The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag, is a sovereign nation and part of the Ojibwe-Anishinabe, the second largest Indigenous group in North America after the Navajo Nation. Traditional Ojibwe culture is retained through language, ceremonies, customs, and beliefs even as the community confronts modern issues including intergenerational poverty and unemployment, sustained by optimism and resilience rooted in cultural strength. The Leech Lake Reservation was established in 1855 by the Treaty of Washington after the loss of large areas of traditional Ojibwe territory in northern Minnesota, and under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 the present Greater Leech Lake Reservation was formed by merging the Leech Lake, Winnibigoshish, and Cass Lake reservations. Today the reservation contains 869,320 acres, or 1,358 square miles, across parts of Beltrami, Cass, Hubbard, and Itasca Counties, with about half of it covered by water, including 256 named fishable lakes totaling 247,503 acres, 244,062 acres of wetlands, forest ponds, and ephemeral pools, and 622 miles of rivers and streams. Wild rice, or manoomin, is abundant there and holds deep cultural and spiritual importance in Anishinabe life; with about 40 wild rice producing lakes and around 13,000 acres of natural wild rice stands, Leech Lake has the largest natural wild rice production of any reservation in Minnesota. Because of concern over losses of wild rice in Minnesota waters and the possibility of genetic alteration of native stock, the Band has invested heavily in sampling and monitoring these ecosystems. Band members continue seasonal harvests of wild rice, plants, berries, maple sap, and birch bark, and many also practice woodcrafts, beadwork, basket making, and birch bark canoe construction. Ojibwe oral history tells that a migration to the Minnesota region beginning around 900 CE followed seven prophecies, including a journey west from the eastern ocean to a place where food grows on water, identified as manoomin in Minnesota’s shallow northern lakes. The prophecies also foretold the coming of Europeans, generations of suffering, land loss, the taking of children in the mission and boarding school era, Christianization, the banning of traditional beliefs, and declines in language and cultural practices, followed eventually by healing and a cultural and spiritual renaissance in which Ojibwe people return to their language, spiritual teachings, and the values of the Good Path, or Mino-Bimaadiziwin.