Manoomin is an essential component to the survival and identity of the Anishinaabeg people. Manoomin, or wild rice as it is called in English, is evidence of the fulfillment of the migration prophecies of the Anishinaabeg. However, Anishinaabeg capacities to subsist from manoomin have diminished greatly in the Great Lakes region due to multiple factors including dams and logging for the timber industry, forced removal to reservations, loss of knowledge due to boarding schools, the need for wage labor, commodification of wild rice, and the breakdown of kinship and gender systems (Child 2012 and Noorgard 2014). Even with these circumstances and the challenges they pose many Anishinaabeg are engaged in the restoration of wild rice habitats and the revitalization of the cultural practices and knowledge systems that are part of ricing. However, while the literature presents wild rice revitalization as the restoration of a "traditional" system of ricing, it is often missed that today's ricing efforts are very different than what occurred historically. In fact, in certain areas, scholarly critics have pointed out that ricing is now a masculine activitywhere it was not previously (Child 2012 and Noorgard 2014), or that certain rice stories actually emanate from Anishinaabeg commercial ricing, and not the historical seasonal round (Noorgard 2014), or that most ricing programs are managed by the governments of federally-recognized Tribes whose structures differ drastically from the management regimes that would have governed ricing historically (Bureau of Indian Affairs 2014).Through three articles this dissertation shows: 1) the impacts of settler colonialism on manoomin in the Great Lakes including how manoomin became a commodity grown on a farm outside of the Great Lakes, 2) how the shifts in gender roles are impacting a group of Indigenous women today and how those women created a regenerative space called the Indigenous Women's Manoomin Collective that wrote Article 2 of the dissertation as a Collective. The members of the Collective are seven Indigenous women from across the Great Lakes in both the United States and Canada. 3) Through a systematic analysis of newspapers in the Great Lakes in Canada and the US that show the shifts that are occurring in systems of knowledge with Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems for people that are participating in manoomin restoration projects and the silencing of Indigenous women experts in those roles.
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