CELPIP reading tips and tricks: Part 3, Reading for Information

Manoomin is an annual aquatic grass, unrelated to the rice grown in Asia, and it lives in shallow slow-moving water between roughly half a metre and a metre and a half deep. It spends part of the summer with its leaves lying flat on the surface before the stalk stands up and flowers. The grain ripens in late summer and shatters, meaning it simply drops from the stalk into the water, where it lies dormant on the bottom through the winter. Because a bed carries several years of seed in the mud beneath it, one failed summer does not empty it. The plant is unforgiving about water depth, however, and a change of a few centimetres at the wrong week can wipe out a season.

The oldest harvest is done from a canoe by two people. One poles the boat slowly through the stand while the other uses a pair of cedar sticks, called knockers, to bend the stalks over the gunwale and tap the ripe grain loose so that it falls into the hull. Much of it misses and falls into the water instead, which is the point: the method reseeds the bed as it works. Beds ripen unevenly, so the same water is visited three or four times across a fortnight rather than stripped in a day. For Anishinaabe communities the harvest is both a legal right and a practice with its own protocols, and the grain that comes home is still parched over a fire, trodden and winnowed before anyone eats it.

In the 1950s researchers in Minnesota began breeding plants whose grain does not shatter but holds on to the stalk until it is cut. That single alteration is what made machinery possible: a crop that waits can be taken by a combine, and a combine needs a diked paddy rather than a lake. Cultivation spread, and most of the world's crop is now grown in paddies in California. The price fell steeply, hand-harvested lake grain became a premium product sold at several times the paddy price, and the change remains contested, not least because paddy grain and lake grain are sold to shoppers under the same name.

The beds face a crowded list of threats. Dams hold water at levels chosen for power generation and flood control rather than for a plant that measures its tolerance in centimetres. Sulphate carried off mine sites appears to interfere with the seedlings. Introduced carp uproot young plants while feeding. Heavier spring rain drowns the stand at the floating-leaf stage, when it is least able to cope. Against all this, restoration seeding programs now run jointly between First Nations and provincial agencies, with results that are honestly mixed: some beds have come back within five years, and others have simply refused.

A wooden grain elevator is a tall cribbed box standing beside a rail siding, and everything about it follows from one idea: lift the grain once and let gravity do the rest. A farmer's wagon tips into a pit in the floor, and a leg, which is a moving belt fitted with cups, carries the grain to the peak of the building. From there it drops into whichever bin the operator has chosen, and later drops again into a rail car. A typical house held about thirty thousand bushels. The outside was painted in the colours of whichever company owned it, with the name of the town lettered across the side, and on most of the prairie it was the only vertical thing for many kilometres.

They arrived with the railways in the 1880s and multiplied along every branch line, spaced roughly thirteen kilometres apart, which was as far as a loaded team of horses could travel and return between dawn and dusk. By 1933 there were close to six thousand of them standing across the three prairie provinces. Farmers were rarely content with the arrangement: complaints about how the private houses assigned a grade to a load, and about the price that followed from that grade, ran for decades, and in the 1920s they produced farmer-owned cooperative companies that came to hold much of the trade.

The end came from the rail line rather than from the building. Branch lines began to be abandoned in the 1970s, roads improved, farm trucks grew, and the grain companies built inland terminals of concrete and steel that could hold a hundred times what a wooden house held and load a train of a hundred cars in a day. A wooden elevator that no longer had a train to fill was a tax bill with a roof, and companies found it cheaper to pay for demolition than to maintain one. By the 2010s fewer than two hundred of the wooden houses were still standing.

A few have found second lives. Two or three are museums, one has been fitted out as a climbing gym, and several were sold to their own towns for a single dollar, after which the insurance turned out to cost a great deal more than the purchase. Heritage designation, where it exists, is usually provincial rather than federal. The argument made for keeping them is that they are the only building the prairie ever invented for itself and that a skyline without them is a skyline of nothing at all. Several communities have heard that argument at a public meeting and voted the other way.