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Wild rice, also called manoomin, mnomen, psíŋ, Canada rice, Indian rice, or water oats, is any of four species of Poaceae that form the genus Zizania, and the grain that can be harvested from them. The grain was historically and is still gathered and eaten in North America and, to a lesser extent, China, where the plant's stem is used as a vegetable.
Wild rice and domesticated rice ( Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima), are in the same botanical tribe Oryzeae. Wild-rice grains have a chewy outer sheath with a tender inner grain that has a slightly vegetal taste.
The plants grow in shallow water in small and slow-flowing ; often, only the flowering head of wild rice rises above the water. The grain is eaten by and other aquatic wildlife.
Texas wild rice is in danger of extinction due to pollution and habitat loss in its limited range. The pollen of Texas wild rice can only travel about 30 inches away from a parent plant. If a receptive female flower receives no pollen, no seeds are produced. Pollination Habits of Endangered Rice Revealed to Help Preservation Newswise, Retrieved on July 15, 2008. wild rice has almost disappeared from the wild in its native range, but has been accidentally introduced into the wild in New Zealand and is considered an invasive species there.
The genomes of northern and Manchurian wild rices have been sequenced. There appears to be a whole-genome duplication after the genus split from Oryza.
One person vans (or "knocks") rice into the canoe while the other paddles slowly or uses a push pole. The plants are not beaten with the knockers, but require only a gentle brushing to dislodge the mature grain. Some seeds fall to the muddy bottom and germinate later in the year. The size of the knockers, as well as other details, are prescribed in state and tribal law. By Minnesota statute, knockers must be at most diameter, long, and weight.
Several Native American cultures, such as the Ojibwe, consider wild rice to be a sacred component of their culture. The Ojibwe people call this plant ᒪᓅᒥᓐ manoomin, meaning (commonly translated ). In 2018, the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe granted manoomin certain rights (sometimes compared to rights of nature or to granting it legal personhood), including the right to exist and flourish; in August 2021, the Ojibwe filed a lawsuit on behalf of wild rice to stop the Enbridge Line 3 oil sands pipeline, which puts the plant's habitat at risk.Kirsti Marohn, Line 3: White Earth argues DNR water permit violates wild rice rights , August 5, 2021, MPR NewsJessica Douglas, Wild rice sues to stop oil pipeline , September 2, 2021, High Country News
Tribes that are recorded as historically harvesting Zizania aquatica are the Dakota, Menominee, Meskwaki, Ojibwe, Cree, Omaha, Ponca, Thompson, and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago). Native people who utilized Zizania palustris are the Ojibwe, Ottawa/Odawa and Potawatomi. Ways of preparing it varied from stewing the grains with venison stock and/or maple syrup, making it into stuffings for wild birds, or even steaming it into sweets like puffed rice, or rice pudding sweetened with maple syrup. For these groups, the harvest of wild rice is an important cultural (and often economic) event. The Menominee tribe take their name, and the name Omanoominii that the neighboring Ojibwa use for them, from this plant. Many places in Illinois, Indiana, Manitoba, Michigan, Minnesota, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Wisconsin are named after this plant, including Mahnomen, Minnesota, and Menomonie, Wisconsin; many lakes and streams bear the name "Rice", "Wildrice", "Wild Rice", or "Zizania".
In the United States, the main producers are California and Minnesota (where it is the official state grain), and it is mainly cultivated in . In Canada, it is usually harvested from natural bodies of water; the largest producer is Saskatchewan. Wild rice is also produced in Hungary and Australia. In Hungary, cultivation started in 1989.
The swollen crisp white stems of Manchurian wild rice are grown as a vegetable, popular in East Asia and Southeast Asia. The swelling occurs because of infection with the smut fungus Ustilago esculenta. The fungus prevents the plant from flowering, so the crop is propagated asexually, the infection being passed from mother plant to daughter plant. Harvest must be made between about 120 days and 170 days after planting, after the stem begins to swell, but before the infection reaches its reproductive stage, when the stem will begin to turn black and eventually disintegrate into fungal spores.
