The family had just finished praying for an adequate harvest of manoomin for the approaching annual journey to the wild rice camps. Thanks had been given for the last year's harvest. Smiles came to the faces of each person as they reflected on the camp and ceremonies that brought the people together just last year. The respect and sacred duties to honor the manoomin, the sacred gift, and to give thanks to Gitchi-manidoo for another year of the good life were an ongoing part of life, as it should be.
-- LaGarde family recollections of a wild rice harvest.
The worldview of Anishinabe people has within it a profound attachment to an understanding that our Creator brought manoomin to the people in a unique and important way. Manoomin was one of two important markers which would signal to the people that the prophecy calling them to journey west was complete. The miigis, sacred shells, were on top of the water and the food that grew above the water (manoomin) was growing in the lakes and rivers.
Today the traditional teachings of Anishinabe communities and Western science and genetic research are at an impasse. A tribal nation seeks to preserve and protect a sacred gift from becoming the next genetically modified agricultural crop redesigned for those who see wild rice only as another cash crop in need of modification so as to improve yield, pest resistance, uniform maturation, resilience and creating seed that assures these "improvements."
To Western science, the mere thought that something spiritual might impede scientific research is absurd, unnecessary and only would serve as an unnecessary obstacle to inevitable progress. To Anishinabe people, the sacred relationship with the manoomin is central and cannot be ignored in any discussion on the natural gift as it has been given.
The Anishinabe understand that Gitchi-manidoo provided the manoomin with benefits beyond being a nutritious and delicious food. That which gives us life, food, often contains powerful and good medicines for our health and well-being. The manoomin is one such special gift. It has multiple medicinal properties and serves as a catalyst for other medicines found in our environment.
We in turn have been given responsibility to assure that seed will always be given back to the lakes and rivers in an intentional way. Our traditional ways of harvesting guarantee that sufficient seed will always be given back. We fear that the genetic manipulation of manoomin would ultimately weaken or destroy those very qualities that bring healing to the people.
There is more than ample evidence that government understood this special standing manoomin had in the lives of the Anishinabe. The treaties certainly speak to this understanding.
The University of Minnesota School of Agriculture has been involved in research affecting wild rice for the past 50 years. Yet pitifully little was done to assure that the Anishinabe people would have any significant involvement in research with such a direct impact on their lives.
Nevertheless, the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture, as part of a land grant school, has ethically and morally defaulted on the larger university and its commitment to be good partners with the public citizens of Minnesota.
Could it be that the Anishinabe communities, in an ill-considered act of institutional racism, were purposefully excluded from the process?
Now we are faced with corporations wishing to patent what they consider intellectual property rights as well as the emerging medicinal properties inherent in the manoomin. Some call it profit-driven concerns; others call it greed.
The Anishinabe people still wonder if it is possible that genetically altered "tame rice" might contaminate the natural stands of manoomin. Furthermore, what might this genetic manipulation do to the medicinal gifts in the natural manoomin? And, finally, what would happen if the natural wild rice beds were to be damaged beyond survival by these new genetic creations?
Hard feelings over the University of Minnesota's wild rice research had been simmering for a half-century when Mark Yudof took the lid off the stewpot in 1998. A law-school dean who had recently become university president, Yudof paid a goodwill visit to White Earth tribal council members and -- perhaps forgetting the trial lawyers' injunction against asking questions before you know the answer -- he inquired how the university might serve the Ojibwe people. Their reply, in essence: Halt your new research into the genetic code of wild rice, our most important spiritual resource. Since then, as the research proceeded, the university has given assurances that it has no plans to genetically modify the rice, and that merely mapping its DNA poses no threat to the reservation's wild stocks. These have not satisfied the challengers at White Earth, who see the gene-mapping itself as an intrusion on something sacred -- and as an opening to inevitable exploitation from quarters far beyond the university.
Joe Lagarde Is An Anishinabe Tribal Elder From The White Earth ReservationStar Tribune
