Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Ricekeepers: A struggle to protect biodiversity and a Native American way
of life
by Winona LaDuke
Orion Magazine
July/August 2007
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/305

AS FALL TEMPERATURES CHANGE on the White Earth Reservation and the mist
lifts off the lakes, the Ojibwe take to the waters. Two people to a canoe,
one poles through the thick rice beds, pushing the canoe forward, while the
other, sitting toward the front of the boat, uses two long sticks to gently
bend the rice and knock the seeds into the canoe. The sounds of
manoominike, the wild rice harvest, are the gliding of the boat through the
water and across shafts of rice, the soft swish of the rice bending, the
raining of the rice into the canoe. They are soothing sounds, reminding my
people of the continuity between the generations. We have been harvesting
rice here for centuries. 

Each year, my family and I join hundreds of other harvesters who return
daily with hundreds of pounds of rice from the region's lakes and rivers.
We call it the Wild Rice Moon, Manoominike Giizis. On White Earth, Leech
Lake, Nett Lake, and other Ojibwe reservations in the Great Lakes region,
it is a time when people harvest a food to feed their bellies and to sell
for zhooniyaash, or cash, to meet basic expenses. But it is also a time to
feed the soul. 

FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, in Woodland, California, a company called
Nor-Cal has received a patent on wild rice. Conceptually, it seems almost
impossible-patenting something called wild rice. The Ojibwe now find
themselves at the center of an international battle over who owns
lifeforms, foods, and medicines that have throughout history been the
collective property of indigenous peoples. 

An estimated 90 percent of the world's biodiversity lies within the
territories of indigenous peoples, whether the Amazon, the Indian
subcontinent, or the North Woods. A new form of colonialism, known as
biocolonialism, is reaching deep into the heart of these communities. As
Stephanie Howard wrote for the Indigenous People's Council on
Biocolonialism, "The flow of genes is primarily from indigenous communities
and rural communities in 'developing countries' to the Northern-based
genetics industry. Ninety-seven percent of all patents are held by
industrialized countries." 

In 1994, for example, two researchers at the University of Colorado were
able to secure a patent on quinoa, much to the surprise of native farmers
in the Andean region of Bolivia and Ecuador who had been cultivating and
stewarding the grain for thousands of years. The patent gave the university
exclusive control over a traditional Bolivian sterile male variety called
Apelawa, and also extended to hybrids developed from the breeding of
forty-three additional traditional varieties. In 1998, the Bolivian
National Quinoa Producers Association, with support from other groups
internationally, was able to convince the researchers to drop the patent.
But similar patents were issued on the neem tree, ayahuasca (a medicinal
plant of the Amazon), and many other medicinal plants. Some of these were
also eventually revoked. In September 1997, RiceTec, a Texas-based company,
even won a controversial patent on the famed basmati rice. When the Indian
government filed a complaint with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,
RiceTec was forced to give up fifteen of twenty patent claims. 

It was within this climate that University of Minnesota plant geneticist
Ron Phillips, along with a few colleagues, mapped the wild rice genome in
2000. According to Phillips, this work is considered "important as a
foundation for genetic and crop improvement studies." The Ojibwe believe
that these studies, bearing names such as "Molecular Cytogenetics in Plant
Improvement," could have far-reaching implications. The wild rice gene map
is now filed with GenBank, a database operated by the National Institutes
of Health, and its availability essentially sets the stage for genetic
modification. 

Traditional breeding techniques attempt to enhance certain traits of the
wild rice and to repress others, but with genetic engineering, it becomes
possible to insert DNA from other plants into the wild rice. The Ojibwe are
alarmed by this possibility, viewing it as an attack on the essential
nature of the rice itself. 

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, according to our oral histories, the
Anishinaabeg-called the Ojibwe or Chippewa by the federal
government-followed a shell in the sky from the great waters of the East to
the place where the food grows on the water. That food was wild rice, the
only grain indigenous to North America, and it has been a central food in
ceremony and sustenance for our people ever since. "The[y] gain their
livelihood by fishing, hunting, gathering berries and wild rice and making
maple sugar, which constitutes their chief means of support," Indian agents
would write, noting that the Ojibwe also relied on wild rice as a source of
trade with the white settlers, and later as a source of credit and cash. 

The rice was so significant to the Ojibwe that the lands with the best wild
rice stands-including Big Rice Lake, Rice Lake Refuge, Lake Winnibigoshish,
Nett Lake, and other mother lodes of the great grain-were reserved. Beyond
the reservation borders, land was transferred to the U.S. government, but
the rice was not. In an 1837 treaty, the Ojibwe ceded nearly 14 million
acres of Wisconsin and Minnesota but retained "the privilege of hunting,
fishing, and gathering the wild rice upon the lands, the rivers and the
lakes included in the territory ceded." Federal and Supreme Court cases,
including the 1999 Mille Lacs Supreme Court case, have upheld the rights of
the Ojibwe to traditional land-use outside the reservations.  

