Word: chippewa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Minnesota's 11,000 Chippewa Indians call wild rice Mah-No-Men. They say it reverently, for wild rice is their cash crop, their "great gift from the Spirit of Heaven." August is the moon of its ripening, the month when the grain turns yellow and the lakes where the wild rice grows look like golden plains. After the ripening comes the moon of the harvest, when the Chippewas gather the rice just as they did when the exploring Franciscan, Father Louis Hennepin, first saw them...
...Chippewa men, standing erect in the bows, pole their canoes into the rice fields. In the stern of each canoe sits a squaw, holding in each hand a wooden flail. Gently, lest the plants be hurt, she presses a sheaf of rice stalks between the flails, bends the sheaf over the side of the canoe. Gently still, the flails knock the ripened heads off the stalks. The rice falls on a canvas cloth or into a birchbark basket; the canoe moves on; the rest of the grain sinks to the fertile mud on the bottom of the lake, to take...
Partly to help the Indians (most of whom act, live and dress like poor whites), partly to save a valuable State resource, the Minnesota Legislature last year passed a rice conservation law. The statute restored to the Chippewas their exclusive harvest rights on some 200,000 acres of Minnesota's rice lakes, outlawed all harvesting methods except the traditional way of the Indians. Chosen to administer the law was a respected Chippewa half-breed named Frank Broker...
This week Frank Broker was at work for his tribe and the State, giving rice conservation its first trial in Minnesota. At Cass Lake, at the town of Mahnomen, at many another where wild rice is sold to brokers, Chippewas and whites are celebrating the new moon of Mah-No-Men with street fairs and carnivals. Frank Broker meantime kept his eye on the wide, shallow lakes and their waving tops of grain. As in the old days, no Chippewa dared go into the fields until the tribal chieftain announced that the rice was ripe for harvest. This year Chippewas...