Memories of wild ricing days past show what’s changed and what hasn’t

My first memory of wild rice is, like many, simply eating it. In the turkey dressing at the holidays or in some summer hotdish at a church function, maybe a funeral, there could be a half-dozen competing wild rice dishes. Our big blended families of mixed-blood Natives and white spouses always made for intriguing buffets, fusions of wild rice, pasta, potatoes in ever more complex recipes served out of steaming crockpots.

Later, I became aware that we got wild rice in some mysterious fashion off special lakes; where canoes, poles and rice knockers were used. The adults always went early in the mornings and came home tired with wet shoes, sunburn and, if the take was big, a good mood.

There was always that ritual. Watching everybody get up around 5 a.m. to go through gear, get the canoe in the truck bed and head out. I might have been 13 when my dad figured I was strong enough to pole a canoe.

Ricing season lands during late summer at the end of the heat. The rice has been growing steadily and, after bursting to full size just weeks earlier, puts on weight with heavy green and purple heads. We’d usually go out to a few lakes, either on the Tamarack Wildlife Refuge south of our home on the White Earth Reservation or north to Lower Rice Lake, in early August to see how things were progressing.

My dad, Paul “Bud” Boswell, would tell stories of unusually good harvests, where he and his brothers would get 450 pounds of green rice into their canoe by early afternoon. I knew there was a bit of exaggeration, but the tales were seductive.

We always riced for ourselves, but some ricing partners went for a big payoff at the landing where rice buyers advertised $1 to $2 a pound. Good pay for folks in those days.

Deciding when to begin ricing was determined by one person on each lake, the “committee man,” usually an elder who was familiar with the lake, what the rice should look like when ripe. If determined too green after a quick pass, the committee man would send everybody home grumbling. Then, the next day or the day after, he would say, “Let’s rice!” and everybody would smile. “It’s dead ripe” was the way my dad always described it.

Finally, at the landing. A little tobacco in the water, and a thank you (Mii gwetch gitchi manidoo!) was given. It didn’t have to be anything more than the snapped-off bit of tobacco from a cigarette, but it was always done.

Rice knockers, called bawa’ iganaakoog in Ojibwe, were made of cedar and used like an extension of one’s arm to harvest the grain.

My dad fashioned a pair of finely carved and sanded knockers every couple of years. He’d sit out on a picnic table in a mound of cedar shavings, taking a few days to get a good pair done. Some were so perfect, he’d never use them and would go the whole season with a beat-up set instead.

The pole, with a metal duckbill end, is used to push the canoe through the rice. The best canoes were aluminum, 16 to 18 feet long. Standing in the back, the poler propels the boat and takes in the view, while the knocker bends rice stalks into the moving canoe, “swishing” the rice carefully to “knock” loose the ripe grain into the boat, repeating back and forth. I riced with my dad and others in the 1980s, through high school, college and a little beyond.

One cloudless afternoon we were on Lower Rice Lake. It was quiet with only the sound of a distant airplane. I was particularly bored after having poled a marathon since morning.

“What are you doing?” my dad would ask.

“Nothing! I’m poling the boat!” I’d quip back at him.

“Don’t look at that plane!” he warned.

This went on for quite a while and the plane got closer. At one point, I squinted up as it made another pass, lost track of the horizon and pitched backwards, headfirst, into the lake. As I fell, I instinctively jumped out of the boat to keep it from capsizing and losing all of our rice.

When I came up from the ice cold water I was met with choice expletives. “What did I ask you?” he laughed.

I learned my lesson, but I also saved the rice.

Over time, some ricers observed that rice seemed to be more patchy than in the past. Theories about cross pollination from other lakes and even purposeful destruction of rice stands abounded. I never saw any evidence of this. It was in the days before the concept of climate change was understood.

After bagging and packing up our gear, we’d head home and spread the rice out several inches deep on a big square canvas tarp. Sunny days were best for rice, for drying and picking out empty hulls and loose heads of rice.

After several days of drying, it was time for processing. Always a time of anxiety, it was imperative to find an expert who knew what they were doing. What if it was ruined? Burned during parching or spun too hard during threshing or broken up during winnowing and we’d end up with a less desirable grade of manoomin called mazaan.

We bought a new steel garbage can every couple years at the Coast-to-Coast store in Mahnomen, the nearby town named after wild rice, and filled it with 300 pounds of finished rice. It sat in the corner and was a guarantee for gifts if the holidays were tight and always something to add to supper.

Now, 30 years later, pieces of this come back to my slowly fading memory every Thanksgiving when I rinse a cup of wild rice in cold water and put it on to boil with a pinch of salt; the smell triggers ricing day memories.

Illustrations by Mark Boswell.