ST. PAUL — In 2021, Dustin Roy and other members of the White Earth Nation learned the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources had been issuing aquatic plant management permits within their reservation for years.
One of these permits allowed a lakeshore owner on McCraney Lake to use mechanical equipment and chemicals to clear aquatic plants from the water to achieve what Roy described as a “picture-perfect lakefront.”
The first plant on this removal list, Roy said, was wild rice, or manoomin in Ojibwe. The aesthetic decision decimated the wild rice beds that the White Earth Nation had been working for years to restore.
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton and a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is spearheading legislation to protect wild rice waters from pesticides.
The bill seeks to integrate wild rice waters into the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s pesticide management plan, developing better practices to monitor pesticide distribution, use and disposal around wild rice waters. It would also emphasize collaboration between tribal, local and state governments.
“This legislation is a starting point to ensure that waters across our state remain pure enough to support this plant, which only needs clean water to thrive,” Kunesh said in a Wednesday, April 8, committee meeting.
Wild rice has been a culturally significant crop for Indigenous communities in Minnesota for centuries, and it was adopted as the official state grain in 1977. It’s an aquatic plant that’s still harvested the traditional way, from canoes on the water.
For Dustin Roy, now the natural resources divisional director of the White Earth Nation, wild rice’s history speaks to its importance today.
“For the Ojibwe people, wild rice — or manoomin — is a relative. It is why our ancestors came to this region,” Roy said. “It is our identity, our livelihood and our traditional food source. Protecting manoomin is protecting our past and our future.”
Yet, the crop has been under threat in recent years.
While wild rice was once abundant, a 2025 study found the amount available for off-reservation harvest by Ojibwe people in the Great Lakes region has been declining 5-7% annually, and it is likely to continue dropping.
A variety of factors — many tied to climate change — have contributed to the decline, according to the study, including abnormal lake water levels, warmer winters and an increase in storm frequency and intensity. Pesticides present another stressor to the plant.
In Kunesh’s eyes, it’s crucial to protect wild rice before it’s too late.
“Wild rice has been a food source for Minnesotans for generations, and it should continue to feed our state for generations to come, if we only take care of it,” Kunesh said.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has overseen wild rice waters since 1991, according to Joshua Stamper, director of the department's pesticide and fertilizer management division. The department currently monitors 53 different river locations, 150 lake locations and 12 wetland locations for watersheds that contain wild rice.
Still, Stamper said there may be areas where there’s a higher presence of pesticides than has yet been detected.
Some lawmakers, including Sen. Torrey Westrom, R-Alexandria, said the bill was too broad.
“If there’s a specific problem now that we know is getting into these, then that’s what we should be targeting, rather than this just give the department an open-ended directive to just go out and see what you can find,” Westrom said. “We don’t know if a mile from the reservations we’re going to be testing or on the reservations or 100 miles off.”
The committee set the proposal aside for possible inclusion in a larger bill later in the session.
Report for Minnesota is a project of the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication to support local news across the state.
