Credit Howard Bedford Williams Family
1940s video taken with a 16mm Kodak video camera by Howard Bedford Williams shows:
- Paddle into Rice Lake (Lac du Bois, Manitoba) up Rice Creek
- the harvesters were families from Sagkeeng First Nations
- Taking green rice from lake and placing in metal trough with fire underneath to parch it
- “Dancing parches the rice to remove hulls”
- Canoeing to rice fields
- downtime playing baseball
- First day of rice picking to see who could pick the most in a certain amount of time with prize for the most picked.
- Using 1st mechanical harvester built by Bedford Williams after most hand picking was done using high volume mechanical methods to parch (bake) rice – dehull it (using grain dehulling equipment).
- Size of chaff pile shows how much rice was processed
- Finished bagged rice loaded onto CPR box car and sold mainly in California until Manitobans started using more rice in 1950s & 60s.
- making a meal using wild rice
Bill Williams was the biggest sole proprietor producer of Wild Rice in Manitoba for years.