In the classroom this week, the first graders read The Star Maiden, a retelling of an Ojibway legend. We deduced from the illustrations that the Ojibway (also known as the Chippewa) are close to the natural world and that based on the clothing the people in the pictures wore that they were living a long time ago. One of the illustrations showed the Ojibway with a harvest of wild rice, or manoomin, the food that grows on water.
In the kitchen, students made a manoomin salad with wild arugula, roasted butternut squash, dried cranberries, and toasted pumpkin seeds. They learned to make an emulsified salad dressing by slowly drizzling oil into acid drop by drop. In our closing circle, we looked at the book The Story of Manoomin, which features pictures of present-day Anishinaabe children and teaches Ojibway words and phrases related to the rice harvest. Over the course of their time at Harvey Milk, the first graders will continue to explore Indigenous peoples and Indigenous foodways in acknowledgement of the fact that native peoples like the Ojibway are still here and thriving.
