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| ISBN-13: | 9781628953282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
Manoomin
A Sacred Gift from the Creator
Many seasons have passed since our Ancestors inhabited the area around the entrance of St. Lawrence Seaway. There the Confederacy of Three Fires members lived in balance and harmony with Mother Earth. It is said the campfires could be seen in all four directions and as far as one could see. It is at this time the Great Spirit delivered Prophecies with instructions to our Spiritual Leaders that we were to migrate in the direction of where our Grandfather sets at the end of the day. If we stayed we would be confronted with death and destruction. The Anishinaabe people were further instructed to follow the Megis until we found the land where the food grows on the water. The Megis guided them to the rich land and pristine waters of the Great Lakes and to the settling point on Madeline Island.
Throughout the region on the watersheds which feed the Great Lakes and along its vast shorelines the Sacred Manoomin could be found and harvested. This Gift from the Creator once found fulfilled the prophecies and became one of the staple foods of the Anishinabek. The Manoomin beds are considered to be the Great Spirit's Gardens and are a source of medicine and food. Manoomin is respected, honored, and feasted and has become part of the identity of the native communities in the Great Lakes region.
— Roger LaBine, Elder from the Getegitigaaning Ojibwe Nation
Many centuries ago, the Indigenous people who now call the Great Lakes home lived on the northeast coast of North America. Their stories tell of a time when they were given Seven Prophecies, the first and third directing them to travel westward to the place "where food grows on water." So began a great migration that lasted hundreds of years. That food was Manoomin (wild rice) and it brought the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi to the Great Lakes region.
The land that welcomed the Anishinaabek was a much different place than what we know today. Lakeplain prairies and miles of Great Lakes shoreline greeted the people when they arrived at the western edge of Lake Erie. Those who traveled westward traversed vast beech/maple forests with nutrient-rich soils that brought forth blankets of wildflowers in the spring. Mature woodlands of oaks and hickory dominated the drier moraine ridges left behind by the glaciers. Prairie chickens and lark sparrows made their homes in the oak savannas and tall grass prairies of the southwestern Lower Peninsula. Great herds of plains bison roamed the prairies in the extreme southern part of this land, grazing on the sweet grasses and tilling the soil with their hooves. Nearly one million acres of tamarack swamps, golden yellow in the fall, hugged the bottom of moraine ridges.
Some bands of Anishinaabek moved northward and found extensive forests of enormous white and red pines emerging from the dry, sandy soils, and soft hemlock trees joining the sugar maples to create a beautiful autumn palette of yellow, orange, red, and green. Mixed oak and pine forests were home to passenger pigeons, whose nesting areas covered many square miles. The skies would darken as millions of the now extinct birds took flight. Arctic graylings flashed their colorful dorsal fins as they courted females in the cold northern rivers. Traveling across the Upper Peninsula, the people encountered vast leatherleaf and sphagnum bogs and muskegs in the central part, and maple/hemlock forests in the east and west. Indeed this land we now call Michigan was a much different place than exists today.
Manoomin was not to be found in the vast forests, dry prairies, airy savannas, or dark forested swamps, but rather in the open shallows of lakes and rivers. The largest beds of Manoomin were part of the vast coastal marshes that lined Lake St. Clair, Lake Erie, and the St. Clair River Delta. Extensive marshes were also found in the many river mouths and bayous along Lake Michigan, as described in 1820 in Geographical, Historical, Commercial, and Agricultural View of the United States of America:
The rivers are numerous, and mostly navigable for boats and canoes, nearly to their heads. Grand river, the largest tributary of lake Michigan, rises in lakes and ponds in the south-east corner of the territory, interweaves its branches with those of Raisin, Black river, Mastigan, and Saganum, and falls into the lake about twenty miles north of Raisin. This river is described as running through a country consisting alternately of woodlands and prairies, abounding with most kinds of wild game. It is navigable for small craft to its source; in high water boats of a considerable size pass from lake Michigan into lake Erie through this and Huron river. A canal connecting Grand river with the Saganum, running into lake Huron, could be opened at a small expense. This canal is among the number recommended by Judge Woodward, of Detroit, in his able report on the subject of internal navigation.
The other streams which run into lake Michigan are, the St. Joseph's, which heads in the state of Indiana, and interlocks by its several branches with Black river, St. Joseph's-of-Miami, Eel river, and Tippecanoe: it enters the south-east end of the lake, is rapid and full of shoals, but navigable 150 miles, and is 200 yards wide at its mouth. The Pottowatomy Indians, who reside on the shore, catch prodigious quantities of fish in its waters: it runs about forty miles in the Michigan territory. On the north bank of this river stands the old fort St. Josephs, from which there is a bridle road to Detroit.
Black river, Marame, Barbue, Raisin, Mastigan, White, Rocky, and Beauvuis; the last three are short rivers, running a westerly course, and emptying themselves into the lake in the order named, at the distance of from ten to fifteen miles apart. St. Nicholas, Marguerite, Monistic, Aux Sables, Lassiette, and Grand Traverse; the four last are small streams, which enter the lake between Marguerite and the straits of Michilimackinac.
