(upbeat electronic music continues) - It is the food that grows on the water.

Manoomin, it means "good berry" in English.

- I didn't know any of this, or I didn't have any of these feelings about rice until I got to come out and rice, and realized, like, "Oh, my God, this is why I exist, this is what allowed my ancestors and my family to thrive and sustain themselves," just really special, and I want more people to understand that story.

- [Jenna] Eryn Hyma.

She's from Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the water harvesting manoomin.

Wild rice beds used to grow all over the state.

It's an uncommon sight these days.

- I think when Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac came to Detroit, he described it as an earthly paradise.

The northern section of Belle Isle was more of a marsh, and there was coastal wetlands where all of these rivers exited Detroit, and wetlands is truly the place where wild rice thrives and grows.

- [Jenna] Long ago, manoomin grew along the Detroit River in Detroit, as the city grew, it went away.

- The history of draining wetlands and clearing swamps is the history of displacing wild rice in a lot of ways.

(faint speaking) - [Jenna] September 2025, Northeastern Michigan, a rice camp on the Au Sable River.

On this expedition, a couple dozen Anishinabek people with Indigenous roots from around the Great Lakes.

Here, the best way to harvest manoomin is the traditional way.

- These are knockers, this is cedarwood, and the reason we use cedarwood is 'cause it's lightweight, it floats, and it's soft, you don't hurt the plants when you're knocking it.

- So grab... (plants rustling) - The central part of any Anishinabek's life would've been his wiigwaasi-jiimaan, which means "birchbark canoe," and for us, that would've been, like, our car.

We lived on waterways, we used the waterways for transportation, you couldn't hunt, fish, gather without your canoe.

So first and foremost, there's gonna be at least two of you in each canoe, all right?

There's gonna be a push-puller and there's gonna be a rice-knocker, you guys can switch throughout, you can hand off your equipment to each other This is how we get through the manoomin without damaging it, 'cause it gathers all of those up and they're strong together, so... - This is really light.

- Yeah, careful with the end of it, though.

We don't wanna bop nobody.

(faint speaking) - Our lives and our practices helped wild rice, the way we harvest it and the way we would care for it, and wild rice returned that favor, right?

So it was, like, a reciprocal relationship.

- We're not just harvesting, guys, we are actually helping this bed out because if we didn't come out here and do this, ducks, redwing blackbirds, they love this just as much as we do, guys, so what we're doing today, we're not just taking it away from nature, we're helping nature because this gives us a chance to get those seeds into the sediment and actually get that sediment moved a little bit with our push-pull so that those seeds get a chance to bury and actually get covered up instead of just being a buffet for the geese the next time they just follow our footprint through the manoomin bed.

- [Jenna] The Au Sable, famous for trout fishing, saw hydroelectric dams installed on the river over the past century.

That helped lead to the demise of the manoomin, but on this part of the Au Sable, manoomin is back.

- 90 years ago, they put a dam just upstream from here.

Over the course of time, the dam started to break down, they didn't wanna take care of it, Army Corps engineers come in, long story short, they took it out, for 90 years, all this rice, and this muck, and all this stuff stayed dormant behind that dam, and once they released that dam, all that sediment comes down and settled all through here.

- Now, the ricers are watching for other dam removals that could revive more manoomin beds.

When you're here for a whole weekend, how many pounds of rice do you end up with?

- We've gotten... You know, for four days, we could, you know, end up with, you know, anywhere from 600 to 1,200 pounds of rice.

- Wow, just with, like, maybe 20 people out there?

- Yeah.

- [Jenna] Wow.

- [Frank] Yeah.

(faint speaking) - [Jenna] Bugs and debris that's also fallen in are removed from the grain, and chaff is separated from ricers' hair.

- This is part of the process.

- [Jenna] Into the sacks.

The seeds of the Zizania genus, first classified by Western science in the 1700s, found throughout the Great Lakes.

The manoomin's encased in holes and needs to be removed.

- For the Anishinaabe peoples, it made up a massive amount of our caloric intake over the winter, so we needed it to last, and so, we needed to dry it so that it would make it through the winter.

- [Jenna] Last fall in Detroit, Jared Ten Brink and Antonio Cosme explained the drying and hauling process.

