Grasses tame and wild: Imperial entanglements in settler colonial cereal breeding and botany

Introduction

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, plants circulated the globe along networks of imperial and international exchange (Beattie et al., 2014; Fan, 2010). Scientific stations and herbaria, such as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (Drayton, 2000), became clearing houses of plant material as well as knowledge about those plants. At the same time that plant material was transported along well-established routes to Kew, new scientific stations helped to open widespread regions to scientific investigation (Naylor, 2010; Piper and Sandlos, 2007) – and different forms of colonization – through the creation of localized, and multidirectional, networks of exchange and inquiry. In the hands of scientists, the meaning and value of plants shifted through material and discursive transformations, including cross breeding and re-designations, which in turn expedited lasting environmental and political revolutions. This paper tracks two such plants, Marquis wheat and wild rice (also known as manoomin), ¹ which were made and remade, in turn, by their passage through Canada's Central Experimental Farm, located in Ottawa, Ontario. By tracking their movement between far-flung imperial and trading centres (Sivasundaram, 2010) – including Kew, Glasgow, Danzig, and Calcutta – as well as sites across Canada (Figure 1), I argue that these plants facilitated lasting changes that while necessarily local were reliant upon, and inseparable from, imperial-scale networks. OPEN IN VIEWER

The movement of Marquis wheat and wild rice within Canada and across the British Empire demonstrates how the operation of ecocultural networks (Beattie et al., 2014) enacted new political and economic orders that relied upon state scientific investigation. Recent scholarship by environmental historians and historical geographers has prompted a move to reintegrate relationships between humans and the natural world into discussions of empire and colonialism (Pawson, 2008; Saha, 2016; Woods, 2015). Experimental stations, agricultural colleges, and test gardens acted alongside world's fairs and expositions as nodes in global networks of exchange and inquiry (Osborne, 2000; Tilley, 2010; Todd, 2017). At these sites, plants and animals from other parts of the world were investigated for both their economic and environmental viability, including controlling potential disease and entomological outbreaks through both breeding programmes and an investigation of different agricultural techniques (Castonguay, 2004; Schnurr, 2011). As I argue below, these tests did not always succeed and British experimentalists struggled to establish sustainable wild rice beds outside of North America. At the same time, scientists enacted explicit racial hierarchies that served to undermine Indigenous claims to the land by importing hierarchies that influenced which plants should properly be considered food (Anderson, 1998). In settler contexts, these institutions were employed to support new colonists at the same time that other agencies worked to remove existing human and ecological communities (Daschuk, 2013; Harris, 2004; Wolfe, 2006).

This article demonstrates the importance of state-supported science in these material and discursive transformations by exploring how the divergent scientific treatment of Marquis wheat and wild rice by Cerealist Charles Saunders (Figure 2) and Assistant Botanist Faith Fyles (Figure 3) at the Central Experimental Farm informed the development of ecological imaginaries that supported different landscapes of settlement (Gray, 2015). I argue that contrasting the celebrated development (Buller, 1919; Morrison, 1960, 2008; Symko, 1999) of Marquis wheat with the scientific re-designation of manoomin (food for people) to wild rice (ornamental feed for wild animals) highlights the essential role of science in what Experimental Farm director William Saunders described as ‘frontier work in the Dominion’ (Saunders in Canada (1890), A5-30; see also Jørgensen, 2014). This frontier work was two-fold: it required the redefinition of the lands and waters of Canada away from Indigenous economic and political orders towards new landscapes of European settlement. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Photography of Botanist Faith Fyles in 1913. Source: Topley Studio, Library and Archives Canada, PA-204727. Public domain.

The development of Marquis wheat between 1893 and 1910 highlights the importance of fields, farms, and towns in the creation and reproduction of the colonial state (Harris, 2010). The wheat staple played an important role in the development of export focused agricultural economies as well as in Western ideals of appropriate food (Russell, 2012; Vileisis, 2010). Fields of wheat also represented idealized landscapes of settlement. These landscapes, as Susan Gray (2015: 60) notes in a similar American context, are ‘not only associated with dwelling and permanence, but with a particular kind of commercial, agrarian landscape, one in which cultivated fields, farms, and towns have replaced the forest primeval’. In post-confederation Canada, settler dominance was maintained through the material and ideological strategies of governmental support for white settlers (Rotz, 2017). The Canadian government's use of scientific agriculture demonstrates the importance of state-sanctioned science in tipping the scales in favour of settler communities. The development of hardy varieties of wheat and other Western food plants was one example of how science played an essential role in the support and reproduction of settler communities.

