American Indian Solutions to Environmental Challenges

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  Toggle Favorite “That’s why we have such good scientists employed. To help us save what we have left.”
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  Toggle Favorite The Leech Lake band is taking steps to keep out invasive species that can crowd out wild rice. 2010
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  Toggle Favorite “The wild rice, in and of itself, is naturally highly variable. And so the band has recognized that understanding the variability of rice is very important.”
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  Toggle Favorite Scientists monitor water quality so they can understand its effect on wild rice growth. c. 2009
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  Toggle Favorite “What we’ve done in the past is just compare photos to photos, and we can see from year to year that the overall coverage of rice is expanding or contracting, and so that we can know exactly where we need to focus our protection efforts.”
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  Toggle Favorite Scientists collect data by taking random plant density samples from lakes. For each sample they place a quadrant into the water and count the number of plants and stalks within the square. c. 2009
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  Toggle Favorite “We did a study on wild rice. We were also looking for mercury and PCBs and other widely known chemicals. We found that the plant does uptake those chemicals. We know that in humans, they cause nerve damage. We don’t know what that does to the wild rice.”
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  Toggle Favorite The tribe protects rice plants by requiring the use of traditional harvesting methods. Push poles are designed to disturb the bottom of the rice beds as little as possible. 1998
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  Toggle Favorite “We do know that we need clean water for the wild rice.”
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  Toggle Favorite “Within our water program, we do a lot of water sampling on a majority of the lakes within Leech Lake. But what we’re looking for is a baseline data background, so we can measure the changes from year to year, and what’s going on with the water.”

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