Pressure Builds To Protect Manoomin (Wild Rice)
St. Paul, MN — With only 24 hours notice, advocates mostly associated with Rise and Repair Alliance packed the hearing room for the fourth time at the Minnesota Senate Building on May 1, 2025. Activists have been showing up to meetings since the start of the 2025 legislative session in an attempt to create legal protections for wild rice. Wild rice, often known by its Objiwe name, manoomin, has been a means of sustenance for Dakota/Lakota and Ojibwe peoples since time immemorial. It is the reason that Ojibwe people migrated to this region, “the land where food grows on water” – without it, people’s health and wellbeing would suffer from not being able to live their way of life and not getting essential nutrients from the rice.
