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MENUCREDITS: The canoe logo was drawn by me (FreeHand) in 1994 to use on a flyer for a Heart of the Earth
Native Science Project-sponsored stortytelling about Wild Rice by a project staffer. For these web pages, I
added a big harvest moon and colored it. Credits for the paintings and drawings used in the "Desjarlait"
section linked-to here are on the Minnesota Indian Artists page, which honors the Red Lake Ojibwe Pat
DesJarlait and the DesJarlait artist-family. Several old photos or drawings here are from Canada
SchoolNet's CanaDisk image library.
Others were scanned by me from Frances Densmore's Chippewa Customs, material she collected from
1905-1925 (U.S. Bureau of Ethnography) which was reprinted in hardcover by Ross and Haines Old Books,
Minneapolis, 1970, long out of print (a defunct company). Nodinens story about maple sugaring is taken
from there. Densmore's How Indians Use Wild Plants for Fooid, Medicine & Crafts compiled over the same
priod as her other Ojibwe books is the source of some photos of sugaring and ricing tools.
Densmore's long-out-of print reports to the Bureau of American Ethnology were reissued by Dover (in
paperback) and by the Minneapolis firm of Ross and Haines Old Books, but are out of print from both
sources; several have been reissued by the Minnesota Historical Society. Densmore, a woman trained in
music, is unique among American anthros in having had a very strong interest in the crafts of native daily
life and beauty; she collected recipes, info about medicine plants, and beadwork and other clothing/craft
patterns, methods, and tools, in her extensive work with Native women (whom most anthros ignore). She
also collected (and was musically equipped to transcribe melodies, during the early period where recording
technology was inadequate) extensive collections of Ojibwe songs and rites of Midewewin. Her Ojibwe
material is incomparable, there is nothing else like it in the history of anthropology or ethnography. She was
fortunate in having a brilliant and highly interested interpreter, Mary Warren English, whose brother's
book on Anishnabe history -- the only one by a Native until the late 20th-century -- was written before his
early death in the 19th century.
Maude Kegg told many stories of her life in Indian to John D. Nichols when she was teaching him
Anishnaabemowin, the language, in 1970 - 1986. The stories were first recorded, then she dictated it slowly,
and he wrote it. Then later, she listened and read, and gave a translation. The stories were published in
facing-pages English and Anishnabemowin in 1991 by the University of Minnesota Press. She has been a
guide and interpreter at the Mille Lacs Indian museum since her husband died in 1968. In 1990, she
received a National Heritage Fellowship from th National Endowment for the Arts (which is going to be put
out of existence by the present Congress) in recognition of her achievement as a flk artist (she is a master
craftsperson at beadwork), and her role as cultural interpreter. Her book, Portage Lake: Memories of an
Ojibwe Childhood is very highly recommended even if you are not learning the language and don't bother
with the facing pages or the incomprehensible professional linguist material Nichols put at the end (part of
his PhD thesis). Although 1/2 of 178 pages isn't very much stories for $18 (paperback). It was also published
in Canada by the University of Alberta Press. Nichols also published most of the stories from it in various
other books and journals.
I "learned by doing" for both sugaring and wild rice by accompanying students at the AIM Survival
Schools Red School House (St. Paul) and Heart of the Earth (Minneapolis) on sugaring and ricing camping
trips in 1976, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1987, and 1994, and participated in cooking with maple syrup and wild rice
at various fund-raising events, and regular school feasts. I learned a lot about the traditions and science of
wild rice from participating as a researcher/investigator for the lawyers in LCO's long lawsuit (eventually
won) against NSP.Wild Rice
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/food/wildrice.html (7 of 8) [5/17/2004 11:56:41 AM]