Indian Ritual Ruined : Wild Rice Glut Leaves Bitter Taste

Hard to believe, but there are canoes out there--somewhere--on Big Rice Lake, gliding lazily through lush stands of wild rice that blanket the surface like a tall green shroud.

They are barely visible through the thick tangle of stalks, but little clues give them away: Tips of poles and paddles bob atop the canopy like periscopes; and the “clack-clack-clack” of hand-held sticks used to knock once-precious rice kernels into the boats ripples only faintly through the stillness of the Minnesota pine forest.

It is a disturbing sort of quiet, not a soothing one, irksome as the loss of that Christmas bonus you always counted on and worrisome as the disappearance of a trusted friend.

Victim of Greed, Hype

Like a gold rush gone bust, the primitive but long-lucrative ritual of the wild rice harvest in these parts has faded to a shadow of itself almost overnight. It fell victim to scientific tinkering, big-time agribusiness, Indian complacency and a wave of greed and hype stretching from the farms in the North Woods to the fertile rice paddies of the Sacramento Valley.

Where there were a dozen or so canoes on Big Rice the other day, a few years ago there could have been scores. “It wouldn’t be uncommon to have 500 out there at one time,” said Frank Bibeau, a Chippewa Indian and part-time rice dealer. “But the money’s not there anymore, so the people aren’t there.”

For centuries, Indians and, more recently, white men, too, had flocked to the crystal clear lakes and rivers of Northern Minnesota as the summer waned to gather in ripe, naturally grown grain for both sustenance and profit.

It was a time of elaborate ritual, fierce competition and raucous celebration. By the late 1950s, the nutty-flavored lake rice began to fetch caviar prices in gourmet food outlets. Wholesale buyers set up shop on the landings and, literally clutching fists full of cash, battled to outbid one another for the haul from each canoe.

$4,000 in Ricers’ Pockets

Diligent ricers could net $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 and more for a few weeks’ work. Rice money meant new clothes, hunting rifles, toys for the kids, repairs for the house and lots and lots of drinks for the boys.

Three years ago, the boom suddenly collapsed in an enormous glut of wild rice that remains to this day. Prices plummeted, the rice buyers retreated from the docks, and ricers, discouraged, stayed home in droves. Once flush in money, the wild rice industry is now awash in debt and recriminations, and another wedge has been driven in the cultural and economic gap between Indians and whites.

It all represents a startling comedown for a delicacy so popular and integral to the history of this region that it was declared the official state grain by the Minnesota Legislature.

The up-and-down saga of wild rice really begins with its name, which is a misnomer. It isn’t rice at all but rather a water-borne grass seed native to shallow lakes and rivers of the Upper Great Lakes region and known in scientific circles as zizania aquatica .

In fact, the first white man’s name for the grass was folles avoine or “wild oats,” so dubbed by 17th-Century French explorers who thought it looked like a weed they remembered from back home.

A Way of Life

To native Americans, especially the Chippewa, who called it manohmen, wild rice was not just a diet staple but a way of life. It was a medium of exchange, the centerpiece of spiritual ceremonies and the subject of many a legend. Tribes waged wars for control of the best rice beds.

As the grain began to ripen in late August, Indian bands would set up wild rice camps on the water’s edge and ricers would head out each morning in their birchbark canoes, two to a boat.

Using a long wooden pole with a forked end, one man would push the craft through the muddy shallows and thick clumps of wild rice plants rising several feet above the surface. Meanwhile, the other rider swept ripe green kernels into the bottom of the boat with a pair of light sticks called “knockers.”

Activity wasn’t confined to the water. On shore, elderly Indians would beat drums to provide a rhythm for the harvest. Later, after the grains were dried in heated kettles, they were dumped in pits lined with deerskins, and children would “jig” the rice, literally dance on it to break off the hulls.

These days, the canoes are aluminum, nobody jigs anymore and what beat there is comes out of a tape deck, not a drum. Still, the harvest mechanics, highly regulated by both the state and Indian tribes, haven’t changed all that much in the last 200 years.

Popularity Spreads

What has changed things, for both good and bad and probably forever, is the money. Interest in the organically grown, natural Indian grain, which was long just a local delicacy, began to spread to specialty and health food shops around the country after World War II.

More and more whites joined Indians out on the lakes as the cash flowed from rice buyers, many of whom lent out canoes and even offered prizes to stimulate production.

At its peak about a decade ago, naturally grown wild rice was fetching upward of $2 a pound right off the boat and, after processing, more than $20 a pound on big city gourmet racks. For a mere half day’s work, even amateur ricers could haul in 200 pounds and net $300 or $400.

“You used to be able to make a couple thousand a week,” said Roger King, 36, who has been ricing since he was a boy. “My first car ever, I got it from ricing. A ’69 Dodge Charger.”

Merchants like Jack Houchins, who runs the gasoline station and general store in Squaw Lake, made a killing, too. “I seen guys pull up to the pump out here, they had money on the seat so thick you could run your hands through it like flour,” Houchins recalled. “A lot of poor people made money. They also blew it real fast, too.”

Tamed, Mass-Produced

In the mid-1960s, when big food conglomerates like Uncle Ben’s Inc. decided to mix wild rice into their product lines, interest really took off. And that, in turn, accelerated efforts to tame and mass-produce what had truly been a wild crop.

