Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies

When I lived in Nebraska, I met a white poet who explained to me in her slight southern twang that her family was “native” to the plains, “as old as the dirt.” I struggled to reconcile her familial placemaking with her erasure of Indigeneity—until now. This woman's claim to settler longevity in the 2010s is part of a legacy of generations of frontier narratives grown in what Molly Rozum calls the “gumbo” of transnationalism (xiv). The intensity with which grasslands-grown generations experienced their surroundings created a passionate sense of place inseparable from a larger regional identity, one that ignored national borders in favor of the environment. As Rozum argues, ecological and cultural change were intertwined (120).Rozum's book follows a chronology of the first immigrant and citizen settlers in the heart of the grasslands in the late nineteenth century through their adolescence and into adulthood. Through diaries and letters, she charmingly reassembles the sounds and smells of the “small world” experience of first-generation grasslands children. Their keen observation of animals, the land, plants, and weather translated into early exposure to archaeology, biology, botany, ecology, hydrology, meteorology, and paleontology. Rozum never lets us forget, however, that their cultivated childhood experiences came at the disadvantage of the region's Indigenous peoples, and that settler colonialism is the driving force behind her study.Parallel stories across the US-Canada border are all that situates the transnationalism in the childhood chapters. It becomes much more pronounced as Rozum follows the children into adolescence and early adulthood. She explains that as their education became more formalized, it also became more national and global—two narratives that served settler colonialism better than regionalism. These adolescents' geographies expanded too as they began to travel greater distances and transition into gendered work life, often in larger towns or regional cities. Yet even in these new environs, these young adults applied their small-world observation skills to bigger places.Many of Rozum's characters begin to lose their charm as they age fully into adulthood. Gone are the youthful days of wandering the prairie and rolling down the hills. They are replaced with first-time encounters with Indigenous peoples (predominately in settler spaces) alongside cultural and intellectual appropriation of Native lifeways and food science. Deviating from her close readings of diaries and letters, Rozum shifts briefly to analyzing creative works as mechanisms for regional placemaking that centered immigrant and citizen stories and erased Native peoples off the landscape. These works rarely broke into national markets but formed a popular region-defining genre of “settler fiction” (254) that, by the early 1900s, had professionalized and exceeded its predecessor: the pioneer novel.By the mid-twentieth century, the grasslands-grown generations had converted their precious region into grainlands. Agricultural innovation followed the establishment of higher education institutions, but, in essence, these researchers formalized the small-world science of their youths. The literary lamentations over industrialized progress following World War I and changes in farming technology manifested in real-world strife following the droughts of the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1940s, they shifted their focus to preservation efforts.While some of the early chapters can be rather encyclopedic, this book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in what is now known as the Northern Great Plains. Though not explicitly about gender, Rozum's careful analysis subtly reveals the divergent gender roles from childhood through adulthood. She weaves in narratives from Icelandic immigrants alongside African American homesteaders, adding to the chorus of voices emerging from the grasslands. Her book is a meditation on the body as much as it is on the land as she tells the story both generationally and seasonally.The poet who raised my hackles with her generational amnesia also once convinced me to lie down beneath the dried canopy of 850 acres of original, unplowed tallgrass and listen to sounds of the Nebraskan prairie. Reading Rozum's book kept my head beneath the rustle of the tallgrass, conjuring memories of a small-world soundscape of tiny critters, my own breath, and a surprising, peaceful silence.

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