Dorothy and Darwin Stevens, two members of the Anishinabe-Ojibwe tribe, demonstrate here the traditional way to harvest wild rice: hand-threshing, parching, "jiggering" (stamping on the grain in a container to loosen the hulls), and winnowing the rice from the chaff to create the final product. Native American rice farmers use more mechanized methods today: at Minnesota's White Earth Reservation, vintage machines from the 1920s do the parching and winnowing. Ironically, the sudden popularity of wild rice in the 1960s should have been a boon for the Ojibwe people, but in reality it created new competition from vast commercial farms growing "wild" rice using non-organic methods. Drawing water from Big Rice Lake--the source for most of the wild rice harvested at White Earth--in order to flood their own paddies, the commercial farms offered cheaper rice, which caused prices to collapse and nearly destroyed the Native American-harvested market. The Ojibwe responded by organizing their own collective, getting their rice certified organic, and marketing it themselves. Prices have since rebounded, but new concerns about "ricing" at White Earth have surfaced, raising the question of whether the quest for "the good life" is being lost in the overharvesting brought on by technology and the increasing importance placed on the profit motive. Interesting, if not as cohesively edited as it could be (more voice-over narration and on-screen titles linking interviewees and the storyline would have helped), this documentary could still be useful in a variety of educational settings (history, ecology, anthropology, economics) and is especially recommended for public libraries in the North Woods region. Aud: I, J, H, C, P. (R. Reagan)
Mino-Bimadiziwin: The Good Life
(1998) 60 min. $99. Vision Maker (dist. by Lucerne Media). PPR. Vol. 14, Issue 1
Mino-Bimadiziwin: The Good Life
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