LAC SEUL — A research and information-sharing project scheduled to run over the next three years aims to help re-establish a traditional crop in several regions in Ontario.
Martha Dowsley, a professor in Lakehead University’s departments of anthropology and geography and the environment, recently received $50,000 from the province’s Ontario Agri-food Research Initiative for a project aimed at helping First Nations grow manomin, or wild rice. In an interview with Newswatch, Dowsley said she’s been working with Lac Seul First Nation on manomin restoration for a number of years.
“What we decided to do was to make a series of workshops to network with other First Nations across the province,” Dowsley said. “Because we've been hearing that there's a lot of First Nations trying to restore wild rice on their traditional territories.”
“But there doesn't seem to be too much coordination,” she continued.
“We thought maybe it'd be a good time to start a province-wide workshop network.”
The initiative is slated to hold workshops in 2025, 2026 and 2027 about how to re-establish wild rice on a larger scale than it generally is now. This year’s workshop, scheduled for early October in Mississauga First Nation near Blind River, is set to run Oct. 2–4. The plan is to hold similar forums in 2026 and 2027 in Alderville First Nation and Lac Seul, Dowsley said.
The three partner communities have some similarities around the scale of their current restoration projects and how historical water management by senior levels of government and development projects that significantly altered watercourses and water levels destroyed the wild rice that used to grow in their territories, she said.
For example, she added, Lac Seul lost at least hundreds of acres of wild rice due to hydroelectricity dam construction and subsequent flooding in the early 20th century. The wetland plant is sensitive to changing water levels, Dowsley said.
“We're hoping that at each workshop, we'll get some other interested parties and maybe experts from that region that will be able to participate, and then those three core communities will act as sort of a research node,” she said.
“That's why they're so geographically distant from each other — so they can share information and learn what each other is doing, learn different traditions.”
The goal is to ensure that the workshops are Anishinaabe-led and that traditional expertise is front and centre.
“So, doing things from their cultural perspective, as well as including science, but setting up the workshops and sort of thinking of wild rice as a relation rather than a natural resource.”
The initiative is also being financially supported by Lakehead University, Dowsley said.
She said undertaking this work in 2025 has numerous benefits, including around erosion control, studying how a resurgent wild rice crop could potentially help control wetland invasive species, like phragmites, and strengthening food security in a way that promotes “cultural resurgence.”
“It was a staple food, and it still has an important food value, so it can strengthen the food system and food security for Indigenous communities, as well as restoring that relationship and the traditions that go along with it,” Dowsley said.
It also brings to the forefront conversations around how the province’s history has had long-term damaging effects to Indigenous communities and the province as a whole, she said.
“You’re looking at this plant that was so predominant in everybody's diet in the 1700s, early 1800s across Ontario, and now we don't have that as Ontarians,” Dowsley said.
“Trying to restore it makes everybody ask what happened to it, and trying to learn those local histories of what and when dams were put in and why, and can we work together maybe to manage the water in ways that is more conducive to supporting wild rice.”