On ancestral lands, the Fond du Lac band in Minnesota is planting wild rice and restoring wetlands damaged by dams, industry, and logging. Their efforts are part of a growing trend by Native Americans to bring back traditional food sources and heal scarred landscapes.

Two by two, the wild rice harvesters emerge from the grass-filled lake and drag their canoes to shore. The harvesters, Lake Superior Chippewa, are reaping their ancestral food in the traditional way — one poling the boat through the waist-high tangle, and the other bending the stems and gently brushing ripe seed loose with a pair of batons. It’s hard, dirty work on a steamy Minnesota late-summer day. They’re caked with chaff and sweat.

But the canoes are loaded with the sacred grain they call manoomin.tribe has now restored three meadows, covering 15 acres, and has several more restoration projects underway.

In the Pacific Northwest, indigenous communities have been working for years to bring back the salmon and trout that once teemed in the Columbia River basin.The Columbia, one of the most heavily dammed and industrialized rivers on the continent, is also on American Rivers’ top ten endangered list. TheColumbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a coalition of tribes with fishing rights on the river, has adopted a “gravel-to-gravel management approach concerned with all the issues impacting salmon throughout their life,” says Sara Thompson, spokeswoman for the commission. The tribes, working with state and federal biologists and conservation groups, have restored habitat and taken other steps that have helped Chinook populations rebound.

Despite mounting success stories,