Gathering Wild Rice

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Artist: Seth Eastman (American, 1808–1875)
Medium: Watercolor
Size: 6 1/4 × 8 3/4 in. (15.9 × 22.2 cm) (image); 9 11/16 × 12 3/4 in. (24.6 × 32.4 cm) (sheet)
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Rights: Public Domain Mark

This is the first known picture by a non-Native artist of people harvesting Minnesota’s proudest hotdish ingredient. The birchbark canoe indicates these women are probably Anishinaabe (Ojibwe); Dakota people typically carved canoes from tree trunks. One woman steadies the canoe while the others bend stalks over the gunwale and gently release the seeds with paddles. The wild grain is then gathered, dried, and hulled. Ohiyesa (also called Charles Eastman), a grandson of Seth Eastman and the Dakota woman Wakaninajinwin, described the next step: “The women then pour it upon a robe and begin to shake it so that the chaff will be separated by the wind.”

This watercolor, one of 35 works on paper by Eastman in Mia’s collection, was the basis for an illustration in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s massive Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1851-57).

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.