The greater part of the rivers just mentioned, expand and form circular bays or small lakes behind the sand-hills near the lake. This effect is produced by the frequent conflicts between the currents of the rivers and the surf of the lake; for the latter not only repels, as it were, the tributary streams, but at the same time washes the sand of the shore into their mouths, causing the smaller ones to contract at their entrance into mere brooks. These basins are from two to three miles across, and are, at certain seasons, literally covered with wild ducks, geese, and other water fowl, which resort here to feed on the wild rice, profusely sown by the hand of nature. — The pious and benevolent St. Pierre could have found in these bays materials for an eloquent chapter on the beneficence of the Deity. (688–89)
Open embayments in Saginaw Bay, with their curving shorelines and shallow, gently sloping bottoms, protected Manoomin from high waves and strong lake energy. The fine-textured soils were resistant to shifting and provided a stable substrate on which the Manoomin beds could grow. Thousands of acres of wild rice blanketed Saginaw Bay and its tributaries and drew in millions of waterfowl during their migration season, providing food and a resting area for their long journey south (Bradford 1917; Stout 2007).
Sand spits developed in other areas of Saginaw Bay, creating protective embayments behind them. Organic and fine sediments settled and provided a nutrient-rich bottom from which the marshes could thrive. Some embayments became sheltered over time due to near-shore currents depositing a barrier across their mouth. The barrier beach lagoons, as they are now called, were shallow and full of organic soils, and created the perfect habitat for rice.
There are two species of Manoomin found in Michigan, the state threatened Zizania aquatica (river rice), and Z. palustris (northern lake rice), which has two varieties according to the University of Michigan Herbarium, Z. palustris var. palustris and Z. palustris var. interior. As its name implies, the elegant Z. aquatica is found along the shorelines of shallow, slow-moving rivers in the southern part of the state (plate 1). Zizania palustris prefers the shallow inland lakes, rivers, and coastal marshes and is the species most frequently planted for restoration projects due to the large size of the seeds (plate 2).
The life story of Manoomin is a fascinating one and somewhat unique in the world of plants. During autumn, when the leaves begin changing color and the morning dew glistens at sunrise, ripe seeds drop from the tall plants and shoot straight down, embedding in the bottom sediment. The seeds rest during winter and need to be surrounded by water temperatures at or near freezing for three to four months. When the ice finally breaks in the spring and the sun gains strength, it melts the ice and provides the warmth and light needed for sprouting. The wild rice seeds will start to germinate when water temperatures reach around 45° F. The thin little plants grow up toward the light and develop long, slender leaves that float on top of the water — called "the floating leaf stage" (plate 3). As the roots reach further into the sediment to anchor Manoomin into Mother Earth, the plant "stands up" and grows taller, turning into an elegant emergent plant.
By early summer, Manoomin starts producing small white flowers, which are pollinated by the wind. These flowers are placed at the top of the main stem, and the pollen-producing male parts develop a few inches below (plate 4). To encourage cross-pollination, the male and female parts mature at different times. Later in the summer and early fall, nutritious grains form where the female flowers once were. Each seed has an awn or "tail" that serves as a rudder, and when the ripe seed drops into the water, the awn guides it straight down into the muck. Seeds on the same plant ripen at different times so that in the event of a strong wind or rainstorm, there will still be more ripe seeds to carry on the plant's lineage (figures 1 and 2).
Manoomin favors clear water 2 to 3 feet deep. Sometimes plants grow farther out from the shore in slightly deeper water, but they have to put so much energy into growing tall to get above the surface of the water that there is little left to produce seeds. So the densest beds are found in the shallower zones. Manoomin requires some flow and stable water levels in any given year, but also needs periodic disturbance. Multiple stable years generally favor perennials, and disturbance will set them back, providing a foothold for the wild rice (an annual plant), according to Peter David, wild rice biologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. This is best illustrated in the Great Lakes rice beds, where Manoomin appears and disappears over time, always in tandem with the lakes' cyclic, fluctuating water levels. Low water levels produce miles of shallow coastline and support the growth of large beds; high water levels reduce the size of the shallow zones, which results in small, few, or no beds. Sometimes there are decades between the high and low water cycles. During times of high water, the resilient seeds of Manoomin remain buried in the sediment, waiting for shallower water to return so that the rays of the sun can once again reach them at the bottom and invite them to sprout.
On inland lakes and streams, stable water levels are particularly important during spring and early summer when the plants are in the floating leaf stage. Their roots are not yet well-established, so wave action from passing boats or flash floods can easily uproot and kill the plants. But when conditions are right, beautiful lush beds of Manoomin can grow and thrive, providing food and cover for many species of animals and opportunities for harvesting.
