Wild Rice Faces Numerous Threats—and Has Determined Protectors

Bazile Minogiizhigaabo Panek, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, was 7 years old when he attended his first rice harvest in northern Wisconsin. He and his sister rode in a canoe while his mom pushed the boat with a pole through the plants growing out of the shallow water. Together, they tapped the plants with sticks. Rice seeds rained into the canoe; others fell into the water.

Indigenous peoples have harvested wild rice, or manoomin, in the upper Midwest for millennia. They care for the plant, which they consider a relative and critical to their cultural identity. They watch it grow through the summer and spread its seeds as they reap them.

“There’s just this moment of excitement and the acknowledgement that we are doing something that my ancestors have done for thousands of years, or doing a similar process that works to honor them,” says Panek, founder of Good Sky Guidance, a company that advises public institutions and corporations on Indigenous knowledge and environmental initiatives.

But the manoomin that once abounded in the region—memorialized in names like Wild Rice Lake—has been declining due to factors like changing land use and global warming. Finding all the water bodies that support these plants and exactly where they grow can be time-consuming and expensive. Restoring them can take years, and the Trump administration pulled funding for some restoration projects.

Yet the plant and the people who nurture it are resilient, and some recent efforts to identify, protect and restore northern wild rice have shown success.

Researchers recently found that drone technology can detect where the species grows , which could be helpful for restoration projects. Separate research published last year , co-authored by Panek, determined that cutting back vegetation that outcompetes manoomin—along with other measures such as lowering water levels during certain growing periods—could help slow the plant’s decline. And tribes, universities and nonprofits are working together to restore it in the region.

“We envision that we would continue to locate habitats that traditionally and historically sustain rice and that can again, and then take and equip community members with the skills and equipment needed to harvest and process that rice,” said Jessie Conaway, an Indigenous arts and sciences research coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works on a wild rice restoration effort in Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago. “This leads to food sovereignty, cultural revitalization, nutrition, the building blocks of communities.”

Bazile Minogiizhigaabo Panek, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, harvests wild rice in Wisconsin. Credit: Ursula Charles

An Important Plant Under Stress

The Indigenous peoples who long depended on manoomin knew that if they cared for the plant, it would care for them. Yet Western practices altered the landscape and the plant itself.

Federal and local government agencies dammed rivers, using them to control water levels and float logs harvested from the northern forests. As traditional wild rice habitats flooded, they became increasingly inhospitable for the plant. Pollution from mining and farming has added to the struggle. And today, wake from motorboats can rip the plant from a lake bottom by its roots during a particularly vulnerable stage of growth.

In the early 1900s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to research manoomin. The University of Minnesota took the helm in the 1950s and continues to do so today, exploring ways to genetically modify the plant so it’s less fragile—“shatter-resistant” or “shatter-proof”—and people can harvest more grain with machinery.

That effort runs counter to some Indigenous ideas on interacting with manoomin, said Taylor Fairbanks, a member of the White Earth Nation located in northwestern Minnesota. A 2026 University of Minnesota graduate, she investigated the history of water, manoomin and the Ojibwe people within the Great Lakes region for her senior thesis.

“When it comes to that genetic modification, there’s not a sense of connection that is being built among people,” she said. “Manoomin has been able to steward itself, and we have been able to do that in return. When we create manoomin to become shatter-proof, then it’s not actually manoomin, it’s actually patty rice, the kind of wild rice that you see in grocery stores, because it’s being industrialized.”

In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe enacted an ordinance recognizing manoomin’s “inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation,” part of the growing rights of nature movement . A lawsuit later brought on behalf of manoomin against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources aimed to prevent construction of a pipeline plaintiffs said would violate manoomin’s legal rights, but an appeals court ruled in 2022 that the tribal court did not have juris…