Indigenous peoples around the world are building movements for cultural resurgence and healing, defending traditional ways of being and knowing, to protect the environment, and re-establish autonomous food systems. After several hundred years of genocide and structural racism, understanding the deep and long-lasting effects of colonisation on Indigenous people is an important step that non-Indigenous people can do to support these vital efforts.
The overall objective of this research was to analyse, from a feminist political ecology perspective, the historical and current patterns of control and access of the Ojibwe people to wild rice. Ojibwe people are Indigenous to what is northern central USA and southern Canada. ‘Wild rice’ is the name that English colonists gave to the wild grass (Zizania palustris) growing in the lakes and rivers of central North America in the 1700s. They gave it this name because they saw it growing in water and producing a grain, but it is not botanically a rice (Oryza sativa) at all. Manoomin, the Ojibwe name for the grain, is a spiritually, culturally and historically important food for the Ojibwe people.
In the 1950s, manoomin was sold by businessmen to stores across the United States and Europe bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous people a significant profit. In the 1960s, the wild grain was domesticated, and farmers began to produce it in flooded paddies in Minnesota and California. The cultivated wild rice is what is found today in rice blends around the world, as well as in health food stores marketed as a gluten-free, ancient grain. The commodification of the hand-harvested wild rice, and later the domestication of this grain were acts of appropriation of an Indigenous food that have had far-reaching impacts on Ojibwe society.
Main conclusions of the research are threefold. First, appropriation of wild rice was possible because of a century of slow violence including dispossession, erasure policies, structural racism and marginalization, including the displacement of women from places of power in society. Second, factors contributing to appropriation included processing technology, the invention of the supermarket, post-WWII housewife propaganda glorifying housework with a focus on cooking, Uncle Ben’s wild rice mix that made wild rice famous, the Indian mystique that made wild rice attractive, efforts of self-indigenization to gain control over natural resources and anti-Indigenous peoples narrative that justified the appropriation. Gastrocolonialism is a useful term to explore this phenomenon. Third, a new approach to feminist political ecology is necessary to sufficiently take into consideration the intersectional dynamics of access to resources, considered gifts or relatives by Indigenous peoples.
