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	Podcast:		Local Features by WXPR
	Episode:		Bringing Back History: The Attempt To Restore Wild Rice On Spur Lake
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:04:51
	Publish Date:		2020-09-03 06:36:00
	Description:		Pete McGeshick II looked out upon Spur Lake and thought about what used to be. “The lake was full,” he said. “The rice bed was full all the way around.” Wild rice used to grow thick on the 113-acre undeveloped lake in eastern Oneida County. It grew tall, too. “You could come out here and you could see people harvesting wild rice,” McGeshick said. “A lot of them, you couldn’t even see because the wild rice was so high.” McGeshick, a Sokaogon Chippewa tribal member and former Rice Chief, is 80 years old now. He figures he first harvested rice on Spur Lake at age seven. “This is the [lake] we’d come to first,” he said. “The rice bed would ripen first.” McGeshick said a hundred people from the reservation in Mole Lake would be shuttled to Spur Lake in old Ford Model A’s, camping on the shoreline and harvesting the resource with a sacred place in their culture. But by the 1990s and 2000s, the wild rice started to disappear, until it was gone altogether. It was sad, McGeshick said. “Yeah. We
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