Ojibwe Lifeway: Wild Rice Harvesting

Gikinoo'wizhiwe Onji Waaban (GWOW; Guiding for Tomorrow)

This website focuses on Ojibwe wild rice harvesting (manoomin). It is a celebration of the historical practice of wild rice harvesting, why it is so important to Ojibwe life, and how climate change can impact this resource. The topic is explained well, in-depth and there is a supplemental video and other topics you can explore.

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Notes from our reviewers

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There is no teachers guide or plan for the students to complete, but this is a really well done website that has excellent information about the Ojibwe community and the importance of the wild rice to their culture. Teachers will be able to expand by continuing to explore the website, asking questions to get deeper problem solving, and connect to other lessons. This is a great informational website for independent research and learning, but more time would be needed if you desire students to turn in work based on a lesson from this website. Review all the resources provided for this activity and decide on an approach to include as many as possible. By strategically selecting resources, scaling up and down a grade or two should be straightforward. This lesson is a true place-based lesson and could be used as a template for designing locally focused place-based lessons. In addition, the thoughtfulness that went into connecting culture and science should provide insights into how to do this for other topics.
The resource includes information about the ecology of wild rice. The science section of the resource shows climate data such as rainfall, lake water levels, temperature, drought indices, and winds from storms. Students are encouraged to develop hypotheses and conduct reviews of this data to consider how a changing climate will impact the wild rice. There are resources included for students to engage in a climate action project. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
This comprehensive lesson is a vehicle for students to connect with place-based learning through the lens of culture. Students are provided a variety of exploratory resources, and seek the nexus of science and culture to identify the challenges climate change poses on a specialty crop of great importance to the Ojibwe people. There are many entry points for this lesson, and also many ways an educator could tailor it for their students, as there is no prescription for how this lesson should be used. There are no assessment tools, which will allow an educator to use their own approach for assessing the work of their students. Teachers are afforded the opportunity to structure this lesson in whichever manner they wish given that there is no teacher's guide associated specifically with this lesson. However, the authors provide a comprehensive guide for the pedagogical approaches to teaching with the Gikinoo'wizhiwe Onji Waaban (GWOW) resources and include many suggestions for how to engage students with the content.
Website is well designed, thorough, with different pictures, video, and other supplemental materials to explore the topic. The materials for this lesson include the website resources and paper-pencils. Around 2 hours is needed to review all the materials, and make decisions on what to include from the resources, and how to coherently bundle them.