Wild rice, in contrast, while readily acknowledged as a valuable food source for Indigenous peoples, did not fit easily into Western foodways: it was not enough to uplift settler communities, Indigenous communities and foodways were also devalued through state-sanctioned scientific agriculture. While Canadian and British scientists acknowledged it as a nutritious grain, they only saw its value as an ornamental and to attract game birds (Bean, 1909; Fyles, 1920). In the post-contact era, the name wild rice has been used to deny the plant's millennia long history of cultivation (Zilberstein, 2015), which despite the lasting myth of a pristine pre-contact North America was readily acknowledged by scientists including Central Experimental Farm botanist Faith Fyles. This is an important point: the scientists who promoted wild rice as an ornamental feed for game birds recognized its enduring cultivation as manoomin. Nonetheless, the supposedly primitive nature of the manoomin harvest was highlighted in official publications that also emphasized wild rice's role in the creation of a brand of recreational cottage colonialism (Dore, 1969; Fyles, 1920). As Laura Cameron and David Matless (2011: 38 emphasis in original) observe this, in turn, makes it possible ‘to not see agency in the landscape, thus making domains like “nature” or “American wilderness”’ seem evident. The re-designation of manoomin as wild rice underscored the continued colonization of the lands, waters, and peoples of the region (Thorpe, 2011; see also Fay et al., 2002; Fay, 2016). Settler authorities exerted powerful imaginative control over the lands and waters themselves, redefining their possible uses from the active sustenance of human life and community to one that privileged cottage colonialism (King, 2015) ² dedicated to recreational escapes and sport hunting for white settlers (Bean, 1909; Fyles, 1920). Unsurprisingly, these discursive moves have continued political ramifications to the present day as cottagers in central Ontario ask why a so-called wild plant is being treated as if it was part of a domesticated agricultural system (Chittick, 2014; Connoly, 2016; Jackson, 2016). ³

The historical geography of Marquis wheat and wild rice research at the Central Experimental Farm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries highlights the complex entanglements of imperial and dominion agricultural science in redefining lands and waters towards settler ends (Todd, 2017). These entanglements were embodied in not only the wheat and wild rice plants examined by Central Experimental Farm scientists but also in the scientists themselves. Before examining the historical geography of Marquis wheat and wild rice at the Central Experimental Farm in more detail, I first provide a brief contextual overview of the wider Canadian Experimental Farm Service and its place in international networks.

Overview of the Experimental Farm Service

Established in 1886 and headquartered at the 465 acre Central Experimental Farm, the Experimental Farm Service included a network of branch experimental farms and stations managed by government scientists as well as smaller substations contracted to individuals and quasigovernmental agencies across Canada. The Experimental Farm Service was created in the context of the defeat of the Northwest Resistance and the completion of the Canada Pacific Railway in 1885, which opened the Canadian Prairies to extensive agricultural settler colonial occupation. The Experimental Farm Service was mandated to ‘conduct researches and verify experiments…bearing upon the agricultural industry of Canada’ (Canada, 1886: 98–99). The Experimental Farm Service was a key institutional player in the development of a state-sanctioned instrumental view of nature (Castonguay, 2004). Alongside its important role within Canada, the Experimental Farm Service acted as a link to imperial and international scientific and ecocultural networks and William Saunders worked to turn the Experimental Farm Service into the clearing house for Canadian agricultural science (Beattie et al., 2014; Naylor, 2010).

The international context of the Canada Experimental Farm Service was essential to its foundation and operation. The Act Respecting Experimental Farm Stations (Canada, 1886) closely followed the recommendations in a report prepared by William Saunders (1886b) on the state of experimental agriculture around the world. While the bulk of the examples were from American states and Canadian provinces, Saunders also assessed the role of stations in the British Empire, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan in supporting agriculture. Experimental farms and stations were present in diverse settler-colonial contexts at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, including in China (Lawson, 2014) and across the British Empire (Beattie, 2014; O'Gorman, 2014). As I demonstrate below, the links between the Central Experimental Farm and its international counterparts were invaluable to the pursuit of its mandate through the exchange of information and plant material.

Breeding Marquis wheat and spreading agricultural economies

A clear economic hierarchy existed in Canada at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Owner-occupied farms were privileged as the foundation of both the national economy and the fledgling dominion's polity. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, British loyalists fleeing the United States established agricultural colonies along the lower Great Lakes, beginning the transformation of the landscape from forest and marshes to fields. A century later, the Canadian prairies came to represent the next frontier for agricultural settlement. This required a different way of ordering the land than had existed under the fur trade. New plants and animals were introduced to affect the change and make the new economic and political order viable. Marquis wheat, the single most celebrated example of agricultural scientific progress of the Experimental Farm Service scientists in the early 20th century, was bred in this context.

A further set of nested hierarchies existed within this new agricultural order. Growing economic plants was deemed superior to raising animals. Within animal husbandry, dairy cows were better respected than poultry. Among plants, wheat was king (Bell, 2018; Magnan, 2016). Using a food regime analysis, André Magnan (2016) placed this hierarchy in the context of the economic hegemony of the United Kingdom and its domestic markets. In his analysis, the high value placed on imported wheat by the British was translated into a key driver for settler expansion on the Canadian prairies that received government support through Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald's national policy and state-sponsored seed breeding (see also Fowke, 1957; Russell, 2012). This attitude is reflected in the debates surrounding the passage of the Act Respecting Experimental Farm Stations in 1886. Cereals, including wheat, quickly came to be of central concern among the scientific programmes at the Central Experimental Farm with the Act including the direction to ‘test the merits, hardiness and adaptability of new or untried varieties of wheat or other cereals’ (Canada, 1886: 99). Director William Saunders retained personal control over the cereal testing and breeding programme until he gave the duties to his son Charles in 1903. To pursue this work the Saunders relied on scientists based at the initial five experimental farms, which were joined by new experimental stations established after 1906. In addition, they enlisted other state agents, including the Northwest Mounted Police and Indian Agents, as well as non-state actors, such as the Canada Pacific Railway and members of Christian missions, as partners in his scientific endeavours (Saunders, 1891: 43). A parallel network of farmers, numbering upwards of 30,000 a year by 1901, were employed in what Saunders (1902: 6) described as ‘cooperative experiments’. These experiments played a key role in the ascendancy of Marquis wheat and other novel varieties of cereals by ensuring their wide distribution, and observation, across the country.

