Wild rice
Based on Wikipedia: Wild rice
In 2021, the Ojibwe people of the White Earth Nation did something unprecedented in American legal history: they filed a lawsuit on behalf of a plant. The plaintiff wasn't a corporation or a trust or even a human being. It was wild rice itself, granted legal personhood three years earlier, now suing to stop an oil pipeline that threatened its habitat.
This wasn't a publicity stunt. For the Ojibwe, wild rice—which they call manoomin, meaning "harvesting berry" or "good berry"—is so central to their identity that they literally followed it across a continent. Their migration story tells of a vision: follow a giant clam shell in the sky until you reach a place where the food grows on the water. After a journey lasting centuries, traveling from eastern North America along the Saint Lawrence River and through the Great Lakes, they found it. Wild rice, waving above the shallow waters of the Lake Superior region.
That was sometime between the late 1400s and early 1600s. But the plant they discovered had been feeding people in these waters for far longer—a fact that sparked one of archaeology's more peculiar debates.
Not Actually Rice
Let's clear up a common confusion. Wild rice isn't really rice at all. It's a different plant entirely—a grass, yes, and distantly related to the rice you find in most kitchens, but belonging to its own genus called Zizania. Regular rice, whether it comes from Asia or Africa, belongs to the genus Oryza. They're botanical cousins who share a tribe (Oryzeae), but calling wild rice "rice" is a bit like calling a leopard a tiger because they're both big cats.
The differences matter. Wild rice grains are long, slender, and nearly black, with a distinctive chewy outer layer protecting a tender, slightly vegetal-tasting interior. They grow not in paddies but in the shallows of lakes and slow-moving streams, where often only the flowering heads rise above the water's surface. Ducks love it. So do other waterfowl, who compete with humans for the harvest.
Four species exist. Three are native to North America: northern wild rice, which grows across the Great Lakes and boreal regions of the United States and Canada; southern wild rice, found along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and in Florida; and Texas wild rice, a perennial clinging to existence along a single stretch of the San Marcos River. The fourth species, Manchurian wild rice, is native to China—but its story took an entirely different turn.
The Plant That Became a Vegetable
Here's something strange about Manchurian wild rice: the Chinese stopped eating its seeds centuries ago. Instead, they eat the plant's stems.
How does a grain crop become a vegetable? Through a fungus. Manchurian wild rice is susceptible to infection by a smut fungus called Ustilago esculenta, which causes the plant's stems to swell into crisp, white, edible stalks. The infection prevents flowering entirely, so farmers propagate the crop by cutting—daughter plants inherit the fungus from their mothers, generation after generation.
The timing of harvest is critical. Farmers must wait until the stems begin to swell, somewhere between 120 and 170 days after planting, but they must harvest before the fungus reaches its reproductive stage. Wait too long, and the stems turn black and eventually disintegrate into a cloud of fungal spores.
This vegetable—called jiāobái in Mandarin, makomodake in Japanese, and sometimes "water bamboo" in English—is popular throughout East and Southeast Asia. Americans, however, cannot legally import it. The United States Department of Agriculture prohibits its entry to protect native wild rice species from the smut fungus that makes the vegetable possible.
Harvesting by Canoe
If you wanted to harvest wild rice the traditional way, you would need a canoe, a partner, and two small wooden sticks.
The sticks, called knockers or flails, are precisely regulated. Minnesota law specifies that they can be no more than one inch in diameter, thirty inches long, and one pound in weight. With these modest tools, you paddle slowly into a stand of wild rice while your partner bends the grain heads over the canoe's gunwale and brushes them gently with the knockers. The ripe seeds fall into the boat. Unripe ones stay on the plant. Some seeds miss the canoe entirely and fall to the muddy bottom, where they'll germinate next year.
This technique hasn't changed in centuries. It's deliberately inefficient by modern standards—you're not stripping the plant bare, you're taking what's ready and leaving the rest. Many tribes consider this sustainable approach inseparable from the rice itself.
The Menominee people derive their very name from wild rice. More precisely, they're called Omǣqnomenēwak, and the neighboring Ojibwe know them as Omanoominii—both names referencing the plant. Across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ontario, you'll find towns, lakes, and rivers named Rice, Wild Rice, or Mahnomen. The city of Menomonie, Wisconsin, carries the name. So does Mahnomen, Minnesota. The landscape itself is labeled with the plant's importance.
Sacred Food, Legal Person
For the Ojibwe, wild rice isn't just culturally significant—it's sacred. And in 2018, the White Earth Nation did something that reflects that status: they passed a law granting manoomin legal rights, including the right to exist, flourish, and be protected.
This wasn't purely symbolic. When Enbridge, an energy company, began construction on the Line 3 oil sands pipeline through Minnesota in 2021, the route threatened wild rice waters. The White Earth Ojibwe responded by filing suit on behalf of the plant itself. The case represented one of the most unusual applications of "rights of nature" doctrine in American legal history—a framework more commonly applied to rivers or ecosystems in countries like Ecuador and New Zealand, now extended to a single species of aquatic grass.
The Dakota, Menominee, Cree, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk peoples also have deep relationships with wild rice. Historical records describe diverse preparation methods: stewing with venison stock, sweetening with maple syrup, stuffing wild birds, even making a kind of puffed rice treat or rice pudding. The harvest remains economically and culturally important to these communities today.
From Wild to Cultivated
For most of human history, wild rice was exactly that—wild. You couldn't farm it. You went where it grew and harvested what nature provided.
Then, in 1950, two brothers named James and Gerald Godward decided to try an experiment. On a one-acre meadow north of Brainerd, Minnesota, they built dikes, dug drainage ditches, installed water controls, and tilled the soil. The following spring, they acquired fifty pounds of seed and scattered it across their makeshift paddy.
