09/26/2026
Wild rice in Wisconsin centers on the Kakagon Sloughs near Lake Superior, a wetland the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe still manages today and calls, without exaggeration, one of the richest wild rice beds anywhere in the region. The Ojibwe name for wild rice is manoomin, meaning good berry, and its story in Wisconsin is tied directly to how the Ojibwe, who call themselves Anishinaabe, ended up here in the first place.
According to Ojibwe teaching, their ancestors originally lived along the East Coast and were instructed by prophecy to migrate west until they reached the place where food grows on water. That journey eventually brought them into the Lake Superior region, where they found exactly that, wild rice growing thick in the shallow rivers and lake inlets of northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. Archaeological evidence shows people harvesting wild rice in this region going back roughly two thousand years, well before the Ojibwe themselves arrived and adopted the same practice as central to their own way of life.
The harvest itself, still done largely by hand today, follows a method that hasn't changed much in generations. Two people work together in a canoe, one standing and using a long pole to push through the rice beds without damaging the plants, since motorboats are never allowed through them. The other sits and uses a pair of cedar sticks called knockers, gently bending the ripe stalks over the canoe and tapping loose kernels of wet green rice, which fall directly into the bottom of the boat. It's slow, physical work, and it's meant to be, since ricing has always doubled as a way of bringing families and communities together each late summer.
Wild rice mattered enough to the Ojibwe that it was written directly into treaty language with the U.S. government, including the 1837 treaty, sometimes called the Pine Tree Treaty, formally recognizing rice harvesting rights on the land. Today six Lake Superior Chippewa Ojibwe communities in Wisconsin, Bad River, Red Cliff, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac du Flambeau, St. Croix, and Sokaogon, all continue the tradition on and off reservation land.
That tradition faces real pressure now. Wisconsin and Minnesota scientists estimate that roughly half the wild rice that once grew across the region has disappeared over the past century, and Bad River tribal members have raised specific concerns about mining activity near the Kakagon Sloughs threatening what remains of one of the last truly healthy wild rice ecosystems in the state. For the Ojibwe, that isn't just an environmental statistic. It's a direct threat to a food source, and a practice, that their own origin story says brought them to this exact stretch of Wisconsin in the first place.