It was this close bond between a people and a food that University of
Minnesota professor Albert Jenks encountered when he came to White Earth
and other reservations to study wild rice in the late 1800s. He noted with
disdain the Ojibwe harvesting practices. "Wild rice, which had led to their
advance thus far, held them back from further progress," he determined. His
perception of the Ojibwe wild rice harvest as a bastion of primitiveness
would become the prevailing opinion at the University of Minnesota
throughout the twentieth century-indeed, a sort of battle cry for
industrializing agriculture. 

In the 1950s, University of Minnesota researchers decided it was time to
liberate the rice from the indigenous people. So they set out to
domesticate wild rice. A university scientist named Ervin Oelke began the
process, using germ plasm collected from twenty-four natural stands within
the 1837 treaty area. Over the years, the Minnesota Agricultural Extension
office was able to "create" several strains of "wild" rice: Johnson in
1968, M1 in 1970, M2 in 1972, M3 in 1974, Netum in 1978, Voyager in 1983,
Meter in 1985, Franklin in 1992, and Purple Petrowski in 2000. 

In effect, what the Creator gave to the Anishinaabeg has become a
profit-making enterprise for others. These domesticated varieties are
engineered to ripen at the same time and, with a harder hull, can be
harvested mechanically. They are cultivated in paddies, flooded fields that
are drained to allow access with a combine. By 1968, Minnesota's paddy wild
rice production already represented some 20 percent of the state's yield.
This increase in production, along with growing national demand for wild
rice and subsequent interest from corporations such as Uncle Ben's, Green
Giant, and General Foods, permanently altered the market for traditionally
harvested wild rice. Lake rice could no longer compete with the
mass-manufactured paddy crop. The wholesale wild rice price dropped from
$4.44 per pound in 1967 to $2.68 a pound in 1976, destabilizing the wild
rice economy of the Ojibwe. 

Then, in 1977, the Minnesota state legislature designated wild rice the
official state grain-a tragic turn of events for the lake harvest. With an
outpouring from the state coffers, the University of Minnesota began to
aggressively market a domesticated version of wild rice. By the early 1980s
paddy-grown wild rice had outstripped the indigenous varieties in
production.  

Ironically, greed knows no state boundaries. Minnesota lost control over
production of its official state grain to California, which by 1983
produced over 8.3 million pounds, compared to Minnesota's 5 million pounds.
By 1986, more than 95 percent of the wild rice harvested was paddy grown,
the vast majority produced in California. As this glut of wild rice hit the
market, prices plummeted. Many Ojibwe lost their source of livelihood. But
to add insult to injury, many of the paddy rice companies were selling
their product as if it were wild wild rice, in some cases even using Ojibwe
images in their advertising. 

The Ojibwe fought back. In 1988, Wabizii v. Busch Agricultural Resources, a
lawsuit on the issue of false and misleading advertising, was filed. Busch
Agricultural Resources (a division of the beer conglomerate) was marketing
a product called Onamia Wild Rice, which plaintiffs Mike Swan and Frank
Bibeau charged was in fact a California-grown paddy product disguised as
Minnesota lake rice. "They had two Indians on a canoe who appeared to be
picking wild rice. They were taking a California-grown product, trucking it
to Minnesota, where it was packaged and designated as a Minnesota product,"
Bibeau, a White Earth tribal member, recalls. The case was settled out of
court, and eventually the state passed a law forcing paddy wild-rice
producers to label their product as such, with the words "paddy rice" no
less than half the size of the words "wild rice." Still, the Minnesota
labeling law does not apply to California-grown wild rice, so
three-quarters of the nation's domesticated crop can be described as "wild"
without qualification. 

WILD RICE, OR Zizania palustris, is actually a grass, sharing only some
genetic traits with other rice crops internationally. The differences in
wild rice beds are well known to local harvesters. Some plants grow tall
and live in deep water; others have adapted to shallow water. Some strains
have fat grains; others have long grains. They range in color from purple
to light brown to greenish. That biodiversity is the staff of life, and it
is essential to the security of the rice. That same biodiversity served as
the genetic basis for the domesticated varieties, an agricultural monocrop.


The Anishinaabeg believe there is a real possibility that wild rice stands
could be contaminated by the domesticated varieties. There are around six
thousand bodies of water with significant wild rice beds in Minnesota,
containing around sixty thousand acres of rice. And there are around twenty
thousand acres of cultivated wild rice paddies in close proximity to most
of those native beds. Ron Phillips claims there is little chance of
cross-pollination as long as approximately 660 feet separate the two kinds
of wild rice. However, in the summer of 2002, university researchers noted
the possibility of between 1 and 5 percent of the pollen from test plots
drifting up to two miles. 