Initially, local farmers created paddies by flooding some of their croplands and transplanting seedlings from nearby lakes. Yields were mediocre, but then the University of Minnesota got into the act by developing a hybrid strain of wild rice that flourished under artificial conditions and could be easily harvested with combines.

In just two decades, paddy production in Minnesota grew from next to nothing to a peak of 5.3 million pounds by 1986. Although subject to the whims of nature, lake harvests increased as prices and demand rose, in some years tripling the output of the pre-paddy days.

A few Indian traditionalists warned that the paddy industry was debasing the intrinsic value of wild rice to the tribes. But, as long as the dollars rolled in, few people, including most Indians, paid heed.

About 10 years ago, a handful of Minnesota growers and marketers decided that profits might be even better if they grew wild rice in California. They put seeds in ice chests to simulate the frigid Minnesota winters and transplanted them into Sacramento Valley paddies that once produced white rice.

For a time, the gamble paid off. California yields were triple those of Minnesota, and equipment and production costs, thanks to advanced technology already developed for the white rice industry, were lower.

Established white rice growers jumped on the bandwagon, with an added inducement. To trim a surplus of white rice, many California growers were getting federal set-aside payments to hold some of their land out of production. But idled land still had to be planted with some sort of grass to prevent erosion. And, because wild rice technically was a grass, it started turning up in more and more idled fields. The growers sold the wild rice and kept the government set-aside money to boot.

‘Double Killing’

“White rice was down, they were looking for an alternative and they could use the same equipment,” explained Glenn Yost, a senior state agricultural economist in California. “So they just sowed that (wild rice) instead of sowing white rice. It was kind of a natural. And, with the set-aside ground, it was a double killing.”

Federal farm officials closed the loophole in 1986, but not before California wild rice production had gotten out of hand and state production soared to 11 million pounds in one year--enough to satisfy all consumer demand.

With Minnesota, and by then, Canada, too, producing huge quantities, the world was suddenly awash in wild rice and prices plummeted.

Many producers both in California and Minnesota lost tens of thousands of dollars and some went bankrupt. The ranks of growers in California have thinned from about 80 a few years ago to around 50 today, and annual production has dropped to around 4 million pounds, about level with Minnesota, which has experienced a similar grower shakeout.

The impact on the Minnesota lake harvest has been even more startling. Only a decade ago, the state Department of Natural Resources sold more than 17,000 ricing permits a year. In 1988, fewer than 2,000 were issued. The number of state-certified rice buyers has dropped from 80 to 19, and the price they paid for just-picked wild rice fell from as much as $2 a pound to as low as 35 cents--about the level of 40 years ago. There’s not a buyer to be found on the docks.

The downturn has triggered a wave of bitterness in Minnesota wild rice country. “If they’d have stayed in Minnesota, we wouldn’t have had the problem,” said 77-year-old Bud Anderson, who runs the general store in Max and who is furious at his neighbors who went west. “When they went out to California, they blew it for the rest of us.”

For many Indians, the collapse is not just an economic slap but a cultural one as well. “They watched the white man take over their product and drive them out of business with something inferior, and its kind of an affront to them,” explained Thomas Vennum, an expert on Chippewa culture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Like contestants in a kind of wild rice version of the Pepsi challenge, boosters of lake and paddy rice have been arguing for years over which variety tastes better and which is more nutritious. However, both sides agree, and scientific research verifies, that wild rice is higher in proteins and lower in fat than white rice and may have the cholesterol-fighting power of oats.

A more serious dispute involves what even some paddy people admit has been a deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between the two wild rices. Indians complain that the paddy version really shouldn’t be called wild. They say also that state officials have spent millions of dollars to develop and promote the hybrid wild rice strain, but then turned a blind eye when paddy rice marketers tried to capitalize on the mystique of the true wild variety.

The state never enforced a 1981 statute requiring all wild rice sold in the state to be clearly marked as either paddy grown or natural. And many brands of the paddy variety, including several grown in California but packaged in both states, bear pictures of Indians on the package or have names such as “Indian Harvest” that imply some connection with native Americans.

A new labeling law, designed with input from Chippewa leaders, was passed by the Minnesota Legislature a few months ago and will go into effect next year. But Indian activists complain that it is riddled with exemptions that will only aggravate the problem.

“The bottom line is that the state of Minnesota, in my mind, is stealing away the wild rice legacy from Indians . . . and is handing it over to paddy growers,” said Bibeau, the Chippewa rice dealer and leading critic of government wild rice policy.

Faced with mounting losses, growers are actively trying to develop new wild rice products such as snack foods and meat extenders. They suggest that Indians should stop complaining and start doing some marketing of their own. For example, lake rice, which is not treated with fertilizers or other chemicals, could be a big seller in the small but growing organic food market.

Trying to cling to the past is not only self-defeating for Indians, paddy industry officials contend, but also a little hypocritical.

“They live in our houses and drive our cars,” said Dan Erickson, the manager of United Wild Rice, a paddy grower’s cooperative in Grand Rapids, Minn. “If they want to live in tepees or wooden huts with fires and furs, that’s fine, but they can’t live in both worlds.”

Researcher Tracy Shryer in Chicago contributed to this story.