At the same time that he was establishing his network of collaborators, William Saunders would spend part of his summer visiting the branch farms. Further, in the early 1890s he sent his sons, including Charles and Percy, as well as his assistant William Macoun, to work on the branch farms during the summer. Although Percy ultimately moved on from his father's line of business and Charles made multiple attempts to set up an independent career in music in Toronto (Pomeroy, 1956), both Charles Saunders and Macoun became successful and influential agricultural scientists at the Central Experimental Farm, taking the lead on national research programmes in cereals and horticulture, respectively, in 1910 (Fisher, 1910). During one of their summer assignments in early 1893, either Percy, Charles, or William Macoun made the fateful cross of Red Fife Wheat and Hard Red Calcutta that produced Marquis wheat. ⁴

The development of new varieties of wheat and other plants, including cereals and fruit trees, played a key role in the early work of the Central Experimental Farm. William Saunders directly oversaw the Cereal Division until he ended Charles's music career to appoint him to the newly created role of experimentalist (later renamed cerealist) in 1903. Cereal research was central to the wider experimental farm project as existing varieties did not thrive in the colder conditions of the Canadian prairies. Writing in 1911 to John Percival, a professor of agricultural botany at University College Reading, Charles Saunders noted that while European nations already had their own regional varieties, in Canada they must be created to meet the diverse soil and climatic conditions of North America (Saunders, 1911a). The desire to reimagine the Canadian west from fur trade and bison-based economies to the breadbasket of the British Empire required discovering or creating varieties of European foods that could survive the short growing seasons and harsh climate settlers found.

Breeding novel varieties of cereals (Figure 4) required the careful removal of pollen from the male plant and manual fertilization of the female plant, whose stamen had been removed. After pollinization, the female plant was carefully wrapped in cheesecloth and tied off with twine to prevent further uncontrolled fertilization (Buller, 1919: 147–149). At the end of the season, the seed was carefully collected. The next year the seed was planted in small plots and carefully observed. The length of germination, ability to resist late frosts or blight, the strength of stalks, the quality of the gluten, and the date of maturity were all tracked. Any emergent varieties were numbered. The plants would be selected for uniformity at the end of the season and the process repeated until a stable variety was isolated with the appearance of sports – phenotypical variations and regressions – limited. Writing in 1911, Charles Saunders (1911b) noted the importance of propagating multiple strains from a single mother plant and then selecting the best strains after years of observation. Those deemed successful were named and sent to branch stations and entrusted to local farmers for further testing as part of the cooperative experiments before being released to the farming community at large (Saunders, 1907: 235–236, 1908: 17). OPEN IN VIEWER

The methodology of these cooperative experiments was simple. In the winter farmers could apply to Ottawa or their local branch experimental farm with details of their farm and climate and in turn they received free seed grain (Saunders, 1915b: 754). The latest varieties, carefully prepared and packaged, would be shipped before the planting season. There was one condition: in return for free seed grain farmers must plant it in a separate small field, carefully monitor its progress over the course of the season, and send detailed reports back to the Central Experimental Farm. This information was the currency of exchange and if reports were not received in Ottawa, farmers risked losing access to the grain supply in the future (Grisdale, 1914: 45). Farmers were free to do what they would with the harvest, including giving or selling the seed to their neighbours. As different novel varieties, such as Marquis, became established and popularized the experimental farms stopped distributing those varieties and instead directed farmers to local sellers (Grisdale, 1914: 44). The creation of agricultural economies was more than simply determining or creating varieties that would prosper in a certain region (Moe, 1918; Saunders, 1914b).

These cooperative relationships provided access to the fields of farmers across the country and in turn shaped future experimentation. A key part of the success of the Experimental Farm Service's project was to establish its authority as a trustworthy source of seed and information. By enlisting farmers across the country in their cooperative experiments, the Saunders not only gained valuable insight on the quality of their novel cereals but also of local climatic conditions. This information was used to limit where certain varieties were sent. As Marquis wheat's reputation spread in the late 1900s and early 1910s, Charles was careful to only send samples to farmers in regions where it was expected to succeed. A failed harvest would hurt both Marquis and the Central Experimental Farm's legitimacy in the eyes of farmers and markets. These relationships had to be carefully managed. In refusing to forward seeds to a farmer in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Charles Saunders (1918a) stated that ‘I am anxious not to send out anything that will be reported upon unsatisfactory … if you were to announce next year that you found this variety unsatisfactory, it would be unfavourably interpreted by some of the public.’ He continued by expressing his concern in keeping ‘the reputation of the [experimental] farms … up as high as possible’. The expansion of the state through the exchange of seed for information allowed government scientists to reinforce agricultural settlement by ensuring, to the best of their ability and knowledge, that farmers would succeed and in turn rely upon them for advice and seed in the future.