Then there is, in Donald Rumsfeld's vernacular, the unknown unknown of the
zhiishiibig, the ducks. Ducks and other waterfowl do not differentiate
between paddy rice plots and natural stands of wild rice; they move freely
between them, carrying rice from one to the other. Phillips himself
acknowledges a problem: "It depends on what you are willing to accept as a
threshold of risk. You can't guarantee . . . that a bird won't pick up a
weed and take it twenty miles away," he said. 

As for Nor-Cal Wild Rice, U.S. patent number 5955648 secures its rights to
a traditional breeding process which uses something known as "cytoplasmic
genetic male sterility" to produce hybrid varieties. John Pershell of the
Water Quality Research Department of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe read all
thirty pages of the patent. "Nowhere did it mention anything about the wild
rice being wild or coming from somewhere," he said. The rice has basically
been co-opted. But what's worse, those confusing words, "cytoplasmic
genetic male sterility," are essentially a fancy way of saying that these
varieties cannot reproduce. They are sterile. The Ojibwe are concerned
that, like the notorious "terminator" seeds, Nor-Cal's strain of wild rice
could negatively affect the vitality of wild lake rice. 

These fears were validated by two major contamination incidents in August
2006. In the first, genetically engineered bentgrass escaped its testing
ground in Oregon. Three years earlier, farmers had joined with
environmentalists and the Center for Food Safety in pursuing a lawsuit
against the USDA, which had, in their assessment, failed to properly
regulate varieties of creeping bentgrass and Kentucky bluegrass that had
been genetically engineered to resist the weedkiller Roundup. In February
2007, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ruled in favor of the
plaintiffs, citing evidence that field tests had the potential to be
harmful to other crops, and instructing the USDA to cease approval for
field tests of genetically engineered crops until it can give more scrutiny
to applications. 

Last August as well, news was released that a German company was
responsible for the contamination of a vast portion of the U.S. long-grain
white rice crop by a genetically engineered variety never intended for
human consumption. When the news spread, European and Asian markets began
strictly limiting their importation of all U.S. long-grain white rice.
Japan banned the white rice crop outright. The European Union demanded that
expensive genetic tests be conducted to guarantee no presence of
genetically engineered organisms. Rice futures prices tumbled $150 million
in a single day and rice exports are estimated to decline by as much as 16
percent in 2007. Following this fiasco, farmers from Arkansas, Missouri,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and California filed a lawsuit against Bayer
CropScience, charging the corporation with tainting the domestic crop and
damaging the U.S. export market. Industry responded by filing a petition to
deregulate its untested, genetically engineered product. Meanwhile,
scientists are still trying to figure out how an experimental crop that was
discontinued years ago, and was apparently grown at distances beyond what
the USDA considered adequate to prevent contamination, managed to become
commingled with long-grain white rice harvested from many different
locations. 

Though no one has yet attempted to grow genetically engineered wild rice in
the out of doors, a similar contamination scenario would be devastating.
Tainted lake rice would be virtually unable to compete in international
markets, and over half of all wild rice is sold internationally. 

FOR THE PAST NINE YEARS, the Anishinaabeg community has repeatedly
requested that the University of Minnesota stop its genetic work on wild
rice. "We object to the exploitation of our wild rice for pecuniary gain,"
wrote Minnesota Chippewa Tribal President Norman Deschampe in a 1998 letter
to the University of Minnesota. He continued: "We are of the opinion that
the wild rice rights assured by treaty accrue not only to individual grains
of rice, but to the very essence of the resource. We were not promised just
any wild rice; that promise could be kept by delivering sacks of grain to
our members each year. We were promised the rice that grew in the waters of
our people, and all the value that rice holds." 

In September 2003, a coalition of Ojibwe tribal governments and members
demanded the following concessions from the university: a moratorium on
genomic research and genetic research of wild rice at the university, to be
effective December 31, 2004; protection of Anishinaabeg intellectual
property rights to wild rice, including a ban on selling these rights; a
cultural consultation program to be set in place by the university to
examine the ethics of research on cross-cultural issues; and mutually
agreed upon beneficial research to be done on behalf of Anishinaabeg
people, equal to that done on behalf of the cultivated wild-rice industry.
A satisfactory response is still pending. More recently, the White Earth
and Fond du Lac bands of Ojibwe have adopted ordinances banning the genetic
modification of wild rice, following the lead of several California
counties and a host of international ordinances on GMOs. 

