 Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations. Member, FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm producer-director Scott Knudson. In this episode, we travel to the White Earth Nation and the Leech Lake Nation to learn about, process and harvest minimum. Well, earlier this winter, my friend and cousin Tim Holm passed away, and many people knew Tim Holm as the guy who sold smoked whitefish beside the road on Highway 2. And people would come from a long way away, and they wanted to know his phone number and always follow up, and my own family has been like that. And when he passed away, we lost that valuable product being produced in our community and that ability to earn some income in our community. And Tim also was doing wild rice. So he did the smoked fish, I would say, for at least two decades, 20 years, and wild rice, I would say, was close to 30 years. And so both of those are important cultural and even financial or income-wise resources for the community and for other people to earn money. We got the smoke operation here in Ball Club, Minnesota. What we do, first of all, is, well, my name is Bill. Nice to meet you. We come over here, maple wood. And we like to use maple or oak. That's the best for smoking. We take the bark off, then we split it in parts like this. Sometimes we split it more to have it chips to start the fire easier. And then we come over here, and we usually use birch bark, and we put it down in there. And we get the fire going. We usually let that burn for a good about 15 to 20 minutes to get all the clear set off. And then we come in here and we scrape it. And this is where we put the smoked white fish. And this is the shack that where I clean the fish and prepare the fish. So then we come in here after the fire has been started for 20 minutes. Then I go to one of these grates and I put one of these grates on top of the smoker. So then that cures the grate. And so then after that, I let that sit there for about 10 minutes on the hot fire. So then I come to my brine bucket. And this is where I flay the fish. And then we come over here after done flaying and we're getting them ready. We come over here and then we wash them off thoroughly. And then we move them from the sink to the brine. What's your brine made out of? There's a few things that I can't tell you, and there's a few things that I can't tell you. One of the things is pickling salt. And then sugar. That's about what I can tell you. So you have some secret spices in there too? Yeah, we have some secret stuff in there. And it is Tim's recipe. So we'll take another one like this. This is where I put my fish and my brine. And we'll have another blue bin. And we'll put an ice cube on top of it inside the other bin. And then we'll put this on there. And then we'll put our fish in there, our brine in there. We'll soak it for about 12 to 16 hours. And then the next day I will start the fire process. What do they look like? Now this is a white fish and we get them from Red Lake Fishery. So we try to keep it all involved with the nations. Because you can smoke any kind of fish that you really want to. If you go out and have your fishing license and go out and catch your daily limit, then that's just up to you. A lot of people like to can northern. A lot of people like to fry up walleye or make walleye nuggets or stuff like that. It just matters how you like it. And smoked white fish is a very good fish for your body. And the oils and stuff in the white fish is very good for your skin and your hair. And all around good for your soul and stuff too. So what you got there? After we're all done, set and done, brining and cooking it and taking it off the smoker. We come back over here and make sure the table is clean. And then I grab my trays and strand wrap. I put them on the scale and wrap it up. That is the white fish after it's been done and cooked. For us, many of the foods are medicine. So that's what helps us live in a more healthy way. And whether it's fresh fish, fresh game, fresh berries, those things truly are medicines. They're finding out now with these antioxidants, your raspberries and things like that. Those are natural to us. I eat a lot of dried cranberries myself and that's what grows here naturally is the cranberry. The white fish itself is one of like three or four fish in the salmonoid family that has the right kind of fish oil in it. And it's a freshwater fish. It's right here. So the medicines for the people are here. I don't know if he was the poor or what. Yes. I think both those guys are four foot tall together. I don't think they could see over the rice either. Yeah. It's not a funny one, Rob said he had to rescue them. You've just taken the extra heads out. Yeah, that's how he does all the cleaning part of it. Yeah. Yeah, if you look hard and you'll see more heads along the side where they could pull that out of the boat and stuff like that. Oh, my name is Judith Van Wilson. I'm from Bokell, Minnesota, which they call the River Minnesota now. And I was out rice and manoman today, which was called wild rice manoman. It's an Ojibwe language and me glitches for thank you. Thank you, Great Spirit, for this rice that you put out into our waters for all of us. And this is my son I'm riceing with and he's been out for a few years now. But we all got to learn how to rice and I had my brother learn me how to rice. Since I was nine years old, his name was James Wilson, and I've been at it ever since. Otherwise, I used to babysit a lot for all the children for everybody to go out rice. And when they wanted to go out and fulfill their boats and get their needs and manoman and I stayed home and watched the kids and fed them. Super. When you pick this rice, are you picking it for yourself or your own consumption? Today I'm going to sell it, then after we go picking for our own. How do you guys finish your rice? We used to get Tim Homes to finish our rice all the time. I've got his plant now. Oh, do you? Yeah. That's why I'm trying to work with boys and girls to get some young people taking it over. Oh, yeah. But yeah, I've been talking with people in the community because that's right. Oh, I like it. I like it. I feel great. Menongiji God today is a nice day. I like it out there. And every time rice and season comes up, I enjoy it every year. We just stay busy and do our work and Zamy doing a little bit talk. That means talking Ojibwe, Zamy doing. And then we had to