On Menominee Lakes, Wild Rice Is Coming Back. It Isn’t Easy.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

MENOMINEE, Wisc. — On a cool bluebird morning, DJ Micik guides his canoe through the narrow channel connecting Little Rice Lake with Rice Lake, two of the largest bodies of water on the Menominee reservation in northern Wisconsin. 

Sitting behind Micik is his 6-year-old son, Liam, whose curiosity pulls him again and again into the tall trio of buckets he sits amongst. Their contents brim with dozens of tightly packed clumps of earth, each roughly the size of a baseball. 

Though they may not look it, these small brown mounds are a new technology inspired by ancient wisdom. The balls’ hard clay exteriors act “like a mother’s womb,” Micik says, ensuring that the half-dozen seeds packed inside each clump can safely sink to the bottom of lakebeds, take root in soft mud, and survive in the face of harsh winter weather and increasingly erratic precipitation that has battered northern Wisconsin in recent years.

If all goes according to plan, the clay balls will help facilitate the return of wild rice — North America’s only native grain, and a sacred superfood in Great Lakes’ Indian Country — to their namesake waters in Menominee after more than a century’s absence. 

“We’re the people of the wild rice, but we slowly lost that connection,” says the elder Micik, a member of the Menominee tribe. “Rice has been going away.”

The incalculable cultural, spiritual, medicinal, and nutritional value wild rice offers has been largely missing from Menominee waters since the 1890s, the tribe estimates, as a consequence of the water pollution, development, and climate change that has affected all harvests region-wide. 

The story of the grain’s significance to and disappearance from Menominee lakes is not unlike those known intimately by tribes in Minnesota, Michigan, and other parts of Wisconsin. It began centuries ago, when these communities’ Anishinaabe ancestors migrated to the Great Lakes region from the East Coast, following a prophecy that foretold of a “food which grows on water.” The Menominee established themselves as keepers of rice and responsible stewards of the world’s largest surface freshwater ecosystems, from which the grain, in thin green shoots, sprouts.

Some Great Lakes tribes have managed in recent years to restore wild rice to parts of their historic landscape, often overcoming agricultural run-off and encroaching industry to do so. But for the Menominee, who today live on the largest land-based reservation east of the Mississippi River, recent efforts have yielded very little grain. Menominee teachers have been forced to travel to Michigan and Minnesota, where harvests have been more successful, to pick up rice to teach processing techniques in grade school classrooms. 

“A big part of the research that we’re doing is starting off from basics, like sampling the waters and sediment,” says Cherie Thunder, the Menominee tribe’s wild rice research coordinator. 

In 2026, the stakes to make some progress feel elevated. The tribe is in the final months of a three-year federal grant that supports their efforts to find new locations and methods to regrow wild rice on their waters. Harvests during the first two years have been largely unsuccessful, and uncertainty lingers regarding future support. Several Great Lakes food programs, including one they had counted on for subsequent funding, have been dismantled in the past year by the Trump administration.  

Despite these concerns, Micik is confident that the clay ball approach, brand-new this year, will yield better growth. His optimism is rooted in the Menominee language. That manōmaeh — the word for wild rice — is just a single letter’s difference from manōnaeh — the word for red clay — he says, is no coincidence. 

“That’s why a day like today,” Micik says, bringing his canoe to rest and offering his son the first clay ball to drop into Rice Lake, “is a dream come true.”

Logging Legacy Meets Modern Challenges

The decline in Menominee wild rice harvests in the early 20th century coincided with the rising regional influence of the “Pine Ring” — the moniker given to white-owned logging companies whose workers in earlier decades had brought outside diseases that killed hundreds of Menominee people. 

Despite the signing of federal provisions meant to embolden the reservation to harvest and sell its own timber, Pine Ring companies continued to pressure the tribe and purchase their lands, including those on which high-protein wild rice grew. The consequences of these sales have lasted into the present day. 

“We’ve struggled with our wild rice and growing it consistently,” says Gary Besaw, the director of the Menominee Tribal Department of Agriculture and Food Systems. “We’re in the early stages of reseeding some of the original beds on the reservation. Granted, we had 12 million acres. Now we’re down to a quarter million acres of our ancestral territory.”

