Cloudy skies this evening followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Low 66F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Cloudy skies this evening followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Low 66F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.

BEVERLY SHORES — To the untrained eye, the line of swaying plants easily blend into the surrounding wetland. However, Jennifer Kanine knew exactly what she was looking for.

Kanine bent the tall grass and examined the top where a cluster of husks covered in tiny hairs grew.

The husks contain mnomen, a Potawatomi word which translates to “good berry.” The nutritious grains are also known by another name — wild rice.

“A lot of people will just walk by it and say, ‘that’s a grass and I don’t know what that is, but it looks pretty,’ and they don’t realize what this plant can provide to humans, to animals and to the ecosystem in general,” said Kanine, who is the director of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi’s Department of Natural Resources.

After decades of dredging wetlands for farming and development, much of the mnomen once found throughout the Great Lakes region is gone.

A study published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that watersheds with wild rice have declined by 32% since the early 1900s, and are now largely limited to northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

However, when researchers with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi began investigating the swales at the Indiana Dunes National Park in 2016, what they discovered surprised them.

“There is a significant amount of wild rice at Indiana Dunes, I don’t think the park even realized how much they had,” Kanine recalled.

The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, based out of Dowagiac, Michigan, has been working to reestablish wild rice on tribal lands for quite a few years. However, the Dowagiac River, which runs adjacent to tribal land, was straightened and dredged long ago, causing pollution along the shoreline which led to the destruction of rice beds.

The tribe tried to introduce rice harvested in northern Minnesota to Michigan, but found the rice could not adapt to the warmer climate.

“That disparity (in climate) is getting even greater with time. It’s just getting warmer here and so it is even harder for the rice to adapt from northern Minnesota to southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana, so I wanted to see if we could find local genotypes,” Kanine said.

The Pokagon Band started looking closer to home, areas in the land now called Indiana where the tribe would have historically harvested mnomen. In 2018 the Pokagon Band received a $40,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to research the rice beds at the national park.

“Maybe once there was wild rice here,” Kanine said as she looked across the lush wetland surrounding either side of the abandoned road.

The Pokagon Band’s team of researchers has harvested wild rice found largely in the Miller Woods section of the park and planted it in the wetlands found in Beverly Shores.

Crumbling asphalt and the odd waterline tangled in the roots of a toppled tree are the only remnants of any past development on the land now owned by the National Park Service.

“We have lost so much of our wetlands, the historic places where wild rice would have been, have been altered. So as we’re starting to reestablish some of these wetlands, we want to enhance the biodiversity within them and we can do that by planting wild rice,” Kanine said. “Wild rice helps tie the food web together. It provides food for multiple bird species, muskrats, beavers, fish.”

Wild rice is keystone species meaning it serves as a sort of “lynchpin” for a whole host of critters to use for food and shelter, Kanine explained.

The rice plants often form a floating mat as they grow, allowing small fish to use the dangling roots to hide from predators. Birds, spiders, lady bugs and rice worms also make homes in the tall stalks.

Armed with a clipboard and waders, Kanine and a team of researchers make the hour-and-a-half commute from Dowagiac to the park almost daily throughout the summer and early fall.

The researchers use a quadrat, a square tool crafted out of PVC pipe used isolate a unit of study while in the field, to examine how the rice is doing. They note how many stalks there are, how deep the water is, how many other plants are growing nearby and if there has been any predation.

When the research first began, the team brought some rice back to a lake on the Pokagon Band’s land in Michigan. Because the bed is small and self-sustaining the tribe does not harvest the rice, but Kanine said they do use it for education.

For the past four years, the Pokagon Band and the National Park have been working on an agreement to allow tribal citizens to harvest certain edible and medicinal plants from the park.

Under the proposed agreement, tribal citizens would be able to harvest a specific list of plants from five locations in the park. If approved, the process would involve getting a permit to go to the park, reporting what is harvested to the Pokagon Band and then the Pokagon reporting the harvest to the National Park.

“A lot of that reporting kind of dissuades people from starting in the first place... it (the agreement) might be for one person a year or zero people a year, but I wanted them to have the opportunity,” said Kanine, adding that she has heard concerns about overharvesting. “If they really knew the Pokagon Band and the way that the tribal citizens are culturally taught how to gather and how to be in the natural environment, they are not going to over harvest.”

Public comment on the agreement ended on July 28. If the agreement is approved, Kanine would like to craft a second agreement that would allow the Pokagon Department of Natural Resources to harvest more wild rice from the park and plant it on the tribal land in Dowagiac.

Though different origin stories exist within the Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Odawa tribes, many mention a migration from the east coast to “the place where food grows on water.”

Loosely organized as the Three Fires Confederacy, the three tribes traveled west until they got to the Great Lakes region where they found an abundance of mnomen growing in the many lakes, ponds and streams.

Packed with antioxidants and fiber, dried mnomen was a key food source for the Potawatomi throughout long winters, often paired with blueberries or walleye. Sharing the history and cultural significance of mnomen helps keep some of the Pokagon Band’s traditions alive, Kanine said.

A few years ago, the Pokagon Band held a wild rice camp where participants learned how to harvest and prepare mnomen.

Pinching a small rice husk, Kanine said “to get it off the plant into your belly takes a long process.” After hand harvesting the rice, either in canoes or by wading through the plants with buckets, the rice has to be dried, heated, placed in a dancing pit to dislodge the grain from the husk, winnowed and sorted.

“Then you get a little vial of rice you can cook,” Kanine said. “That’s why you pay upwards of $20 or more per pound, especially locally grown, hand-harvested, hand-parched, hand-winnowed, hand-sorted.”

The tribe’s Center for History and Culture is in the process of hiring a sustainability leader to help lead more wild rice programming.

As Kanine and her fellow researcher Diana Ramirez packed up for the day and prepared for the trek back to Dowagiac, they looked across the small stand of mnomen happily growing in the wetland.

“It takes a lot of passion and it takes a lot of heart to want to be out here doing this work and we’re doing it because we see a benefit in it and we want to make sure it is maintained throughout history.”

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