Thomas Vennum, Jr. Wild Rice and the Ojibway People

(St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 1988), pp. 74-75.

Because there were songs associated with the harvest of other Ojibway staples—Begging Dance songs to solicit maple sugar from workers in the sugarbush or sacred songs for success in hunting deer, for example—the scarce mention of songs connected with wild rice and its harvest is surprising. The earliest collectors of Ojibway song, such as Frederick R. Burton and Frances Densmore, failed to record any ricing songs per se, and it seems none have been collected since.

There have been, however, occasional references to songs, both sacred and secular, somehow associated with wild rice. At Nett Lake burials, after a package of wild rice was thrown into the grave, mourners sang a song referring to how wild rice would help the deceased on the journey to the land of the dead. Sylvia Cloud of Odanah remembered a special song used when her father “danced” (hulled) the rice for their relations, and James Mustache recalled a song at Lac Court Oreilles performed when “one old fellow” trod the rice: “I don’t remember that song any more, but they got that slow beat; we’d pound on anything…… you pound on two sticks, not loud, you know, but just so he’d hear the time.”

Songs also may have been performed to prevent storms from devastating the crop……. Paul Buffalo explained: “We’re leaving for the journey…… to look over the crop. Maybe take something that we need for sample, for taste, that’s matured……. I pound the drum, thank the Great Spirit, make signs to the north and west and east and south. The Great Spirit has given directions, given the power, given these parts of the storms. It could come from either way, make a lot of damage in the area, which may destroy our crop, may hurt the feelings of the people, may hurt the life of the people. So that’s why we do these things in our Indian way…….”

Customarily, tobacco offerings were for thanksgiving and for protection. As Paul Buffalo warned, “You gotta remember before you pick rice, take that tobacco, put it in water. Water’s a big thing, dangerous.” At Vermillion Lake, one old woman put a pinch of tobacco into the fire before eating the first rice, a widespread practice observed at Lac Cout Oreillies into the 1940 s as a protection against windstorms. Storms could also be warded off by putting a piece of plug tobacco on a stump and invoking the assistance of thunderbirds.

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