Development also remains an ongoing challenge. Northern Wisconsin is cabin country, flush with vacation homes and lakefront getaways. Some of the most prominent shores where wild rice historically grew are heavily touristed today, busied by docks and boats. Where wetlands once absorbed excess water, the growing presence of concrete, Micik says, has further stymied the natural flow of water that helps wild rice grow. 

“If we were in charge of writing the law of the land, we could have made a rule saying nobody within range of the watershed can have a house there,” Micik says. “Now, it’d be really hard to instill that law. There are too many people.”

Changes in lifestyle are also a factor. The number of people who hunt for ducks has declined in recent years, so abundant waterbird populations are eating the crop well before late summer harvest. Thunder has also wondered if the distribution of certain birds, including swans, has changed. There is speculation that a mold may be growing on the crop and killing it. Propellers from increasing boat traffic seem to certainly add to the challenge.

“There’s probably a place on Shawano Lake, one of our largest historic manōmaeh lakes, where there’s not a lot of action, but I don’t know,” Thunder adds. “So we’re just starting with locations on the reservation.” 

The ideal places for wild rice to grow are by areas of moving water, nearby an inlet or outlet, and where water levels are roughly 2.5 feet deep. Wild rice typically starts to grow in early spring. By early June, it reaches its floating leaf stage, which is one of its most vulnerable life stages to hungry birds. The height of harvestable rice can range from sticking a couple feet above the surface, to reaching taller than a human standing in a canoe. 

Micik is especially encouraged by areas where spawning bass have cleared seaweed from the lake floor, offering an opportunity to “create a relationship with the fish.”

“Long ago, our ancestors saw the connection between the two,” he says. “We weren’t just wild rice harvesters. We were cultivators of it.”

This symbiotic relationship was disrupted by the installation of a dam on the nearby Wolf River, which flows into the reservation, last century. The barrier has led to a decline in the number of sturgeon — an important bottom feeder that keeps wild rice beds clean — in Menominee lakes. It is yet another challenge that the tribe hopes the protective clay ball method will help overcome.

“We’re listening to our elders,” Besaw adds. “They told us a long time ago what we really should be doing, what really is happening, and what we should be prioritizing.”

Grant Funding Shores Up

The Menominee Tribe has shown that even the smallest seed can grow into an outstanding impact.  

Over the past half decade, the tribe has launched successful efforts to re-center traditional foods — including buffalo and wild rice — in elders’ diets, and both private and federal dollars have been used to deliver thousands of these meals across the reservation. But cuts to USDA programs in the last year, Besaw says, inevitably slowed this momentum. 

The Menominee Tribe’s Department of Agriculture and Food Systems, along with programs in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, was a founding member of the Great Lakes Midwest Regional Food Business Center. The institution, one of 12 across the country founded by the USDA in 2023, was meant to support farms and local food businesses with small grants. 

At the direction of the Trump administration, the center shuttered in September before any financial aid could be distributed. In the absence of the funding the center would have guaranteed, Besaw says the tribe is continuing to look for other opportunities. If funds are found, they will be used to carry some positive momentum forward — initial reports from the tribe this spring indicate that the first wave of wild rice, planted last fall, is beginning to emerge. 

On a recent canoe trip on Menominee lakes, one could feel this anticipation. 

After roughly an hour of paddling through clear waters and tall grass, the elder Micik brings the boat to rest near a shallow shore and places a clay ball in his son’s hand. Two generations take turns tossing the mud-protected seeds into the clear lakewater, each ripple bringing substance to the tribe’s expanding tenor of joy. 

“This is such a big thing for me, restoring wild rice back in our community, having rice on water beds on our reservation,” Micik says. “So many people I know could benefit from more easily accessible wild rice.” 

“The next big thing,” he continues, watching his son Liam, “would be having kids leading this.” 

Header Image: DJ Micik guides his canoe on Little Rice Lake on the Menominee reservation of northern Wisconsin. Photo: Christian Thorsberg / Circle of Blue