Todd Moilanen paddles gently through wild rice beds on Ogechie Lake, trying not to disturb a loon sleeping on its back on a nest of reeds a few feet away.
Moilanen, an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and the band’s cultural resources director, delights in seeing resurgence of life on Ogechie Lake. For years, the small, shallow lake about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities was too deep for wild rice, or manoomin, as wild rice is called in the Ojibwe language.
Logging companies around the Rum River built the Buck More Dam in the 1930s, which kept water levels consistently over four feet—too high for manoomin.
Low water levels are critical for manoomin, a sacred crop for the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes region. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is bringing more rain and flooding to Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, making harvests of wild rice less reliable.
For more than 70 years there was virtually no rice, and very little waterfowl and wildlife on Ogechie Lake. But the Mille Lacs Band worked with an engineering firm and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to modify the dam, and in 2015, they implemented a project to restore the lower level historically experienced on the lake, part of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Reservation and Minnesota’s Kathio State Park.
Eight years later, the effect is dramatic. The shallow lake brims with wild rice, which, as Moilanen paddles through in late June, is in its “floating-leaf” stage, where most stalks lie flat against the water’s surface and others are beginning to emerge above the waterline. Now, wildlife that feed on the wild rice are regular visitors.
Moilanen points out a wood duck skimming across the glassy surface and a large osprey swooping overhead. His canoe quietly passes the loon; the large black bird with a distinctive white band around its neck stirs awake and dives into the water.
“That’s the ecosystem that’s coming back,” Moilanen says.
Wild rice is a fickle aquatic grass that can be washed out by rising water levels, a growing trend in Minnesota, according to 128 years of state precipitation data. The grass seed, or grain, has been consumed by the Ojibwe and other Tribal Nations for centuries, and has garnered widespread appeal in the ubiquitous wild rice soup found on menus across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest.
Tribal, state, and federal governments are working to adapt to the changing environment to ensure manoomin lives on in Minnesota, which is home to more acres of natural wild rice than any other state in the country.
“We see the extremes more often now,” said Kelly Applegate, director of natural resources for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. “We see water levels that are really high at critical points when the rice is developing.”
For Tribal Nations of northern Minnesota, wild rice’s survival is not just about protecting the environment—it’s also about preserving a core part of their identity.
The Ojibwe of Minnesota and Wisconsin are Anishinaabe people who originated in the woodlands of the northeast. According to traditional beliefs, the Ojibwe were told to move west until they found food growing on the water. They found it in the shallow lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and it became a staple of their diet.
“The reason that we’re here is because of manoomin,” Moilanen says.
Warmer and wetter
Minnesota’s climate is getting warmer and wetter. The 10 warmest and wettest years in recorded state history have all occurred in the past 25 years, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
That change has brought a massive increase in large rainfall events. Since 2000, storms that produce more than six inches of rain have been occurring four times more often than in the 20th century, DNR data shows.
Record snowfall in Minnesota this winter, a sudden warmup in early spring, and a few heavy storms led to widespread flooding across the state earlier this year, prompting the capital city, St. Paul, to declare a flood emergency. In response, Governor Tim Walz signed a disaster assistance bill in April that moved $40 million, the largest amount ever, to an emergency account to help Minnesotans recover from flood damage.
Even small changes can meaningfully alter the environment. Since 2000, there has been a 65 percent increase in the number of rainfalls over three inches and a 20 percent increase in storms with more than one inch of rain.
The state is getting wetter as the climate warms, according to Minnesota Senior Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld. The 2010s were a historically wet decade. The early 2020s have brought drought, but it is likely still the wettest among the state’s other bouts with drought, Blumenfeld said.
“When we get the heavy rains, it’s coming as hard as it ever has,” he said.
The current trend is dry periods between June and October, and really wet periods from November to April. But that can and likely will change, Blumenfeld said, adding that the warming atmosphere only promises more moisture, but it won’t necessarily be clear when that moisture will come.
Blumenfeld earned a PhD studying major storms in Minnesota, and said the frequency of such storms keeps growing.
More water in ricing country
The Rum River watershed of central Minnesota, home to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, received an average of 28 inches of rain a year from 1895 to 2022, according to precipitation records the state began keeping in 1895. The rate has been rising by about half an inch per decade since 1980, according to state climate trend data.
But for the past 20 years, annual precipitation in the watershed has risen to an average of around 31 inches.
“It’s a huge deal because that water has to go somewhere,” Blumenfeld said.
The Little Fork River watershed, home to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, one of the seven sovereign Ojibwe nations in the state, is also getting wetter. The watershed has an average annual precipitation of 26 inches, but is trending higher and has been growing at a rate of two inches per decade in the past 20 years. Last year was particularly wet, with nearly 35 inches of precipitation, which contributed to historic flooding.
Spring flooding in 2022 practically wiped out the entire wild rice crop on Nett Lake, said Chris Holm, ecological resources director for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa. The shallow lake about 220 miles north of the Twin Cities near the Canadian border is a traditional ricing hub for the Bois Forte Band.
While cultivated wild rice that has been bred for specific qualities is farmed commercially in Minnesota, Tribal Nations often prefer its original form that grows naturally with little or no intervention in the lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota. Tribal members harvest the rice for personal use and for sale to the general public.
Wild rice is sensitive to water levels, particularly in June. Too much spring rain can wipe out beds before they can take root.
“If you have higher water levels, it takes more energy for the plant to grow up into the surface and leaf out where it can photosynthesize. So with high water levels, you have less plant growth, less manoomin harvest,” said Madeline Nyblade, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota pursuing a doctorate in hydrology.
Nyblade is part of Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin, or First We Must Consider Manoomin, a university research group that focuses on tribally driven questions around wild rice. Many of the questions the researchers received about climate change focus on water levels, she said.
The bigger storms Minnesota is now experiencing on a more regular basis also challenge the rice, especially late in the season. A violent storm with heavy rain and wind can knock rice off the stalks before it can be harvested in late August.
Applegate recalled a recent year where high water took out 90 percent of the rice beds for the Mille Lacs Band. Then in 2021, the opposite happened—a late summer drought prevented the harvest. The rice around Mille Lacs was tall and thriving, Applegate recalled, but with too little water, ricers couldn’t reach the patches by canoe to harvest the manoomin.
Rapid change
Applegate, an enrolled Mille Lacs Band member who grew up in the area, has seen shifts from climate change. The moose have moved further north. The white birch trees are receding. And beds of manoomin that served his people for generations are more regularly being wiped out by high waters.
“As Anishinaabe and tribal people, we depend on these wild plants for our food, medicines, craft materials—cultural objects made from plants. They’re a very integral part of our culture,” Applegate said.
Climate change is rapidly shifting where and how plants grow in Minnesota, and the pace is concerning to the Mille Lacs Band, he said.
Historically, Native people in the Great Lakes region could expect bountiful wild rice, according to Mike Dockry, an assistant professor with the University of Minnesota and a member of the First We Must Consider Manoomin Research Group. Dockry is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a traditional ricing people of the Great Lakes region.
“It was growing on many, many more lakes than it is now, and tribes were free to move,” Dockry said.
Any one lake might have a bad harvest, but people could find another that was booming, he said. Settler-driven land use and large scale water system management geared toward agriculture has contributed to fewer bodies of water with wild rice.
Source: mprnews.org
Photo Credit: istock-digitalsoul
Categories: Minnesota, Crops, Weather