The Saunders’ breeding work tracks the rise of the practical application of genetics to economic breeding work. In the early 20th century English biologists William Bateson and Edith Saunders (no relation to William and Charles) popularized the genetic work of Gregor Mendel (Richmond, 2001). Mendel's breakthrough research on the principles of heredity in beans identified the importance of dominant and recessive phenotypes. After listening to a lecture by Bateson at the 1902 International Conference on Plant Breeding and Heredity in New York City, William Saunders rose to say that ‘this paper has thrown light on many subjects which have been somewhat dark in my mind … in the cross-fertilization of wheats’ (Saunders in Horticultural Society of New York, 1904: 9). The insight of Mendelism proved decisive in controlling these mutations, and Charles Saunders (1911a, 1912) would rely on his experiences as a cereal breeder to defend Mendel in subsequent years.

Using language similar to the eugenics movement of the day, ⁵ the concern for fixed pure varieties was of central concern to the farmers who made up the Experimental Farm Service's main audience. For example, in 1914 Charles Saunders engaged in a series of letters with a farmer from Saskatchewan who insisted upon receiving ‘pure Marquis seed’ (Fitzgerald, 1914). Saunders (1914a, 1918a), ever the careful scientist, insisted that purity was impossible. Indeed, Marquis wheat was born out of the heterogeneity of the subject realms and trade networks of the British Empire. This is demonstrated by an examination of Marquis's parent varieties. The origin of both Red Fife and Hard Red Calcutta tell stories of circulation across empire. While Red Fife's European and Upper Canadian origins are well documented and celebrated, Hard Red Calcutta is often only mentioned in passing despite the importance of the female line to early 20th century cerealists.

Red Fife Wheat is named for David Fife, an early settler in Peterborough County, Ontario. Fife obtained the original wheat from a trader in Glasgow who in turn purchased it in Danzig (modern Gdańsk). Red Fife proved successful and formed part of the backbone of Canadian wheat production in the 19th century. Later while it was being grown in small multiplication plots at the Central Experimental Farm, researchers noticed it was identical to Galician wheat, which originated in modern Ukraine (Saunders, 1905: 216–217), a link that was later reinterpreted and celebrated by a Ukrainian-born researcher at the Central Experimental Farm (Symko, 1999).

Hard Red Calcutta's pedigree was even more blurry. Charles Saunders (1918b) noted that the name did not refer to a fixed variety but rather was a simple trade name for any hard red wheat purchased in Calcutta, India (Buller, 1919: 151). This in part reflects the fact that it was never an established variety in Canada, nor did the name refer to any specific variety in India. Further as Canadian historians have noted, immigration from India and other parts of Asia was officially discouraged by the Canadian government in the early 20th century. There is a dark irony that ‘the exclusionists argued that immigrants from India were unsuited to Canada's climate’ (Wallace, 2013: 34; see also Anderson, 2013: 82–92) while plants from India were being imported precisely for their ability to thrive in Canada's climate.

Unlike Red Fife, which was well established in Ontario, the movement of Hard Red Calcutta illustrates the reach of the imperial scientific imagination. Indeed, William Saunders' (1889: 17) early search for hardy wheat led him to contact the Marquess of Dufferin who had served as Canada's Governor General before being appointed viceroy of India. ⁶ Recognizing the general climatic correspondence of elevation to latitude, Saunders reported writing to Dufferin to request grain seeds from the Himalaya mountains. At the same time, he began acquiring wheat from the Russian imperial government, seeking hardy varieties from Siberia and other parts of northern Eurasia. Despite the initial promise of some varieties, Saunders was ultimately disappointed in the adaptability of Eurasian wheat to the Canadian Prairies. Although the varieties obtained from Russia and India proved hardy, they lacked the yield and quality of naturalized varieties, like Red Fife, expected by Canadian farmers and bakers (Saunders, 1893: 46–47). The hardiness of a plant was only one factor in its success, and not the most important. Ultimately the test of good wheat was whether it made good bread.

Prior to 1905, William and Charles Saunders relied on two methods for determining the viability of wheat for commercial bread production. In the field the tacit ‘chew test’ was instrumental in determining which of the many new crosses would be selected for further propagation. The chew test was what it sounds like: a kernel was removed from a head of wheat and chewed between the molars to determine the strength of the gluten and, therefore, the potential baking strength of the wheat (Department of Agriculture, 1936: 63). Those novel varieties selected through the chew test method were re-sown the following year and the harvest sent to commercial bakers. Outsourcing of this work proved cumbersome and in 1905 Charles was able to secure funding to purchase commercial milling and baking equipment as well as to hire an assistant (Saunders, 1905). This work stalled during the First World War when the milling and baking assistant enlisted (Saunders, 1915a). By this time, Marquis wheat was already heralding an explosion in production across the prairies, pushing the viable wheat growing region hundreds of kilometres further north.

The breeding of Marquis wheat was the result of a number of geographic movements across a number of scales. Globally, the international networks of the British Empire facilitated the movement of seeds across oceans and continents to the Central Experimental Farm and its branch stations. Later the imperial commercial networks, employed in the wartime economy, hastened Marquis wheat to markets in Europe and to the trenches at the frontlines. Nationally, the traffic of specialists and plant material between the central and branch stations of the Experimental Farm Service brought together the sons and assistant of William Saunders and wheat varieties from around the world, allowing the purposeful crossing, testing, and selection central to creating new varieties of economic plants. At the most minute scale, the disciplined movement of pollen from the stamen of Red Fife to the pistil of Hard Red Calcutta and the physical control of further reproduction created the scientifically controlled reproductive circumstances that resulted in Marquis wheat.

