On Menominee Lakes, Wild Rice Is Coming Back. It Isn’t Easy

MENOMINEE, Wisc. — On a cool bluebird morning, DJ Micik guides his canoe through the narrow channel connecting Little Rice Lake with Rice Lake, two of the largest bodies of water on the Menominee reservation in northern Wisconsin.

Sitting behind Micik is his 6-year-old son, Liam, whose curiosity pulls him again and again into the tall trio of buckets he sits amongst. Their contents brim with dozens of tightly packed clumps of earth, each roughly the size of a baseball.

Though they may not look it, these small brown mounds are a new technology inspired by ancient wisdom. The balls’ hard clay exteriors act “like a mother’s womb,” Micik says, ensuring that the half-dozen seeds packed inside each clump can safely sink to the bottom of lakebeds, take root in soft mud, and survive in the face of harsh winter weather and increasingly erratic precipitation that has battered northern Wisconsin in recent years.