BAWA'AM -- Knocking the rice
Ricing (mahnoomin ikayng) now is still done in canoes, wiigwaasejimahnug. Well the
wiigwaas- (birchbark) part isn't true anymore, they're aluminum now. Poling through
the thick, tall reeds of a rice field on a zahgaigun (lake) is hard work; men usually do it.
You can't paddle through these thick reeds, a long pole called gahndakeeigunahk is
used. The woman sits in the stern as he pushes ahead. She uses bahwaigunahkoog -- 2
long sticks called knockers -- to knock ripe grains into the canoe while leaving some to
shatter later and re-seed.You sweep the right knocker over some rice reeds and bend it into the canoe. You hit
the heads sharply with the left knocker, and the ripest grains fall out, then you let the
reeds spring back up. Then you do it the other way on the other side, and you keep on
doing this one arm, the other arm, till the whole canoe is pretty full. How fast it's
gathered depends on how thickly the rice grows, and how ripe it is. It can take
anywhere from 2 hours to most of the day to fill a canoe. Nobody goes out twice in one
day, but the whole bed will be riced-over maybe half-a-dozen times, as grains in the
heads continue to ripen. (Of course you don't take it all, you leave some to re-seed and
some for the birds.)The aim is to keep the long, pointed seeds as unbroken as possible, while threshing it
with the knockers, something never true of commercial wild rice. In the old days, if
anyone was careless and broke up the grains, pulled off the whole heads or squashed
down the reeds, they were asked to leave the lake by the elders. This is not respectful to
the rice and the Manido. For a period in the '50's and '60's, there was a lot of drinking
going on at rice camps. Some people felt this was why harvests got very bad in the early
'70's. There were some other reasons for that, too.JAAMOKE Problems
In the '70's in Minnesota, the State Department of Natural Resources controlled
ricing, but with demonstrations by AIM and some political pressure, Indians didn't
have to buy DNR ricing permits on lakes that lay within reservation boundaries. They
were still regulated by DNR wardens. They had to show tribal ID cards with pictures.
If they caught you ricing without a card on you or on traditional lakes outside rez
boundaries, not only were you arrested, they also confiscated the canoes and anything
else they felt like taking from the rice camp, sometimes they took pickups or cars.
Usually they took any Pipes and Medicine bags. They would say it had dope in it.White people from the nearby rural areas had in this period discovered wild rice as
a cash crop. They went after it in flatbottomed boats that crushed the reeds down. They
pulled off the whole heads with combs made of nails driven into sticks; they sold the
rice to commercial processors. Who sold it packaged as Indian Wild Rice, with
Hiawatha Gitchee-Gummee pix on the labels. Lakes were not reseeding, both because
of this bad practice and also because of acid rain, from the big paper mills on both sides
of the Canadian border. But the DNR was trying to blame it on a few Indian people.
What they were really doing was trying to save the rice for those who took and sold it,Wild Rice
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/food/wildrice.html (2 of 8) [5/17/2004 11:56:41 AM]