The scientific breeding work described above was not esoteric. It was part of a deliberate settler colonial policy to resettle the prairies with European and Euro-Canadian populations. As Peter Russell (2012) observed, the opening of the west to white settlers came just as the supply of available agricultural land in eastern Canada was being exhausted. While Russell's focus on the market economics overlooks the scientific and technological challenges faced by settlers, his description of the types of agriculture moving west along the railroad corridor shows the importance of developing an understanding of this migration that relinks science to its settler colonial ends. My point here is not to denigrate the struggles of early settlers or to downplay the important achievements of agricultural science. Rather, by relinking the scientific mission at the Central Experimental Farm and its regional branch stations to the settler colonial project I expand the discussion of the role of science in the British Empire to the Canadian context.

Dominion scientific agriculture, including the development of Marquis wheat and other novel cereals, was essential to settler expansion. The new economic and ecological orders being transplanted from eastern Canada and Europe focused on the wheat staple alongside cattle, fruits, vegetables, and small-scale reforestation efforts based on private property rights. The creation of farms and the focus on cash crops for export can be linked to the widespread extirpation of bison that in turn reinforced the deteriorating conditions of Indigenous peoples confined to ever smaller reserves. Far from the simple increase of agricultural settlers from eastern Canada and Europe that Russell describes, the new order included the successful assertion of imaginative control over the prairies that redefined what was possible. James Daschuk (2013) demonstrates this process of erasure by showing how disease and hunger were used to break the spirit of Indigenous communities and hasten their relocation. The government's Indian Agents worked to keep Indigenous people on reserves while it also employed agricultural scientists to expand the productive basis of incoming white settlers. The hand of the state that held down one community was used to uplift others.

Manoomin and ‘Wild’ Rice

The development of Marquis wheat and the place of the breeding projects in Canadian settler colonialism highlights the importance of understanding the role played by scientists in reinforcing the imaginative control necessary to remake landscapes for different economies and societies. The transformation of manoomin into wild rice marks a shift from food for humans to an ornamental feed for game birds. This underscores a second concurrent redefinition of nature as the plant was transported from lakes and rivers of Ontario to the Central Experimental Farm, and then from the Central Experimental Farm to Kew and landed estates across the United Kingdom. Rather than using plants to replace one ecological and human community with another, the movement of wild rice shows how the discursive redefinition of a single species can be used to redefine land that was important for Indigenous food production yet marginal to Western agriculture towards exclusively recreational ends. Here even the name of the plant – whether it is called wild rice or manoomin – does colonial work.

In 1901 American botanist Albert Ernest Jenks (1901) listed 59 different names in use for wild rice in North America at that time. This list included the two names I have already introduced, manoomin and wild rice, along with a number of variations in European and Indigenous languages. Although detailed, this list was not exhaustive as additional names were applied by botanists at Kew, most often Canadian rice grass (Prain, 1908). The names on Jenks' list can be divided into three main categories: those based on the Anishinaabemowin manoomin; those derived from the French folle avione, including the common English name wild rice; and, finally, names based on the Linnaean classification of the plant's genus, Zizania.

Names are not neutral, and language forms a key part of ecocultural relationships and circulation (Pretty et al., 2009). Names are historically and geographically relevant to the situation in which it is employed and is fraught with cultural and political ramifications. They enact different relationships between the human doing the naming and the plant being named, as well as relationships between the namer and the wider world. To paraphrase Dolly Jørgensen (2014), the name we use for the plant is itself a technology that does essential work in remaking the world. A brief examination of the etymology of each of the three most common names for manoomin/wild rice/zizania will serve to explain these differences. Manoomin, the Anishinaabemowin term, is often translated as the good berry. The cultivation, harvesting, and consumption of manoomin are historically important to the Anishinaabeg foodways (Connoly, 2016; Vennum, 1988).

Wild rice, on the other hand, was assigned to the plant by Europeans who saw aquatic plants resembling rice growing as if in the wild, unaided. As Central Experimental Farm botanist William Dore (1969: 6) put it in: cultivated ‘tame grasses’ – meaning dominant Western crops such as wheat and barley – required constant care from farmers while ‘in contrast, wild-rice is essential the same plant today that it was when the first explorers found certain Indian tribes … using it as a main food’. Wild rice was ‘wild’ both because it was well adapted to the climate in which it was found and used and because Indigenous communities relied upon it. Further, early 20th century botanical descriptions of Indigenous conception served to reinforce its apparently uncivilized and uncultivated condition (Bean, 1909; Fyles, 1920; Jenks, 1901). There have been numerous attempts by Europeans to domesticate wild rice since its ‘discovery’ in the 18th century, including at Kew Gardens in the early 20th century (Zilberstein, 2015). Wild plants, for Dore, thrived naturally in the climate in which they were found while the tame grasses, among which he counted wheat, oats, and other cereals, required active human support to survive.

Wild rice was ‘rice’ in its superficial resemblance to the more familiar Asian rice (Oryza sativa); however, Asian and wild rice are not directly related. In one case, this confusion led to a First World War veteran to apply to the Soldiers’ Settlement Board for a grant to plant Asian rice in Manitoba (Douglas, 1920). Charles Saunders (1920) was asked to draft a memo, in which he argued that this plan was not feasible as ‘ordinary rice requires a warmer and longer season than we have in Canada’ and there was little ‘demand for a new kind of food’.