Manoomin has a fairly large range that covers most of the eastern half of North America, yet the archaeological record is scant given the broad geographic area in which it is found (NatureServe 2016). To date, we know of twelve locations where remains of Manoomin have been found (table 1). In 2003, Crawford and Smith published a list of thirty-seven sites containing archaeological evidence of Manoomin, only two of which were in Michigan. The Dunn Farm site in Leelanau County was our first to produce preserved wild rice fragments. Discovered in 1973, the rice fragments were radiocarbon dated in 1992 to between A.D. 460–520 and A.D. 540–620 (Brose 2017). In 1991, archaeologists found Manoomin grains in five separate soil layers in excavations at the Schultz site near Saginaw, Michigan. Radiocarbon dates indicate that those soil layers were aged between about A.D. 90 and A.D. 636 (Lovis et al. 2001a).
Unpublished reports on file at the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office document five other sites where evidence of wild rice has been found in Michigan. These include the Casassa site, located about eleven miles southwest of Saginaw (Branstner and Hambacher 1995); the Cloudman site, which is found on Drummond Island at the eastern edge of the Upper Peninsula (Branstner 1995; Christine Branstner, personal communication to James Robertson, March 31, 2017); the Converse site in Grand Rapids (Hambacher et al. 2003); site 20SA367 along the Flint River in Saginaw County (Hambacher et al. 2009); and the Fisher and Fritz sites in Ottawa County, which are along the Grand River about twenty miles west of Grand Rapids (Hambacher et al. 2016). Based on radiocarbon dates and artifacts, these five sites date between about A.D. 500 and the seventeenth century.
Research published by Maria Raviele (2010) in her PhD dissertation adds to our list of archaeological sites that produced evidence of Manoomin. As part of her research project, Raviele microscopically examined cooking residues that were adhering to prehistoric potsherds (pieces of broken pot) from the Kantzler and Surath's Junk Yard sites in Bay County, and the Schultz, Shiawassee #13, and Solms sites in Saginaw County and successfully identified wild rice phytoliths in the residues. Phytoliths are microscopic fossilized particles of plant tissue made of silica, the primary mineral used to make glass. Phytoliths were also found in soil samples from underground storage pits at the Fisher and Fritz sites in Ottawa County.
It is noteworthy that phytoliths are much more likely to be preserved than the seeds of Manoomin, and the analysis of phytoliths provides a valuable method to track the use of Manoomin at archaeological sites. Certainly, these finds support the argument that Manoomin has been collected and eaten by people from this land for at least two thousand years.
Documenting places where Manoomin once grew is a daunting and difficult task. Some of the information passed down orally within the Anishinaabek tribes of the Upper and Lower Peninsulas has likely been lost due to historical disruptions of the culture, or, if stories survived, may be kept private within a given tribe. In the early writings of the French explorers and land surveyors, Manoomin was often referred to as "folle avoine" (French for wild oats), or it might have been called rice, wild rice, or wild oats. Many early references in travel guides, encyclopedias, and historical atlases were highly generalized, simply stating that Manoomin grew in a nameless lake or stream, or was abundant in Michigan. Later in the 1800s, more accurate locations began to appear in print in newspapers of the day.
Chief Simon Pokagon, a renowned Pottawatomie leader and author, described Manoomin in southwest Michigan in two letters to Albert Jenks dated November 10 and November 16, 1898. In the first letter, Chief Pokagon presented the first documentation of Manoomin in that part of the state, reporting that "our people used to gather much wild rice through the St. Joe valley" (meaning the St. Joseph River valley). He said that two Pottawatomie words were used to describe wild rice, "Me-no-maw" and "Man-o-min," and that minominkike meant "I gather wild rice" (Pokagon 1898).
Albert Jenks was one of the first scholars to write about Manoomin in the Great Lakes region in his 1901 paper Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes. He presented the concept of a wild rice district, which he said encompassed the northeastern and northern parts of Wisconsin and the part of Minnesota lying east of the Mississippi River. He believed that Manoomin was so abundant in the district that it was able to sustain an indigenous population equal in number to the Native population in the rest of the Northwest Territory (southwestern Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan). He dubbed the Indigenous people who lived in the district "wild rice gatherers." Jenks had a difficult time finding sources of information on wild rice distribution within its range, as botanical textbooks of the day were of little to no assistance. Instead, he corresponded with postsecondary teachers of botany and also directors of experimental stations to solicit what he could. It was truly the first attempt at defining the distribution of wild rice nationwide and provided a base for others to build upon. In describing where Manoomin grew in Michigan, Jenks wrote:
Michigan. Found throughout the state in mud-bottomed lakes and sluggish streams; also found commonly in Grand river valley (letter of C. F. Wheeler, Michigan Agricultural College post-office, Michigan). It is found also in Huron river, Washtenaw county (letter of F. C. Newcombe, Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 9, 1898). The plant is also very abundant in St Joseph river in southwestern Michigan, and is found also in various streams and small alluvial lakes in Kalamazoo and Barry counties.
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