November is National Native American Heritage Month, and BridgeDetroit teamed with One Detroit for a report on wild rice — the state’s official native grain and a key part of Indigenous history in Michigan.

Known as “manoomin,” wild rice used to grow in abundance across the Great Lakes region. Now, there’s an effort underway to bring it back.

BridgeDetroit’s Jena Brooker and One Detroit’s Bill Kubota went along for a manoomin harvest on the Au Sable River where new rice beds now grow on the northeastern Michigan river because of a dam removal. Brooker and Kubota capture the cultural significance of manoomin, how it’s processed and why it’s so important in the region.  

When heading out to harvest, each two-person canoe is manned with a push pole and a rice knocker. A four-day weekend at the Au Sable with a team of 20 ricers can yield anywhere from 400 to 600 pounds of rice.

Eryn Hyma of the Little Band of Ottawa Indians in Grand Rapids said she’s learned the importance of the harvesting practices and wants the story to be more widely known.

“I didn’t have any of these feelings about rice until I got to come out and rice and realize, ‘Oh my God, this is why I exist.’ This is what allowed my ancestors and family to thrive and sustain themselves,” she said. “It’s really special, and I want more people to understand that story.”

Long ago, manoomin grew along the Detroit River, but over time, as the city of Detroit grew, it went away.

“The history of draining wetlands and clearing swamps is the history of displacing wild rice in a lot of ways,” said Antonio Cosme, co-founder of the nonprofit Black to the Land Coalition.

Once covering much of Michigan’s inland lakes and streams, wild rice is indigenous to the Great Lakes region but has largely disappeared due to colonization, environmental degradation, and climate change. Today, there is little information about where Michigan’s remaining rice beds exist.

To aid in its restoration across the state, the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative, comprising tribes indigenous to the Great Lakes region, state officials and academic experts crafted a stewardship plan. The 122-page plan is believed to be the first of its kind to ensure that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people “live together in a good way with mnomen,” preserving the aquatic grass for future generations.

In 2023, the state Legislature named manoomin as the state’s native grain — the first designation in the nation — and it coincides with a cultural resurgence marked by new manoomin camps, soup cook-offs and summits. 

Jared Ten Brink, a co-author of the stewardship plan and an educational researcher at the University of Michigan, told BridgeDetroit and One Detroit, that “our lives and our practices help wild rice.”

Ten Brink, who is also a member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi, has noted that manoomin is a sustainable food source that doesn’t need to be shipped from across the globe or refrigerated and doesn’t require preservatives for storage.

Detroit’s Belle Isle “is a place where wild rice could have been,” Ten Brink said. “And, that’s a place (if the conditions are right) where we could have it again.”

Bill Kubota is a senior producer for One Detroit senior and Jena Brooker is BridgeDetroit’s food and environment reporter

Collage and slideshow images provided by BridgeDetroit’s Jena Brooker