The 1854 Treaty Authority is one of three intertribal natural-resource management agencies in northern Minnesota. These organizations see the challenge of restoration somewhat differently than state and federal agencies do, though they too are concerned with regional water quality and wetland ecology. Rather than aiming simply to reestablish wild rice in these waters, intertribal stakeholders seek to restore it as a harvestable resource. The line between remediation and restoration is occasionally blurry; still, the distinction is important, because the story of decline in wild rice in Minnesota is also a story of the displacement of wild rice’s human harvesters. The story of its resurgence may yet be told through the transformation of human engagement, from forms of settler-colonial harm to renewed practices of harvest, stewardship, and kinship with these lands and waters.
Today, the estuary is still very much a postindustrial ecosystem, although, as Vogt explains, “progress in these last ten or fifteen years has been immense.” Much of this improvement has amounted to remediation, i.e., the removal or neutralizing of contaminants. A longer and more complex journey toward real ecological wellness lies ahead. As we were told by Nancy Schuldt, a biologist who serves as Water Projects Coordinator at the Fond du Lac Reservation, “Remedial work does not equal restoration. Remedial work makes a clean slate for restoration.” Restoration, in turn, begs the question, “Restored to what?” and inevitably, “Restored for whom?” Typical restoration models operate through counts of individual entities, be they of large mammals or seedlings of an endangered plant. Success is considered achieved when more individuals have been added, returning a site to some former ecological condition. “You could look at everything that has been lost and try to put it back,” observes Dr. Joel Hoffman, chief of the Ecosystems Services Branch at the Mid-Continent Ecology Division of the Environmental Protection Agency. “But restoration is a human endeavor. It’s value-laden.” Schuldt and Vogt would agree; they are concerned not with abstract ecology understood in isolation from human communities, but with the restoration of cultural practices that have shaped this estuary since the Ojibwe people arrived in what is now Minnesota over a thousand years ago. (Historic references and official documents describing these populations use the name Chippewa, coined by French fur traders; the synonymous term Ojibwe is now also commonly used.) The return of harvestable wild rice today would thus signal not just the recovery of a functioning ecosystem, but the reclamation of a cultural heritage.
Restoration, in other words, must be thought of as the repair of relationships rather than the replacement of objects. Relational repair in the St. Louis River Estuary would span scales as vast as the watershed itself, and as minute as the instant when a ricer in a canoe swings her knocking stick against a panicle of ripened rice, sending grains flying. Restoring wild rice would mean replanting the white pine forests that once dipped toward the water’s edge, to mitigate the massive erosion that the logging and construction industries have left behind. Relational repair would mean opening more publicly accessible space along the increasingly privatized shoreline, where ricers could pitch camps and launch canoes. Can new attention to a plant whose use was written into treaties — albeit treaties that continue to be broken — change the course of postindustrial development and real estate speculation along these waters and in the city of Duluth? Schuldt thinks so. “If we’re protecting wild rice,” she reminds us, “we’re protecting resources that are important to everyone.”