Zizania is derived from the Greek word for weeds and is the taxonomic genus assigned to the plant in the Linnaean system of classification. Most accounts credit Carl Linnaeus himself for naming it in the 18th century from a sample obtained in British Virginia (Bean, 1909; Fyles, 1920). Today Zizania is neatly divided into four species: aquatica, found in costal and brackish waters from the St Lawrence down the Atlantic coast of North America all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; texana, found in Texas; latifolia, found in Manchuria in Northeast Asia; and, palustris found across the great North American boreal forests from Saskatchewan to Quebec (Dore, 1969: 16–23). The latter, Zizania palustris, currently refers to the variety discussed in this article. These distinctions, however, are not historically constant. In particular, the words palustris and aquatica have referred to each other at different times by different authors. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Zizania aquatica was used to describe the species of wild rice sent by Fyles to Kew (Bean, 1909; Fyles, 1920; Jenks, 1901).

To summarize: in the three most common names we have manoomin the good berry, an important foodstuff; wild rice which has never been tamed; and Zizania, a weedy plant that is hard to categorize. To add to the confusion, in the early 20th century imperial botanists at Kew requested that Central Experimental Farm scientists send them Canadian rice grass and received wild rice in the mail (Prain, 1908). What we call the plant changes how the landscapes in which it is found are understood and in doing so helps clarify the simmering conflict unfolding in central Ontario (Jackson, 2016). While the cultivation of manoomin has a millennia long history among the Anishinaabeg, cottagers are confused and outraged by the harvest of wild rice. Naming practices are an exercise of imaginative control over the possible uses of land and water. With that said and to avoid confusion, I use the name for the plant based on its use. As my focus is on settler colonial scientists at the Central Experimental Farm and imperial botanists at Kew, wild rice is used more often than manoomin.

Both the geography and the goals of wild rice research were different than those of the cereal breeding programmes. Where the development of Marquis wheat relied upon a generally westward movement of plant material from Europe and British India to Ottawa and from there to western Canada, wild rice moved in the opposite direction. The source of the plants used in naturalization experiments further underlines the cooperation of various agents of the young dominion's government (Figure 5). Initially seed was obtained near Hymers, Ontario, from the Geological Survey of Canada's chief Botanist John Macoun (father of William) before local sources were found in eastern Ontario. These latter sources were along the Rideau River at Kars and Smith Falls, south of Ottawa, and later at Billings Bridge, a mere 2 kilometres from the Central Experimental Farm. The seed was then planted, studied, and harvested in the ponds of the Central Experimental Farm's Arboretum and Botanic Garden (Fyles, 1920). Starting in 1909 and continuing into the 1930s, regular shipments were made from these stands in Ottawa to Kew. At Kew botanists planted the seed in the Lily Pond. From there, they distributed it to amateur experimenters, landed estates, churches, and other botanic institutions across the UK (Bean, 1909; Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, 1923, 1927, 1934, 1936). OPEN IN VIEWER

Twenty years earlier, wild rice was part of one of the first shipments of plant material sent from the Central Experimental Farm to Kew Gardens in 1887 (Saunders, 1887). These shipments fulfilled an earlier promise from William Saunders. In a letter to William Thiselton-Dyer, Kew's director, Saunders (1886a) described the relationship he hoped to establish between the newly established Central Experimental Farm with the growing community of Canadian botanists and horticulturists, on the one hand, and between his experimental farm and the wider world. With the establishment of the experimental farms, Canada would ‘not much longer be a clank’ in the empire's biological research programme. Similar to the role played by prominent local botanists in rural Victorian England, Saunders was positioned himself as an authoritative go between in the exchange of knowledge and plants (Naylor, 2010). He sought to establish the Central Experimental Farm as a key node in network between the metropole (Kew) and periphery (Canada).

The wild rice seed sent in 1887 was collected by John Macoun but had to pass through Saunders's growing clearing house at the Central Experimental Farm before being shipped overseas. Enclosing the seed in his letter, Saunders thanked Thiselton-Dyer for his investment in the new experimental farm system – an investment that came in the form of seeds and saplings. The wild rice seed was the first return on Kew's initial investment and helped reinforce the fledging relationship of exchange of plant material between the two research centres (Saunders, 1887). Where the currency of exchange between William and Charles Saunders and farmers in the cooperative cereal experiments was information, communication between research stations was focused on the exchange of the plants and plant material.

Wheat and cereals would eventually make their way east as foodstuff for the British Empire, but wild rice in the hands of Western scientists, tended and harvested as manoomin by the Anishinaabeg, was not intended as food. Its movement from the Canadian Shield and Rideau River to the Central Experimental Farm and from there to Kew marked a transformation from thinking about manoomin for human consumption to viewing wild rice as an ornamental plant used to attract wild game to the estates of the landed gentry in the UK and to hunting camps, parks, and nature preserves (Fyles, 1920). In letters sent to British experimenters in 1908 and 1909, Sir David Prain, (1908; 1909) Thiselton-Dyer's successor, noted wild rice's two benefits for his clients: it was a beautiful addition to one's pond and could be used as a feed grain for waterfowl (Figure 6). Although European and settler authors had long referred to the plant as wild rice, folle avione, and similar names, the movement of the plant in scientific communities is key to its redefinition as part of the wider Canadian settler colonial undertaking. Prain did not promote manoomin as a highly nutritious food for humans, rather in the British scientific market wild rice was valued only for its looks and its ability to attract desirable birds. OPEN IN VIEWER

