from suppressing. 

The existence of manoomin long predates that of Minnesota. The state grain is a relative of Ojibwe peoples and a connection to the past and the future, both of which are protected by treaties signed between different Ojibwe tribes and the U.S. federal government in the 1800s. 

“Growing up, my dad showed us how to practice our treaty rights,” Goose said. “He helped to establish a tie to the land around us. That sacred tie I still hold with me in all that I do. I will always protect the land so my children have the same opportunities to practice their treaty rights: to hunt, fish, and gather within their homelands.”

In 1836, 1837, 1842, and 1854, Ojibwe tribes signed nation-to-nation treaties with the U.S. Tribes ceded land but reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather plants and animals. These treaty rights are critical to upholding Ojibwe peoples’ connection with their homeland, cultural practices, and lifeways. 

But treaty rights don’t go as far as protecting against contemporary threats, such as habitat loss and climate change, said Esteban Chiriboga, an environmental specialist for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Historically, what’s been more effective for species protection is utilizing provisions of the Clean Water Act to draft rules around water pollution, which in turn support the health of manoomin, Chiriboga said. 

Under the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency enacted the Tribal Reserved Rights Rule, which advances water quality protections and establishes stricter standards for pollution with a specific interest in upholding treaty rights. Minnesota is the only state with laws on the books to protect manoomin against sulfate pollution, and Chiriboga said that his organization is working with tribes in Michigan and Wisconsin to enact legislation under the Tribal Reserved Rights Rule that would add similar protections to wild rice in those states. As the Trump administration continues to strip federal agencies of their regulatory capabilities, instantiating state protections may be the only viable alternative.

But like climate change, threats against manoomin are mounting with no signs of slowing down. Advocates hope that even the stripped-down provisions from the Wild Rice Act incorporated into the omnibus bill will help address legal vulnerabilities wrought by a Western legal framework. 

“People are realizing that the current way of doing things is not working,” said Bazile Panek, founder of Good Sky Guidance, an organization that supports collaboration and understanding between public institutions and tribes. “The colonial way of ‘managing’ our lands is pretty  hierarchical—it’s human supremacy.”

Panek, an enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, told Prism that we live in a “colonial world,” which forces Indigenous peoples to navigate colonial systems. As things stand, he said it’s worth fighting to integrate Indigenous knowledge into these systems—and tribes should be consulted throughout the implementation process and as part of any future bills addressing Indigenous cultures and practices. 

When drafting the legislation, advocates were careful not to replicate potentially problematic elements of other legal trends, such as the Rights of Nature movement, said Jessica Intermill, a lawyer and policy consultant with Minnesota Interfaith, Power, and Light, who helped draft the Wild Rice Act.  

The crux of Rights of Nature laws is that humans possess the ability to bestow rights onto nature, similar to how rights are given to corporations and people in the U.S. But if a government can give rights, it can take them away, Intermill said. In ideating the bill, Intermill said that she, Goose, and others didn’t want to perpetuate “human-centric ideology that the country is founded in.”

“We have a right to exist, you know, ‘life, liberty, pursuit of happiness’—so does the rice, so does all of these other species [who] are our horizontal relatives,” Intermill said. The bill isn’t about dominion or treating plants and ecologies as “resources” or sites of extraction; it’s about illustrating how the opposite is true. 

“The plants, animals, and water—they take care of us,” Goose said. “Without them, we wouldn’t be here.” 

It’s a colonial mentality that nature is a resource that leads to exploitation, Goose said. “When you think about living beings that we share this Earth with as relatives, you care about them,” she said. 

Madeline Nyblade is an assistant professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry who has studied the impacts of climate change on manoomin health. She told Prism that approaching manoomin humbly has the co-benefit of attuning us to the inherent aliveness of all living things in the world. 

“There’s something about respecting the personhood of manoomin [that] allows us to be more fully human,” Nyblade said. “Respecting our full humanity and our relationship with manoomin is a more creative and thoughtful space that we can imagine even more ways of being in good relation with each other and the land.”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor