THE FIRST YEAR OF THE MANOOMIN PROJECT: PLACE-BASED RESEARCH BY NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS on WILD RICE LAKES on THE FOND DU LAC BAND OF LAKE SUPERIOR CHIPPEWA RESERVATION, NORTHERN MINNESOTA

The manoomin project is a collaboration between Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (Cloquet, MN), the Reservation’s Resource Management Division, and the University of Minnesota. It builds on a successful history of collaboration between these parties, including regular science camps (gidaakiimanaanimigawig, Our Earth Lodge) for students of a wide range of ages. The primary goal of the project is to involve Native students in research on sediment core samples collected from Reservation lakes that grow wild rice (manoomin; Zizania palustris), a culturally important resource. Campers collect lake cores during winter with the assistance of coring specialists from LacCore (National Lacustrine Core Facility) and Resource Management, and students visit the LacCore lab in Minneapolis to log, split and describe cores soon after they are taken. Academic mentors with a range of specialties (phytoliths, pollen, plant macrofossils, sedimentology, geochemistry, magnetics, etc.) spend 1-2 weeks with small groups of college-age (>18, many nontraditional) student interns working on a particular paleoenvironmental proxy from the sediment cores. Younger students (junior high and high school) work in larger groups in shorter stints with the same mentors. All students gain experience in research labs learning and practicing techniques and interpreting their results along with those of other groups. The continuation of the project over five years (2009-2014) will allow these students to develop relationships with scientists and to receive mentoring beyond the laboratory as they make transitions into 2- and 4-year colleges and into graduate school. Their research provides historical and environmental information that is relevant to their own land and that will be used by Resource Management to better understand these ecosystems in the context of current global and local change. A substantial evaluation component charts progress and provides feedback to project participants and the larger community. We here present results from the first year of manoomin.