The vegetable is especially common in China, where it is known as gāosǔn (高筍) or jiāobái (茭白). In Japan it is known as makomodake (マコモダケ). Other names which may be used in English include coba and water bamboo. Importation of the vegetable to the United States is prohibited in order to protect North American species from the smut fungus.
Despite the close association of the Anishinaabe and wild rice today, indigenous use of this food for subsistence also predates their arrival in the Lake Superior region. The Anishinaabe today were part of a larger Algonquian group who left eastern North America on a centuries-long journey to the west along the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes. The Anishinaabe migration story details a vision to follow a giant clam shell in the sky to a place where the food grows on the water. This journey ended between the late 1400s and early 1600s in the Lake Superior wild rice country when they encountered the plant.
But a more precise dating of the antiquity of human use of wild rice and the appearance of the plant itself in lakes and streams have been the subjects of continuing academic debates. These disputes may be framed around these questions: When did wild rice first appear in various areas of the region? When was it plentiful enough to be harvested in quantities to be a significant food source? What is the relationship of wild rice to the introduction of pottery and to increases in indigenous populations in the past 2,000 years? "The use of wild rice by and its influence on prehistoric people in northeast Minnesota has led to much argument among archaeologists and paleoecologists".
As an example, archaeologists divide human occupation of northeast Minnesota into numerous time periods. They are: the Paleo-Indian period from 7,000 years ago (5000 BCE) extending back to an uncertain time after the glaciers receded from the last Ice Age; the Archaic period from 2,500 to 7,000 years ago (5000–500 BCE); the Initial Woodland period from 2,500 to 1,300 years ago (500 BCE–700 CE); the Terminal Woodland period from 1,300 to 400 years ago (700–1600 CE); and the historical period after that time. These rough dates are open to debate and vary by location in the state. In general, two lines of inquiry have focused on archaeological wild rice: 1) The radiocarbon dating of charred wild rice seeds or the associated charcoal left behind during the parching stage of rice production, and 2) Examination of preserved wild rice seeds associated with specific prehistoric pottery styles found in excavations of processing sites. Different pottery styles in northern Minnesota are linked to certain times in the Initial and Terminal Woodland periods stretching from around 500 BCE to the time of contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans. To place this in context, "Although ceramics may have appeared as early as 2,000 BCE in the southeastern United States, it is about 1,500 years later that they became evident in the Midwest". After European contact, indigenous wild rice processors generally abandoned ceramic vessels in favor of metal kettles.
On its own, accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating of wild rice seeds and charcoal samples from the Big Rice itself indicated indigenous use of this site dating to 2,050 years ago. Furthermore, all excavation levels that solely contained ceramics only used during the Initial Woodland period (known as Laurel pottery complex) also included wild rice seeds. This indicated the use of wild rice during the Initial Woodland period, according to the study.
Excavators have documented more than 50,000 pottery shards from the site from the Initial and Terminal Woodland periods. Specifically, researchers analyzed ceramic rimsherds of Laurel pottery from the Initial Woodland period and Blackduck, Sandy Lake and Selkirk pottery styles from the Terminal Woodland period. Each pottery type had wild rice seeds associated with it in the soil layers of archaeological deposits. These soil layers were not contaminated with pottery from other eras.
This suggests intensive exploitation of the site for wild rice processing through these time periods by different cultures. For example, archaeologists often associate Sandy Lake pottery with the Sioux people, who were later displaced by the Anishinaabe and possibly other Algonquian migrants. Archaeologists often associate Selkirk pottery with the Cree people, an Algonquian group.
An examination of the pollen sequence at Big Rice indicates that wild rice existed in "harvestable quantities" 3,600 years ago during the Archaic period. This date is 1,600 years before the AMS radiocarbon date of human-processed charred wild rice seeds at the site during the Initial Woodland period, although there is no archaeological evidence of human use of the wild rice at the site that far back in time as of yet.
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