find our way back to land and we didn't get started out until a little bit late this morning. But we made it out here. But this is where he wanted to come today. So this is the first time I rice this year at this lake here, Stemple, White Oak, what we call White Oak. Wow. Right for Donut. Well, the color doesn't always mean anything. Yeah, I feel it's a tradition for me that I once started out and I've always wanted to do it for many years because that's one of the things I did. It's something I like to do every year and got good at it and took me all those many years to get good at it and go out there and whoever wants to go out there and rice, find a partner and look for somebody. Yeah, we got Tim Holmes' smoked fish. My cousin's been doing his smoked fish by the roadway again now, too. Oh, really? All seems like he's been getting business there. He has. Yeah. Same recipe. People missed that, please. Oh, man. Tim did such a great job on that. I know I was surprised about Tim passing on. Yeah, he caught us all up there. My first day or first start for this year, we only got about 89 pounds, but we still didn't stay out there for all the six hours that you can stay out there. My significant others went out and did that and they went to S Lake this year and got some rice. So they got it finished there, but I'm not for sure. He didn't say how many pounds, but he left me two pounds of it and it's nice big rice from S Lake there. We make sure that we save up enough for the whole winter season, enough to last, and then just have doings for when we bring our dishes out to make for food and if somebody passes on or something, that's what we use our rice for. We bring that manoman out there at a feast and share with the people for everybody. But I'm glad that somebody was around to interview about wild rice and going on to the lakes and stuff and seeing how this is done. That was the rice and I think I was 19, but it took me all that while, six years or so till I got to go to that pole and I didn't know how to use the duck bill to put on the rice or anything but I just had to use to turn with my might and stuff until I got to know how to turn the canoe around and everything. Right, almost everyone seems to start like a polar. It seems like so you can see what's going on or whatever. Six years, huh? I've pulled for a long, long time. You see, you know, it's been over six years, last past two. I didn't do a lot of rice since I was 19. You grab them by the beard, that's because of the carpet that you're seeing. This is what it looks like underneath that carpet. And you can see that it's almost like sperm or something because you've got the little part of life and then like a tail. And so those tails help these kernels when they fly and then when they hit the water, just like you're seeing in the boat, it helps them land straight down in and they dig right into the sand and the soil so they can get buried. They say that the kernel of rice can lay dormant on the bottom of the lake for up to 17 years and still be rejuvenated and grow again. And part of that ability of wild rice is part of what they're trying to do with the genome. They're trying to figure out how to extract the characteristic that allows rice to lay on the bottom of a lake for so long and then germinate and they want to shoot that into like green tomatoes so that they can pick tomatoes green and then store them in large warehouses and then like do the trick to start ripening them and bring them out just in time to start ripening. But they don't want to talk to us about wild rice. They don't want to see if it's okay. They don't want to see if we should have any right to any of the patent or any of the commodity even though it's you know our kind of a real religious kind of a centerpiece. My name is Nathan Gochi. I was picking out rice. I was a knocker today. My uncle Mike was on the polar. We've been doing it for about three years now. Picking out rice with my uncle is a big deal for me. Being a family member. Being a younger generation. But he teaches me ways to do it. Uncle teaches younger kids how to do it now. It affects the culture a lot of people going out picking out rice and keeping it going. And showing the young kids how to do it and stuff. Get out and do it. Hard labor. Not sitting at home and sitting on the coach. Playing video games. Going out and picking up on wild rice. You feel it in your body after working all day pulling and knocking. I said in your fingers playing the video game. Teach your young kids how to harvest wild rice when they're young. Take them a long ways in life. It's like meditation. It gets mined off everything else. It's good meditation to get out on the lake and do what you like doing best on your culture. Picking out rice. Going out on the lake. Knowing what you did after the day is done. I feel relieved after coming out of the lake. Going before you're stressed out after you come out of the lake you're relieved of everything. How much rice do you try to save for over the year until next season for you to eat and stuff with your family? 80 pounds finished. That gets you by? Yep, gets you by until next year. Ceremonies and family and gifts and everything? Well, 80 pounds gets you through the winter and everything. And that's probably typical for almost everybody we try to get 80 or 100 pounds. 80 pounds to 100 pounds. And so for me, I love the wild rice that comes out of here and I love the fish that comes out of here. But I'm not of the age to do that. You know, I can't just start smoking fish and I can't try to make a living off of that or off of wild rice per se. But everybody else who's young here and needs something else to earn from should be able to. How much rice do you think you got today? A couple hundred maybe? Hopefully. I'm going to go get my scale. Normally we have the scale set up where that little stick is. That's just, normally I have my little trailer and normally I've got a bunch of things going on. I told Tim on several occasions that as me being a treaty rights attorney that he was kind of one of my heroes because he was living treaty rights. The state nor the federal government could tell him what to do with the making of wild rice, the sale of wild rice, the trade of wild rice or of the white fish because it's not a game fish and it was prepared. And so while there were people who attempted to tax and people who attempted to say, hey you're on the road, hey your signs