In the spring of 2006, a letter signed by over seventy Minnesota state
legislators promoting the protection of wild rice was secured by state
representative Frank Moe, whose constituents include two Ojibwe bands, but
only after a pitched battle with the biotech industry and the University of
Minnesota. At the legislative hearings, representatives for both the
industry and the university testified against protecting wild rice from
genetic engineering, pushing instead for an open-door policy for the
future. Biotech giant Monsanto, unsurprisingly, argued that such protection
would send a "chilling message" to the biotech industry, and perhaps
diminish its investment in the state. 

Despite this opposition, a protection bill for wild rice was signed into
law in early May 2007. The legislation requires that any entity wanting to
grow genetically engineered wild rice in Minnesota must file an
environmental impact statement with the state. It also requires that state
entities notify the tribes of any permits granted to grow genetically
engineered wild rice in other states, and that they engage in studies to
better understand the threat that genetic engineering poses to wild rice. 

The controversy over wild rice is similar to a recent dispute over taro, a
sacred food of Native Hawaiians. Since January 2006, Hawaiians had been
pressuring the University of Hawai'i to give up patents it held on three
varieties of taro, arguing that taro, the "elder brother" of Native
Hawaiians, should not be subject to transgenic experimentation. Gary
Ostrander, vice-chancellor for research and graduate education at the
University of Hawai'i at Manoa, describes how the three disease-resistant
taro strains were created after a leaf blight wiped out 90 percent of
Samoan taro in the 1990s. University scientists had used traditional
breeding techniques to cross Palauan and Hawaiian taro, and the university
had obtained plant patents on the resulting strains in 2002. However, after
negotiations with Native Hawaiian taro farmers and legal counsel, the
university filed "terminal disclaimers" with the U.S. Patent Office,
dissolving its proprietary interests. And in June 2006, the university
literally tore up its patents. "It is as if the patents were never filed,"
said Ostrander in an article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, adding that he
had come to appreciate the Native Hawaiians' point of view on the issue. 

Earlier that spring, the pueblos of New Mexico had joined with Hispanic
communities in a historic declaration of seed sovereignty, reaffirming
seed-saving traditions and rejecting patents and genetically engineered
seed. The declaration states that the traditional farmers of Indo-Hispano
and Native-American ancestry in northern New Mexico "consider genetic
modification and the potential contamination of our landraces by GE
technology a continuation of genocide upon indigenous people and as
malicious and sacrilegious acts toward our ancestry, culture, and future
generations." In October 2006, the declaration was passed by the National
Congress of American Indians, an organization comprised of the elected
tribal leadership of federally recognized tribes. And in early 2007, the
New Mexico state legislature passed a memorial "recognizing the
significance of indigenous agricultural practices and native seeds to New
Mexico's cultural heritage and food security." Even though several clauses
concerning the threat of genetic engineering were deleted due to pressure
from Monsanto and the State Department of Agriculture, the final version
resolved that the House of Representatives "supports efforts to prevent
genetic contamination of native seeds." 

Rowen White, a Mohawk seed saver and farmer, explains what's at stake: "A
cultural community that persists in its farming tradition does not simply
conserve indigenous seed stock because of economic justifications. The
seeds themselves become symbols, reflections of the people's own spiritual
and aesthetic identity, and of the land that shaped them." 

"We stand to lose everything," says White Earth tribal member Joe LaGarde,
who has harvested wild rice since he was a small child. "If we lose our
rice, we won't exist as a people for long." This is why tribal entities in
the North Country are determined to differentiate the wild rice that is
harvested from lakes and rivers from the corporatized version, and are
seeking national and international markets for their rarefied product.
Through work that is somewhat like the fair-trade struggle of coffee
farmers, the Ojibwe are beginning to regain an economic foothold with the
wild rice economy. The key is to keep the rice and protect it; to remain
connected to a traditional way of life and the land. 

It was in that spirit that I took my fifteen-year-old son out ricing on the
Ottertail River last year, far from the din of television, Game Boys,
NASCAR, and big cities. I let him pole for the first time. He's quite a bit
larger than I, and in the past I would do the poling out of fear that he
would dump the boat-and his mother-into the lake. But over time he's become
more steady, and I've become more docile. We watched the wabiziwag, the
trumpeter swans, lift off the river and listened to the sound of rice
falling in the canoe. 

There is something irreplaceable about following the canoe path of your
ancestors through the rice beds. It's sort of a miracle in this millennium
that this age-old tradition continues. But it does. And it will. 

Apane. Always. 



Forwarded by:
_________________________________
Ravi Khanna, Director
voices from the global village
1world communication
P. O. Box 2476
Amherst, MA 01004
cell: 413-687-8150
e-mail: oneworld@igc.org