Ojibwe women harvesting wild rice

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Wild rice makes a tiny exploding sound when it is struck by a cedar knocking stick. A burst, followed by the sounds of rice falling into a canoe below.

“It’s the sound the universe made when it began,” I was told by my long-time teacher. It’s the sound of life beginning, life continuing. Wild rice, what we know as manoomin, is the food that grows on water, the staple that lies at the heart of my people’s culture. 

(Houska 2020).

Line 3 resistance leader Tara Houska writes about the importance of access to gathering and harvesting wild rice - a right guaranteed by the Treaty of 1837 even through the ceding of Ojibwe land to the United States (Canada has similar treaties). Ojibwe resisters argue that in addition to inflicting violence onto the land and water and contributing to the looming threat of climate change, Line 3 threatens access to wild rice through its construction and potential for oil leaks. Houska's reference to the sounds of wild rice harvesting as the beginning of life/the earth is one example of alternative modes of knowledge production that challenge Western hegemonic discourses. What does it mean to know and to be? Wild rice, which would be considered by many current settlers as merely a food, is a source of sustenance, care, kinship, and spirit for many Ashinaabe people historically.