This discursive shift from food to feed cannot be overstated. In the letter that accompanied the initial supply of wild rice seeds, William Saunders (1887) noted that it was ‘freely used by many of the tribes’ of Canada. And yet the seed was not studied for its potential as a food crop when it arrived at Ottawa or Kew. E.S. Archibald, the third director of the Central Experimental Farm, noted in his preface to a 1920 pamphlet on wild rice that while ‘as a food for man, wild rice has distinct value … our main object … is to stimulate its growth in localities where it is found to thrive in order to attract and furnish food for our game birds’ (Archibald in Fyles (1920: 3)). W.J. Bean (1909: 382), head of the arboretum at Kew, wrote in the 1909 that ‘although the seed or rice is used as food … it is on its value as a food-plant for duck and other edible waterfowl as an economic plant chiefly depends’.

While there was a niche market in Canada and the United States for growing wild rice for human consumption outside of Indigenous communities during the mid-20th century, mechanized production was limited largely to settlers. Noting the high prices available for wild rice at supermarkets, American botanist Taylor Steeves's (1952: 130) made the racial hierarchy clear in his 1952 analysis of wild rice as food for humans:

The Indians who today harvest wild rice … still follow in a general way the traditional methods of harvesting and processing developed by their ancestors…where white men have become interested and have entered into the industry, some very ingenious devices have been perfected to facilitate production.

Just as the development of Marquis wheat and other novel cereals was part of a re-imagination of the Canadian prairies towards grain production, wild rice at the Central Experimental Farm played a role in redefining the forests and lakes of the Canadian Shield for a new economic reality that focused, in part, on the rise of recreational economies in the form of cottages and hunting camps (Thorpe, 2011). Despite its recognized value as high quality human food well adapted to its surroundings, the frequent refrain that wild rice's economic potential lay in its consumption by wildfowl, not people underlines this shift. This parallels the concurrent introduction of certain species of fish preferred by sports fishers supported the vacationing elites from southern Ontario. The provincial government asserted its imaginative control by establishing a series of fish nurseries and a policy of stocking lakes to support the growing recreational demand shifting the balance of ecological communities across the region away from Indigenous manoomin harvesting and fishing towards white recreational fisheries (Knight, 2007). Wild rice, not considered appropriate as food by settlers, was only fostered where it could be used to attract ducks and other wildfowl for white hunters and was thus largely consumed indirectly.

The eastward movement of wild rice seed continued during the early 20th century. Botanists at Kew Gardens hoped to introduce the plant to the rural across the British Isles to help attract game birds to their grounds (Bean, 1909). Wild rice, however, was notoriously difficult to transport. Seed stored over the winter, such as that found among the Central Experimental Farm's first botanist and entomologist James Fletcher's effects after his death, often lost its germinating power (Saunders, 1909b). Drying the seed for shipping had a similar effect (Saunders, 1909a). Indeed, Fyles (1920: 13) would later conclude that ‘the sowing of seed which has been kept dry for several months is the chief cause of so many failures to cultivate wild rice’. Shipping the seed moist risked mould and fermentation (Saunders, 1909b). This challenged the ability of scientists at the Central Experimental Farm and Kew to naturalize wild rice in a British context.

The development of particular techniques and technologies to transport wild rice seed across the Atlantic Ocean posed a particular challenge as neither Kew Gardens nor its partners in other parts of the UK were able to create self-sustaining stands (Bean, 1909: 383; Elveden Gardens, 1910). Although Saunders did not describe how he prepared the initial 1887 shipment for the transatlantic voyage, Faith Fyles, working over 25 years later, took careful notes on her attempts to send seed across the ocean. At the same time, Sir David Prain, Thiselton-Dyers's successor at Kew, sought to reintroduce wild rice to the UK. There had been previous attempts by Joseph Banks at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries but Bean (1909: 382) concluded ‘it would not appear to have been permanently successful’. The renewed interest in wild rice in the UK was demonstrated by the number of members of the landed gentry who signed on to a cooperative experiment to naturalize wild rice. Seed received from Canada, from the Central Experimental Farm, was then distributed to over 20 estates across the UK.

Fyles continued to collect and send wild rice seed to Kew. Initially she received the seed from collectors working in northwestern Ontario; however, after the outbreak of the First World War she reported the collectors had all enlisted and been sent to the front. In 1916 she located a source of wild rice along the Rideau River near Billings Bridge, 2 kilometres west of the Central Experimental Farm. Fyles collected the seed and planted it in the Dominion Arboretum on the banks of the Rideau Canal. Alongside the plantings in the slow-moving waters of the Arboretum ponds and streams, Fyles (1920) experimented with different methods of cultivation to increase her ability to harvest seed for distribution. Shipments to Kew continued into the 1930s predominately in the fall but occasionally also in the spring (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, 1936). The autumnal shipments were preferred because most attempts to preserve seed at the Central Experimental Farm over winter failed.

