MINNESOTA: Moon of Mah-No-Men

Minnesota’s 11,000 Chippewa Indians call wild rice Mah-No-Men. They say it reverently, for wild rice is their cash crop, their “great gift from the Spirit of Heaven.” August is the moon of its ripening, the month when the grain turns yellow and the lakes where the wild rice grows look like golden plains. After the ripening comes the moon of the harvest, when the Chippewas gather the rice just as they did when the exploring Franciscan, Father Louis Hennepin, first saw them in 1680.

Chippewa men, standing erect in the bows, pole their canoes into the rice fields. In the stern of each canoe sits a squaw, holding in each hand a wooden flail. Gently, lest the plants be hurt, she presses a sheaf of rice stalks between the flails, bends the sheaf over the side of the canoe. Gently still, the flails knock the ripened heads off the stalks. The rice falls on a canvas cloth or into a birchbark basket; the canoe moves on; the rest of the grain sinks to the fertile mud on the bottom of the lake, to take root and grow for the next moon of Mah-No-Men.

For years white men left the Chippewas in peace to gather the rice and grind it into a rich, tangy meal. Then hunters spread the word that wild rice made good eating with game. Doctors and dietitians prescribed it for dyspeptics and people who were allergic to other cereals. Prices rose (to around $1 per lb., retail, for packaged wild rice). Greedy whites moved into the rice fields of north-central Minnesota, began to push out the Chippewas. Motorboats and rude, unaccustomed hands destroyed the wild plants, breaking nature’s cycle of renewal.

Partly to help the Indians (most of whom act, live and dress like poor whites), partly to save a valuable State resource, the Minnesota Legislature last year passed a rice conservation law. The statute restored to the Chippewas their exclusive harvest rights on some 200,000 acres of Minnesota’s rice lakes, outlawed all harvesting methods except the traditional way of the Indians. Chosen to administer the law was a respected Chippewa half-breed named Frank Broker.

Nearly everybody in northern Minnesota knows rawboned, six-foot Frank Broker. For more than 25 years he was a logger, one of the best in that logging country. Now he is a jobber, driving through the timberlands in his Chevrolet to buy up small lots of lumber and sell them to the mills. With his good sense, his jet-black Indian hair and his love of talk, he is also a familiar figure in the lobby of the Endion Hotel at Cass Lake, where red and white men of affairs assemble regularly to settle matters of moment. As a past president of the Chippewas’ tribal council, he understands Indians and wild rice.

This week Frank Broker was at work for his tribe and the State, giving rice conservation its first trial in Minnesota. At Cass Lake, at the town of Mahnomen, at many another where wild rice is sold to brokers, Chippewas and whites are celebrating the new moon of Mah-No-Men with street fairs and carnivals. Frank Broker meantime kept his eye on the wide, shallow lakes and their waving tops of grain. As in the old days, no Chippewa dared go into the fields until the tribal chieftain announced that the rice was ripe for harvest. This year Chippewas and whites alike awaited Frank Broker’s word.