Lake Winnebago wild rice restoration project continues despite federal funding cut – WPR

By Trevor Hook  Wisconsin Public Radio, October 6, 2025

Intertribal Lake Winnebago Wild Rice Revitalization Project seeks to merge mainstream, Indigenous methods to preserve wild rice

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For Jessica Skeesuck, vice chair of the Brothertown Indian Nation, restoring wild rice goes beyond just helping the environment.

“It is an important food from a nutritional value perspective, but also from a very important cultural perspective for many tribes, including Brothertown Indian Nation,” Skeesuck told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”

Skeesuck and Jessie Conaway, an outdoor educator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are co-leads on the Intertribal Lake Winnebago Wild Rice Revitalization Project. 

For three years, Skeesuck, Conaway and other collaborators have worked to reseed wild rice across the lake by combining mainstream science and Indigenous reseeding methods. This can mean reseeding via “broadcasting” — throwing rice directly into the water — or by mixing wild rice with nearby clay and sediment to create “mud balls” to then place into the water.

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“My great hope is that we will continue to have improved collaborative relationships … so that the quality of the water and the quality of the sediment is improved,” Skeesuck said. “In this day and age, we know that water is a scarcity. We have some really high quality water in the area. If we are able to do that in a good way, then the rice will survive and we will be able to take care of our people and our animal relatives that depend on it.”