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The wild rice on your supermarket shelf may not be totally wild, and is certainly not rice, but it is truly indigenous.

From the lakes of Ontario and Manitoba to northern Saskatchewan and Alberta, first nations families have long harvested the seed from this aquatic grass, the only cereal that's actually native to Canada.

At Mise Restaurant in Winnipeg, chef Terry Gereta serves nutty wild rice latkes, and pops the grain in oil for a crunchy garnish on salads and soups.

Wild rice is a natural alongside fall game dishes. Scott Pohorelic, executive chef at Calgary's River Café, combines it with barley groats, quinoa, leeks and fresh morels in his grainy prairie risotto. Wild rice pancakes topped with smoked salmon or golden Canadian caviar, or served with grilled venison, make a stylish seasonal statement.

At the Williams Wild Rice Farm, northeast of Winnipeg, Judy Williams Skrzenta's family has been "farming" Zizania aquatica since 1915, leasing the shallow lakes that dot the beginnings of the Canadian Shield, and reseeding them every spring. Their watery farm spreads over 500 hectares, the largest single natural wild rice field in Canada.

The long harvest begins at the end of summer and ends in late fall. The marshy fields must be passed over up to eight times as the kernels turn from khaki green to chocolate brown.

Much of the rice is collected by the kind of jet-propelled airboats you'd find cruising the Florida Everglades. But some of it is still collected by hand, as the local Ojibwa and Cree people have been doing here for centuries, gliding through the waters in canoes and beating the seed heads over the bow of the boat with winnowing sticks. The locals who still harvest by hand are paid by the pound for the grain they bring to the Williams' processing plant.

The family's old black-and-white photographs recall how Ms. Skrzenta's grandfather and great-grandfather, surveyors for the Dominion government at the turn of the last century, learned to gather and cure the wild grain working alongside the local indigenous people.

They parched the rice over campfires to dry the kernels, and "danced" it from the hulls, winnowing the chaff away by tossing it in the wind. The end of the wild rice harvest was marked by a thanksgiving "Manomin" feast.

The rice has the best, nuttiest flavour when fully ripened and nearly black - any lighter-coloured, unripe grains will taste grassier. The longest, thickest, unbroken kernels are top grade.

Wild rice triples in volume when cooked and is best simmered in four times its volume of water or broth until the kernels swell and burst.

The Williams' Du Bois brand wild rice is labelled Canadian Lake Wild Rice - to differentiate it from the cultivated varieties of "paddy-grown" wild rice commercially produced in places such as California and Minnesota, which is far more ubiquitous.

While Canadian wild growers seed rice around marshy lakes across the country, it's grown in the natural wetlands where the grass is still indigenous, and has none of the chemical inputs used in cultivated rice.

This wild rice is fussy about where it puts down roots - only shallow water with the right chemistry will do. And that, growers say, makes it superior and a little more expensive - perhaps not completely wild, but genuinely and uniquely Canadian.