{"id":196706,"date":"2021-06-09T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T10:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=537122"},"modified":"2021-06-09T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T10:45:00","slug":"the-line-3-pipeline-protests-are-about-much-more-than-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/06\/09\/the-line-3-pipeline-protests-are-about-much-more-than-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"The Line 3 pipeline protests are about much more than climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Frank Bibeau remembers canoeing on the waters of northern Minnesota with his father on a late summer day in 1996. The sky and placid lake stretched to the horizon all around their red canoe, interrupted only by stalks of delicate grasses protruding through the lake\u2019s surface. Bibeau navigated with a long pole while his father, perched in front, rhythmically knocked grains from the stalks into the boat, harvesting wild rice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every year, from the time the maple trees first mottle gold and red in late summer until the first frost, Anishinaabe all across the Great Lakes region embark on the wild rice harvest. Bibeau learned to harvest the grain from his father, who learned from his father before him, and so on \u2014 \u201csince time immemorial,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Bibeau and the Anishinaabe people, the wild rice harvest is at once tradition<\/a>, sustenance, and cultural lifeway<\/a>. According to their oral tradition, the Anishinaabe came to settle in the Great Lakes basin thousands of years ago when they followed a sacred shell in the sky to a place where food grew on water. When they arrived, they found wild rice \u2014 one of the only grains native to North America. Wild rice in the Anishinaabe language is manoomin<\/em>: the good berry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWild rice is our life. Where there\u2019s Anishinaabe there\u2019s rice. Where there\u2019s rice there\u2019s Anishinaabe. It\u2019s our most sacred food,\u201d said Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke. \u201cIt\u2019s who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n