Plain Wild Rice

Traditional wild rice harvesting still goes on every autumn in small lakes from Ontario to Minnesota. Two people in a canoe go out among the rice plants, one poling, the other using a double pole arrangement called “knockers” to bend the rice stalks over the canoe and then to slap the ripe rice off the stalks into the canoe. The work is hard and slow but still, on a good day two people can fill a canoe, bringing in about three hundred pounds of wild rice. The rice must then be dried so that