[Episcopal News Service – Bemidji, Minnesota] In mid-August, Mike Kornezos and his longtime ricing partner Thomas Jones were out on the lakes checking the readiness of wild rice. Harvested in early fall, wild rice – along with fish, wild berries, migratory ducks and garden-grown vegetables – has long sustained the Anishinaabe, as the Indigenous peoples of northern Minnesota are called. Hot days and cold nights make for the best conditions, they said. In the following weeks, they would spend most mornings on the lakes in a canoe: Kornezos standing at the stern like a gondolier with long metal pole forked at the end for catching hold of the muddy surface below to better propel the boat along the water, and Jones kneeling, using a pair of smoothly carved sticks called “knockers,” one to hold the rice stalk steady and the other to thresh the rice kernel into the bottom of the boat by one smooth, swift extension of the forearm from the elbow. A protein-rich plant, wild rice historically has grown in abundance in northern Minnesota, a region of pine forests, peatlands, rivers and lakes; it’s a cultural and culinary mainstay of the Anishinaabe, who are also known as Chippewa and Ojibwe. “We produce more rice here, naturally, than we do anywhere else in the States,” said Elaine Fleming, an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College, a Cass Lake community college where she teaches Anishinaabe studies and Leech Lake Nation history and nationhood, as well as survey courses on Indigenous peoples of the Americas. “We are a nation, not a reservation,” Fleming made clear in an interview with Episcopal News Service from her home in Cass Lake on the Leech Lake reservation. “And a nation,” she said, “has four elements: language and culture, history, a land base, and its own governance. When I teach, I like to break things up like that so [students] can understand themselves as a nation. In the fall, ricing is part of that. In the spring, it’s sugarbush.” The ability to feed itself – to have food sovereignty – is part of being a nation, she said. In June, Episcopalians from across the United States joined with the Anishinaabe in a nonviolent protest at the headwaters of the Mississippi River – Bear Creek as the Anishinaabe call it – to try to stop construction on the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Beginning in 2016 with the Dakota Access Pipeline and the camp at Standing Rock, North Dakota, The Episcopal Church has joined interfaith solidarity actions as Indigenous peoples and other “water protectors” have stood up to multinational corporations’ energy exploration, drilling and transportation infrastructure projects. These nonviolent actions have centered on water quality; they’re also about human rights violations and the rights of sovereign nations. The church also has stood with Native Alaskans, the Gwich’in, in their struggle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploration and development. Oil drilling in the refuge poses a threat to Porcupine caribou, animals the Gwich’in depend on for food and cultural survival. General Convention sets The Episcopal Church’s priorities. Its solidarity with the Anishinaabe is fixed in a 2018 resolution reaffirming the church’s repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and support for Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over territorial resources. The resolution specifically noted the concerns of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe regarding the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. When the Anishinaabe ceded territory to the U.S. government in 1855, they did so with the understanding that they would maintain their rights to hunt, fish and gather wild rice on the land. On Oct. 1, after a six-year legal and regulatory battle, the Line 3 pipeline became operational. The $9.3 billion, 338-mile pipeline replacement and expansion project carries oil across northern Minnesota, where 85% of Minnesota’s Indigenous population now live on a patchwork of reservations, among them the Leech Lake and White Earth reservations. The pipeline runs along reservations and ceded treaty lands. With more than 10,000 lakes, Minnesota and Lake Superior hold a fifth of the world’s freshwater. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has given Enbridge permission to use 4.5 billion gallons of groundwater annually. “When people like Enbridge come in, we will battle them,” Fleming said. “We have a say about what they are doing with the land and what happens with the water, and it’s not just about us. Everybody needs the water to be clean and useable, so we’re not just fighting for Leech Lake or White Earth. We are fighting for the land and for the people.” When European settlers first arrived in North America, Indigenous peoples by some estimates numbered in the millions. By the 1890s, warfare, disease and starvation had decimated the tribes, and some 249,000 remained in the United States. Those who survived the genocide lost territory when they signed treaties designed to open the land to logging, mining, homesteaders and farming. Forced from their land, Indigenous peoples began to lose access to the fish and game, plants and berries that sustained them. When the U.S. government began issuing rations to reservations, further disrupting Indigenous peoples’ cultural and culinary traditions, the government used food and harvest season as tactics. “They would give us food, and a lot of times the food didn’t come on time. Sometimes the food was rotten. They would be selling [us] the food so they could profit off of it,” Fleming said. “But the one thing we could always depend on was the rice. … Rice is something you can keep. For at least 10 years, it’ll be good. They understood that, and when they were treatying with us, they would hold their treaty meetings in the fall purposely to influence us to sign treaties – like the Nelson Act – because they knew we wanted to get home, that we needed to be ricing.” The Nelson Act became law in January 1889. It attempted to relocate all the Anishinaabe in Minnesota to the White Earth … Continue reading Church’s solidarity among Indigenous peoples in Minnesota shines light on long-ignored history of exploitation