Restoring Relationships with Manoomin

Supporting the Next Generation of Manoomin Stewards

As for all Ojibwe Peoples, Manoomin has been profoundly important for the Red Lake Nation, and Manoomin’s ongoing decline due to colonially perpetuated stressors represents an infringement on the Tribe’s inherent and treaty-protected rights to maintain their land-based lifeways.

Although many other Tribal nations have established programming to steward this sacred plant-being, Red Lake Nation has been distinct in its natural and human setting. This presents both challenges and a unique opportunity for Manoomin research and restoration on the Red Lake Nation Reservation, which can serve as a broader precedent for Tribal natural resource management.

Addressing barriers to Manoomin stewardship and co-building interventions through western science and Ojibwe knowledge training, this project will investigate processes of restoring Manoomin’s relationship with water, which the team asserts depends on restoring Tribal members’ relationships with Manoomin – connections that can be healed by growing a community of next-generation land and water stewards.

Project Goals

• Facilitate knowledge sharing events and Manoomin feasts – with youth to elders – that can center, celebrate and resurface Tribal knowledge about Manoomin
• Conduct biophysical environmental monitoring, involving the collection of past and present environmental data to assess controls on the variabilities in Manoomin
• Work with Red Lake Nation Tribal College and the Red Lake Youth Council to implement an intergenerational and interdisciplinary cohort strategy found to increase retention and senses of belonging among Indigenous students in STEM