This week the first graders learned about manoomin, a sacred food of the Indigenous Anishinaabe peoples. In the classroom, we read The Story of Manoomin, a book produced by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The book has illustrations of Native children participating in the wild rice harvesting, drying, parching, dancing, and winnowing processes. We learned some Ojibwe words like waabigwan (flower), jiimaan (canoe), aamoo (bee), and miigwech (thank you).
In the classroom, we worked with wild rice we sourced directly from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and made a salad featuring other ingredients native to present-day North America like squash, cranberries, and pumpkin seeds. There were a lot of fun jobs in this lesson, including making our own salad dressing using a mortar and pestle - a tool humans have used for cooking for tens of thousands of years!