Efforts to cultivate wild rice as an ornamental plant in the UK, including challenges faced sending seed from Canada, conflicted with wild rice's life cycle. An annual aquatic plant, it is grown from seed each year. As the seed ripens in the fall, it darkens and loosens its hold to the stalk. As a result, during harvest by humans and consumption by animals many grains drop into the water and sink into the muddy banks of the slow-moving rivers and lake shores where the plant thrives. In this way the harvest and consumption of wild rice is often coterminous with planting and where conditions are right, such as in Ontario's Pigeon Lake, can lead to the expansion of stands (Jackson, 2016). The seed lies dormant during winter until the surrounding waters warm, at which point it germinates and the stalks begin to grow out of the water. The relationship between wild rice and water is a necessary one, and once dried for any length of time the seed loses its vitality (Fyles, 1920: 12–13).

Fyles treated the regular shipments of seed to Kew as an opportunity to run an experiment on the best means of transporting the seed across long distances as well as how to successfully store it over the winter. Initial attempts were made to ship it wet, but this required the seed be kept in a cool place. Too much heat would create the ideal circumstance for mould and other bacteriological threats. On the other hand, dry seed was almost worthless. After a decade of work, she determined that seed collected on a cool day and stored away from the sun proved the most effective way of shipping. Time was still a concern and depending on the growing conditions of the season, the seed would not survive the transit in any meaningful way. Too much summer rain, for example, led to small seeds that dried out too quickly (Fyles, 1920: 10–12).

Getting the seed to Kew was half the battle. Once there, the Royal Botanic Gardens proved unsuitable for the creation of self-propagating stands. While in the Dominion Arboretum at the Central Experimental Farm wild rice was planted in streams and ponds that kept their water all year, at Kew the ponds were drained for cleaning during the winter. This gave the seeds an opportunity to dry out before being re-submerged. Further, as a seed used to attract birds it was altogether too successful. At Kew sparrows posed the main threat, while experimenters across the UK reported ducks, voles, and mice ‘greedily eating it’ (Bean, 1909: 383–385). These challenges led the botanists at Kew to experiment different means of naturalizing their wild rice. One method was to collect the seed as soon as possible after they ripened and to store them in mud at the bottom of water-filled barrels for the winter. This would mimic the conditions found in the lakes and rivers of Canada. In the spring the seed would be carefully transplanted to the ponds and from there a new season's collection would be grown. This method was labour intensive and time sensitive (Bean, 1909: 383). The repeated and regular requests sent to Fyles for new seed underscored the unsustainability of the naturalization project.

The failure of botanists at Kew and across the UK to naturalize wild rice offers a poignant counterpoint to Dore's argument that wild rice was wild because, in Ontario at least, it did not require the care and attention of the tame grasses. The failure of the early 20th century naturalization project in the UK, as with that in the early 19th century (Zilberstein, 2015), provides a second ground on which Europeans and settlers could assert the wildness of wild rice: it could not be tamed even at the very heart of empire.

Conclusion

Settlers did not abandon their cultural heritage and foodways when they moved into new regions. They brought their culinary traditions, including a sense of which plants and animals were fit for human cultivation and consumption, with them. Indeed, as Kay Anderson (1998: 126) noted in European thinking ‘to cultivate nature was to draw it into a moral order where it became “civilized”’. The development of these moral orders was entangled in local and imperial politics, as Indigenous cultivation of manoomin, while initially acknowledged, was quickly ignored to place wild rice at the bottom of the hierarchy where tame grasses such as wheat reigned supreme. Cerealists, botanists, and other experimentalists at the Central Experimental Farm and Kew framed the fate of these plants with that of specific communities. The fate of wheat was that of settlers while the positioning of wild rice, including its ‘timeless’ framing, not only reflected the position of Indigenous people within settler-dominated society, but also supported their framing as unchanging relics of a past era.

Thus, the expansion of ‘tame’ cereal-based agriculture relied on the creation of new varieties suited to the climatic conditions settlers found in the newly opened Canadian west. The food sources of Indigenous communities became less and less important to the newly ascendant society as those communities were displaced from the land. This expansion of agricultural economies further undermined existing foodways, leading to the famines and disease that helped force Indigenous nations from their territories onto reserves (Daschuk, 2013). Similarly, wild rice was not seen as appropriate for regular consumption by settler communities or as having been cultivated by Indigenous groups.

The circulation of Marquis wheat and wild rice through the hands of Canadian and imperial scientists demonstrated the hierarchy of crops in the settler colonial order. Each plant has a separate role to play in enacting the imaginative control necessary to remake the landscapes of the young Canadian state for permanent European and Euro-Canadian settlement. The rise of Marquis wheat in the first decades of the 20th century led to the creation of the now iconic, and even banal (Swanson, 2017), landscape of western Canada alongside the primacy of wheat as a key economic staple. Manoomin, in contrast, was eclipsed by wild rice, assisting in the redefinition of the lakes and forests of central Ontario away from Indigenous food ways and economics towards cottaging and tourism.

The two cases of Marquis wheat and manoomin demonstrate the role of scientists and scientific networks as technologies of governance in creating and sustaining settler colonialism in Canada in the late 19th and early 20th century. Science was essential to cultivating the ground in which settler communities and economies developed. The physical and discursive alteration of plant material by government and imperial scientists was essential in rooting new economic and political orders across northern North America. The movement of plants and plant material through both imperial and dominion scientific milieus was used to reinforce nascent state structures during Canada's first decades, helping to enact dual human and ecological revolutions.