Wild rice returns to Rice Lake
Rice Lake’s first real rice harvest in about 50 years collected on the north shore
For more than a decade, Alderville First Nation’s Jeff Beaver has been trying to re-establish wild rice in and around Rice Lake.
Today, due to his efforts, small beds are growing in areas like Stoney Creek which runs into the south shore of Rice Lake on the western outskirts of Alderville but recently the first real “harvest” in about 50 years took place on a tributary along Rice Lake’s north shore.
Naturalist Jeff Beaver, and his first cousin and well-known biologist and artist, Rick Beaver, harvested in the traditional way using 100-year-old cedar, rice sticks to beat the rice head off the stem and into their canoe.
Historically, First Nations people from many areas including those at Hiawatha and in the Ottawa Valley came to Rice Lake to harvest the rice right up until the 1940s and 1950s, but then the amount “started dwindling,” Jeff Beaver said.
This was after the arrival of carp and its migration to the area, Rick Beaver explained.
“They root out the seedling rice at the time when they first start growing.”
That was not only the reason for the demise of the wild rice but remains the ongoing problem of re-establishing it.
This recent harvesting of about 55 pounds of wild rice from Rice Lake is a different variety and hardier, both men said. They don’t know how the two-to-three acre bed got established in the north shore location.
“We need to know how it got there and why it’s more adaptable. That will take a bit of sleuthing,” Rick Beaver said.
Much of the rice the Beavers gathered from this first harvest in five decades was replanted at the site to enlarge the northern bed, and they saved a small amount to replant elsewhere.
Rick Beaver said he posted a Facebook message about the harvest and has received about “200 hits” from people interested in everything from where the harvest took place to buying it.
“We don’t want to divulge the location due to the ongoing conservation efforts,” he said.
“The only reason we harvest is for seed. That’s generally known.”
The Alderville First Nation men say they are not interested in commercialization of the local wild rice, just re-establishing it in enduring beds.
Among the information Jeff Beaver has amassed about wild rice is a magazine article that records a confrontation between a commercial ricing operation and First Nations people in the Ardoche area during the early 1980s in which First Nations blocked a second attempt at a commercial harvest.
“We’ve won that fight,” Rick Beaver said, and wild rice is still growing there.
Another location where wild rice is growing is where the Trent River crosses Highway 30 in Northumberland County, the pair said.
The wild rice needs moving water that is not too deep. Along Stoney Creek there are two areas planted, including a larger one south of a beaver dam and Rice Lake.
The local rice is a shorter variety, three to four feet high. Other varieties grow up to seven feet, Jeff Beaver said.
The wild rice seen can be “broadcast by hand” into suitable areas or it can be stored in a bag put into a stream over winter and then planted in the spring, he said.
But whether it takes or not, and survives, is really up to the carp that spawn and grow every year just as the young rice shoots start to raise their tender green heads.