Photo above: Tina Frankenberger
As part of our ongoing series of equity interviews, today we hear from Tina Frankenberger, of the Grand Traverse Bay Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. She shares thoughts about Manoomin, the wild rice that is so important to Michigan’s Indigenous tribes. As told to Jeff Smith.
I was first introduced to wild rice, or Manoomin, back when I worked as a fish biologist for the Grand Traverse Band, around 1998. I was doing Great Lake biology, and the inland biology team was working on wild rice restoration, and that was my first introduction to it. But I didn’t really get into it until 2016, when Grand Traverse Band held their first wild rice camp on the Betsie River. I had come back here to try to get agriculture started for our tribe.
I spent two months or more just camping and going from wild rice camp to wild rice camp.
And that’s when the wild rice idea really hit me. I had really gotten passionate about it. And I remember that that year, that harvest season, I went around to a lot of different tribes that were hosting wild rice camps and participated and helped harvest, so they would have rice to process for demonstration there. I got to see a lot of the different wild rice beds throughout the state of Michigan and see how it came ripe from one side of the state to the other. I saw the variation on all the different rice beds rather than just what we had here in our own backyard. I spent two months or more just camping and going from wild rice camp to wild rice camp.
Over the years, the Anishinaabe Caucus had really pushed forward the effort for wild rice to become the official state native grain, and that happened in November 2023. I went down to Lansing to see it become official.
There was a working group between the 12 tribes, the federally recognized tribes in the state of Michigan, with two representatives from each tribe. There were also representatives from the state DNR and agriculture department, and two representatives from the federal government on the wild rice task force team to move forward on issues related to wild rice restoration, and so I had been on that since about 2019.
Wild rice is an aquatic grain and it has very sensitive times during its development. So it’s a tricky balance: You don’t want to tell people where the rice is at, but also in some ways you need to let people know where it’s at and let them understand about those times a year when it’s very fragile so people with powerboats or even paddleboards and kayaks are not going over top of it or tearing up the root systems.
Fluctuations in water levels also have a big impact on wild rice—if water is either too shallow or too deep that’s a problem. We are seeing huge rainfall events that wash out bridges and roads, and those floods greatly impact wild rice. People can’t control the amount of rainfall that we get, but water levels on many lakes are controlled by dams, and we need to give tribes more control to be able to make sure that the water doesn’t get too deep, especially at key times of rice development.
What can happen is something we call ghost rice, which is when the rice husk looks normal on the plant, but when you harvest you realize there’s no rice inside.
What can happen is something we call ghost rice, which is when the rice husk looks normal on the plant, but when you harvest you realize there’s no rice inside. More education needs to be done to the general public, so they know how to protect rice plants.
For Manoomin, about a foot and a half of water is ideal. And if you get up to about three feet of water, the species of wild rice we have growing here in this area starts to not do so well
If we get rains at the wrong time, all it takes is a year or two of high water to really knock down your restoration efforts, because if you’re not producing seed one year, you don’t have good regrowth the next year. So big rains at the wrong time for wild rice has been one factor that reversed some of the strides that we made forward.
Grand Traverse Band has beds on the Betsie River, and we have someone who has mapped them with drones over the years, so we can see the difference of how many acres of wild rice there were in the Manoomin beds. They were up to seven to nine acres at one point on that stretch of the Betsie, and then as low as four or five acres in some years when the water was really high.
When rice beds are ignored and not harvested traditionally, in a sustainable way, the beds tend to shrink.
Robin Wall Kimmer, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass talks about the reciprocal relationship between humans and sweetgrass, where the harvesting helps the sweetgrass. And I believe that is also true of wild rice. When rice beds are ignored and not harvested traditionally, in a sustainable way, the beds tend to shrink. When you harvest traditionally with knocking sticks, 50 percent of the rice goes back into the water to replant.
One thing I like is there’s a relationship between the red-winged blackbird and the wild rice. When the birds flock to a rice bed, you know it’s at prime ripe, ready to harvest. And there’s a reciprocal relationship with the red-winged blackbirds just like with humans. When the birds flock to the rice and eat, they knock off rice that falls to the bottom of the lake and it regenerates. One of our beds was documented at about 3 acres and for some reason people stopped harvesting the bed for a few years and when it was documented after that, it had shrunk to about a half-acre. So I really feel the reciprocal relationship with humans and wild rice is real.
Sweetgrass is a sacred plant and one of the first four sacred medicines the Creator had given Native people, and wild rice is also one of our four sacred ceremonial foods, so there is definitely a relationship between our people. And wild rice is also part of our migration story. We were told that we needed to migrate to where the food grows on the water, and Manoomin is an aquatic plant, and it’s the food that’s growing on the water. That’s how we knew this was our home, and so for us, it’s really important that we keep up that relationship and we take care of that plant.
Wild rice was nearly wiped out from Michigan because of logging and wetland draining, and today there is only a patchwork of small rice beds, but they are expanding. Well, our people are like that too. Our people went through a long period of removal and termination, things that had a huge impact on our population. But I believe in our ability to thrive and I believe in the ability of the wild rice to thrive.
For me, I have gotten those messages about how closely and intricately those things are related. The wild rice is what told us that we needed to come here. This was the story about why we needed to migrate here, what we were told in those prophecies, and so we live here.
As Native people, we believe that all of the relatives, the things like the Manoomin, the the winged relatives, the finned relatives, the four leggeds, the the plants, the trees, those are all relatives of ours, and they take pity on us to help us survive. Now that the environmental factors, the climate factors that have had an impact on the Manoomin’s ability to exist here, I believe that that direct correlation of the size of the rice plants and whether we interact also is a correlation.
We need to take care of those wild rice beds that sustained our life and took care of us. I feel that pull. I feel the ancestors when I am out there on wild rice beds. I am at home. I am at peace.
We need to take care of those wild rice beds that sustained our life and took care of us. I feel that pull. I feel the ancestors when I am out there on wild rice beds. I am at home. I am at peace. If my spirit or my heart is aching, that is the perfect, perfect place for me to go for healing—not just for food that sustains my body. Just being out there in those wild rice beds heals my heart and my soul in a way that nothing else I’ve ever found can help me.
No amount of therapy, drugs, or anything else can fix when you’ve had a bad day or you’re going through the emotional struggles of trying to be a human in this life that we live that is so fast-paced.That relationship with the rice beds to me is so important to me. I’ve made sure that I get out on a wild rice bed when I need help getting through some of the worst struggles that I’ve been through.
I’ve had family and friends who made sure to call me even during COVID when we were all masking and social distancing. “Hey, you might not have any of your equipment or anything, but I’m going to be out here on the bed at this time, come meet me. We got life jackets. We’ve got the canoes there. We’ve got the knocking sticks. Just show up and be at your end of the canoe.”
And it was like magic. I mean, they made sure that I got out on that rice bed. Not because we pre-planned it or made any special effort. It was because it was meant to be. 