Everyone told them it wouldn't work. Wild rice needs flowing water, the conventional wisdom went. It won't grow in a controlled environment.
It worked.
The Godwards had accidentally proven that wild rice could be cultivated like any other grain crop. They spent the early 1950s refining their techniques, and commercial production eventually followed. Today, California and Minnesota are the main American producers, with Minnesota claiming wild rice as its official state grain. Canada produces most of its wild rice from natural waters, with Saskatchewan as the leading source. Hungary began cultivation in 1989, and Australia has also entered the market.
This presents an interesting tension. Commercially grown wild rice is still wild rice—same species, same genetics—but it's produced using paddies, machinery, and agricultural methods that bear no resemblance to traditional harvesting. Some tribal communities have pushed back against calling these products "wild" at all.
Nutrition: The Other High-Protein Grain
Wild rice punches above its weight nutritionally. Per one hundred calories, it contains more protein than any grain except oats. It's rich in dietary fiber and the amino acid lysine, which is often lacking in other grains. It's also low in fat and naturally gluten-free—though this is true of all rice, wild and domesticated alike.
A single cup of cooked wild rice delivers meaningful amounts of several vitamins and minerals. You'll get over twenty percent of your daily manganese, fifteen percent of your zinc, and at least ten percent of your niacin, vitamin B6, folate, magnesium, and phosphorus. Thiamin, riboflavin, iron, and potassium come in at five percent or more.
There is, however, a danger lurking in poorly processed wild rice. The seeds can be infected by ergot, a fungus famous for its role in historical episodes of mass poisoning and its chemical relationship to LSD. Infected grains develop pink or purplish blotches, sometimes growing into structures several times larger than the seed itself. These contaminated grains are highly toxic and must be removed before consumption.
The Archaeological Puzzle
When did humans first eat wild rice? This question has occupied archaeologists for over a century, and the answer turns out to be surprisingly contentious.
Some European-American researchers once argued that wild rice consumption didn't begin until after contact with Europeans—a claim that would have profound implications for indigenous land rights and cultural claims. A seminal 1969 study definitively refuted this, using radiocarbon dating to prove that processing sites were centuries old.
But establishing prehistoric use is one thing. Establishing when it became important is another.
The questions multiply: When did wild rice first appear in various lakes and streams? When did it become abundant enough to be worth harvesting in quantity? Did its availability drive increases in indigenous populations, or was it the other way around? And what about that curious coincidence—the appearance of pottery in the archaeological record happening around the same time wild rice became important?
Archaeologists investigating these questions work from several kinds of evidence. They radiocarbon-date charred wild rice seeds and the charcoal from ancient parching fires. They examine the relationship between wild rice remains and different pottery styles, since pottery types serve as time markers throughout the Woodland period. They excavate processing sites and study the soil stratigraphy for distinctive features.
One such feature deserves special mention: jigging pits. In the mid-1800s, the geographer Henry Schoolcraft described depressions in the ground near wild rice lakes. Local people would place animal hides in these holes, fill them with rice, and stomp on it to thresh the grain from its husk. Modern archaeologists find these same pits in excavations—a direct material connection between historical accounts and the deep past.
Loss and Survival
Not all the wild rice story is triumphant. Texas wild rice, confined to a tiny stretch of the San Marcos River, teeters on the edge of extinction. Its pollen can travel only about thirty inches from the parent plant. If no receptive female flower sits within that range, no seeds form. Pollution and habitat loss have fragmented the population into isolated patches that may no longer be able to reproduce effectively.
Manchurian wild rice has nearly vanished from the wild in China, though it persists as that cultivated vegetable. Ironically, the species has established itself as an invasive plant in New Zealand, where it was accidentally introduced—thriving in its new home while disappearing from its native range.
And then there's the matter of land. As the fur trader Benjamin G. Armstrong wrote in the 1800s, outsiders who "claimed to have acquired title to all the swamps and overflowed lakes on the reservations" deprived indigenous people of their rice fields, cranberry marshes, and hay meadows. The loss of traditional harvesting areas accompanied—and in some cases enabled—the near-destruction of wild rice cultures.
Yet those cultures endured. The Ojibwe still harvest manoomin. The Menominee still bear its name. And in a Minnesota courtroom, a plant was granted the legal right to flourish.
The Genome Tells a Story
Scientists have now sequenced the genomes of both northern wild rice and Manchurian wild rice. The results revealed something unexpected: at some point after the Zizania genus split from its cousin Oryza (the true rices), the wild rice lineage experienced a whole-genome duplication. Every gene, copied. This kind of event is rare and significant—it provides raw material for evolution to work with, potentially explaining some of wild rice's distinctive characteristics.
The genetic work also confirmed what botanists had long suspected: despite their superficial similarities, wild rice and domesticated rice took separate evolutionary paths millions of years ago. They're parallel experiments in what a water-loving grass can become.
A Food That Grows on Water
Stand on the shore of a Minnesota lake in late summer, and you might see what the Ojibwe ancestors saw when they ended their long migration. The wild rice stands in the shallows, its flowering heads nodding above the water's surface. Canoes move slowly through the stands. Wooden knockers tap grain into boat bottoms, just as they have for centuries.
The same scene plays out in Saskatchewan and Wisconsin, in scattered pockets of Michigan and Ontario. It's not the same everywhere—commercial paddies now produce most of the wild rice Americans eat, and the supermarket version bears little cultural weight. But in the traditional harvesting grounds, wild rice remains what it has been for longer than anyone can precisely date: a plant that defines a place and the people who belong to it.
Whether it deserves legal rights, whether cultivation should count as "wild," whether the ancient processing sites prove continuous occupation—these debates will continue. But the grain itself keeps growing where it has always grown, in the shallows where the food floats on the water, waiting for someone to arrive by canoe.