are in the wrong place, ultimately you can't tell us those things on the reservation. And so Tim was an obvious standard for people to go out and make a living. The story of how we have had our things taken or pushed away or made us to try to be different through assimilation and things like that. Well then you have World War I and things are, you know, the way they are. We're not even citizens until 1924. We're still living on reservations. You know, you have the depression that comes in in the 20s and then from what I can see they used a lot of our resources to help out with the CCC and WPA and things like that with these projects. And then our money was gone around 1939, right at the beginning of World War II and that's when they had a lot of your rationing. And so when I asked my dad a long time ago I said well what happened to the treaty rights? He says well I don't know. He says all I know is it came along and they told us we couldn't do it anymore. We couldn't hunt and fish like that anymore. He says I thought we could always hunt and fish all over northern Minnesota. Well that is what our treaty rights are. But in the 1940s, around 1941 the United States government started squeezing all of the people for rationing and so they were squeezing on the Indians' rights also and they said you're going to have to start coming under state regulation. Well there was nothing that said that we could do it but because we were under the control of the federal government and they had the right to sign our name essentially, our identity, we became pushed under and then you have Public Law 280 in 1953 where they got some civil jurisdiction over us. You have the McCarthy era and so forth. You know you look at World War II I know people who were in an all Indian army battalion or infantry group. You know they had all the groups separated. The Japanese were separated. The Germans were separated. The Germans had to fight in Asia. The Japanese had to fight in Europe. So they didn't trust anybody but they said okay you can come in and fight and wear our uniform but you know we're going to keep you separate and we're going to keep a real close eye on you. And so really it probably wasn't until the 60s where we started having a change in the federal policy and groups like AIM came out and started standing up for our rights. We've just been through it a long time ago and we've kind of given up after 150 years of this oppression and occupation. So it's really kind of a weird thing and oddly because of my work Justice also has grants for this kind of a program to help us revitalize our old customs and traditions because it gives us something to do and make some money. Right. Uh oh this one's wet. 68 this is more on target of sorts where we are. Because I think it is important to have an economic engine. When you're in just idle it has to start and run which is our problem with the Thresher coincidentally. Our economic engine. How symbolic. Well this is a 170 inline six cylinder Ford motor from a 1970 or so Ford Maverick and unfortunately it needs a new carburetor or carburetor repair and so this is where it would be it wasn't running right and this is what powers the Thresher. The Thresher is what separates the hulls from the kernels of wild rice like the Indians would do with the dancing or jigging in the kettle or in the ground with a lined leather skin with new moccasins so that the leather against each other and all would rub off the chaff then you'd have to winnow it or fan it away. Put your handles when you get in there so don't stomp on it little bitty pieces the goal is you put your foot down put your foot down and bring your heel into it so you kind of twist but make sure your whole foot is doing it not just the back, there you go. So when you're doing it you want to be happy, you want to think good things it's always when we're doing stuff like this, we're always wanting to be thinking about our families thinking about good things so when you start getting crabby and tired, let me know how something else is good things, good thoughts going on. And so I'm working with Boys and Girls Club to create what I call the Ball Club Living Cultural Resource Center so that there's a place where you can have the tools that you need seasonally I heard about an expert So what this does is with these paddles can you see the paddles, okay? This knocks those hulls off you know when you're eating the rice and getting the hull off, that's what this does and so what it looks like when it first comes out of here is a lot like this this is after it's all been turned for about 10 minutes in here, okay? Let's go over here by the front Can you see those kernels starting to come out? Ultimately, if I'm able to I would like to create more like a food locker where people could pick berries and that fish, they could get deer they could get duck, whatever it is because we have, you know, slightly different laws and so forth so that you could come here trade in raspberries and maybe take out some duck meat or something like that you know, amongst ourselves Okay, need a couple of people to help out here See that gray tray over there? Let's put some wild rice in there I don't need no more than half of them to have some We'll see if it gets hot One more, one more Let's see if it's starting to get hot over here We'll put it up here You can smell it a little bit, see it's starting to see that smoke So it's hot on the backside It's just not as hot down here But then you look at the ability to have that passed on You know the other night, Blaine came over with his granddaughter and two other kids and they were five and six in terms of preparing food and they could hear the noise they could see the machinery they understood what it was as far as wild rice and then they were able to to hold it and feel the heat from the fire and they knew that that colonel was food and that one little boy he was so excited he wanted to take that colonel to his mom you know, because he had discovered all this Join us again on Common Ground If you have an idea for Common Ground in North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call 218-333-3014 To watch Common Ground online visit lptv.org and click local shows episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community a partnership for generations member FDIC Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online please consider making a tax deductible donation at lptv.org