- So how long would you let this rest out for?

- I think generally, it's a couple of days.

- Yeah, a couple of days if you have good sunlight and heat, a couple of days.

- With anything like this is that there's so many steps involved that there is a job for everyone.

- [Jenna] The next step, parching, more drying by fire.

The process, in times past, often along the river, the young and old pitching in.

- Historically, we would've done this exactly the same way, we would've built a fire and set copper kettle over a flame, and then, stirred and stirred and stirred.

You don't want it to get too hot, so we have the flame off to the side so the top part is hot and the bottom part stays cooler so that it doesn't cook the rice, you're just kinda toasting it in a way.

- [Jenna] From here, hulling time, the really old-fashioned way, jigging, rolling the grain underfoot.

But then, there's a hulling machine.

- [Jared] Right, so this threshes it, it tosses that grain around.

- These have been around for a while, the photo here goes back to the 1930s.

(light rattling) Jared Ten Brink borrowed this one for our demonstration.

All this leads to the bare grain, ready to cook.

Does wild rice taste different than regular rice that we're used to buying at the grocery store?

- The first thing I think that's important to note is that there's different wild rices.

This wild rice is more of a nutty flavor.

This is different than what you can buy typically in a store.

- What's your favorite thing to make with the rice?

Back at rice camp, Sam Barber's making dinner.

- [Sam] This was cooked for probably about 45 minutes.

- [Jenna] Seems like it's really popular serving that with maple syrup and... - Yeah, maple syrup and berries, that's a pretty... I think that's a pretty traditional way.

- [Jenna] Perhaps tradition is what you make it.

- I like fitting it into dishes and it just goes so well with so many different ingredients, like, you could put it in chili, you could put it in, you know, Middle Eastern dishes, you could put it in Asian dishes, either mixed in or as, like, a main start, and tacos with wild rice are really good too.

- [Jenna] Soup?

That's popular too, like at the Detroit North American Indian Center on the west edge of the city.

- Some of our foundational stuff, though, that we do is Earth honoring.

- [Jenna] This is the third annual manoomin soup cook-off.

The judges record their scores, Jesse Deerinwater presiding.

- Is first place with 23.5.

(people cheering) - [Jenna] The soups are served.

- [Person] What is the name of this soup here?

- It's butternut-squash manoomin soup, and then, I've got toppings for dried venison, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and dried cranberries.

- [Person] Thank you.

- Some of the recipes are, like, family recipes that folks have in their families that they've had for a while, other ones are just, like, general recipes that people know about because they're common soups throughout the Great Lakes and taking the concepts of, like, modern chefing, you know, you might say, mixing it with the old recipes and the old foods.

- Oh, it's amazing, yeah.

It's so delicious.

- [Jenna] Here, there's concern about water quality.

Preserving the environment is a theme of this gathering.

Sam Cooper lives in Petoskey.

- So there's a big connection between people that consider themselves to be water protectors and people that are trying to help support the manoomin and wild rice, and help it flourish in Michigan.

- A program underway, the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative, brings experts and stakeholders together.

They've created the Manoomin Stewardship Guide.

Vincent Salgado is part of the Initiative.

Are you working with the state to implement something as a result of the plan?

- Hopefully, with this plan, we're able to get the state agencies more involved in this work to restore manoomin by providing more resources and, like, more boots on the ground, but also, we hope this starts a dialogue for increasing protections for manoomin.

- [Jenna] In 2023, the state officially designated manoomin Michigan's native grain.

Where might more of it be grown?

It needs slower-moving, shallow, clean water.

People nearby need to understand and accept it too.

(plants rustling) - That rice used to grow in the Grand River and in the Muskegon River, doesn't grow there anymore, but maybe we take a dam out and it comes back.

- You know, not everybody's gonna want it, you know?

And that's fine, it doesn't have to be over there, but where it is, that it's protected and it should stay that way, like, especially... Like, this is all natural, you know?

And it just wants to be here.

- I look at places like Belle Isle.

That is a place where wild rice would've been, and that's a place where we could have it now.

- [Jenna] The conditions would need to be made right again, like up north on this part of the Au Sable.

- The rice is still here, it persisted, it survived, and we're still here, and we persisted and we survived, and we're not going anywhere.