Finding Home in Grassland Grown

Over the weekend, I read the first of a little gaggle of books on the environmental history of the Northern Plains and the West that have been staring at me from my shelf. Molly Rozum’s Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairie (Nebraska 2021) was a pleasant read. Rozum argues that the first generation of settlers born on the grassland plains of the Dakotas and Prairie Provinces played a vital role in creating a sense of place and identity for this the white settler society of this region. In fact, she argues that the creation of this settler identity was part of a larger colonial process that involved the overwriting of Native American understandings of the landscape and replacing it with a view deeply embedded in settler experiences on the land. 

There are any number of things that made this book particularly compelling to me, but one of the key arguments Rozum makes is the role of childhood experiences with animals, in nature, and at home that shaped the distinctive character of settler identity in this place at the turn of the 19th century. In other words, this first generation of prairie born settlers experienced the landscape not as adults who grew up in points east or Europe, but as individuals who only knew this country as their home. By examining dairies, journals, and published accounts of growing up on the Northern Plains, Rozum was able to trace how individual experiences (even if filtered through nostalgia of adulthood) constructed a real sense of identity, priorities, and regional character. Her use of a diverse range of sources from both sides of the US-Canadian border was fascinating to me (unfamiliar as I have tended to be with literature that treated this area as a transnational zone). Her use of Era Bell Thompson’s 1946 memoir was another revelation. It was remarkable to see the prairie (and Grand Forks) through the eyes of a black girl and woman.   

Rozum goes on the show how the various ecologies, experiences, and environments encountered by settlers shape their efforts even after they’ve left the Northern Plains to construct a sense of regionalism and regional identity.

The book is far enough from my professional bailiwick that I’ll refrain from even attempting a review, but three things did strike me as interesting.

First, over the last few years, I’ve made a more serious effort to get out into the landscape of the Red River Valley. At first, I did this by walking along the banks of the Red in our local park and then I did this by riding my gravel bike outside of town. As I did this, I think that I’ve become a more careful observer of the countryside, come to appreciate local animals (especially birds!), and even have come to understand the path of the rivers and creeks throughout the intensely flat plains that surround Grand Forks.

I had never really thought about my efforts to develop a greater sense of place in the area as part of a process of settler colonialism. In fact, I had vaguely considered my growing appreciation of the local landscape as part of my effort to connect with a world that extended far beyond my limited sense of self. Whatever my intellectual (and not a little arrogant) assumptions about locating myself in the landscape, my developing sense of home represented the transposing my views of countryside over those that had gone before (whether Native American or white settler). Making Grand Forks “my home” represented a sense of possession.

Second, Rozum did a wonderful job connecting the developing sense of regional identity to both global and local trends in literature. This led me to start to root around in early 20th century literature from folks who grew up on the Northern Plains. For example, I discovered the work of Robert McAlmon whose book of poems, Explorations (London 1921), interlaces his travels (after his marriage of convenience to the writer Annie Winifred Ellerman [pen name Bryher] which provided him with a significant source of income) with images of the grassland prairies. He went on the live in New York and then Paris where he founded the literary magazine Contact with William Carlos Williams (which is now available via the HathiTrust), started a small press of the same name, and publish poetry, short stories, and the novel Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (Contact 1924). Despite this galavanting, he continued to recognize the value of grounding critical voices in a sense of place and regionalism. Perhaps because of his travels, he recognized this as a tonic for the dreadful character of the modern world. 

I also was introduced to Clell Gannon another prairie poet and also a painter whose art contributed to the cover of North Dakota Quarterly in 1950s. If McAlmon’s work had all the literary pretensions of Modernism in interwar Paris, Gannon’s work was more homespun, but no less accomplished. In fact, there’s something about Gannon’s work that makes me want to republish his 1924 collection, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres which features his endearing sketches and even more endearing poetry.

Finally, the penultimate chapter discusses the definition of a region by interrogating the terms used to describe the Great Plains, Northern Plains, the Northwest, the West and myriad variants. And, Rozum unpacks its borders (and the borders of the arid west from its sub-humid neighbors to the east). Debates centering on the 100th, 98th, and even 96th Meridien reminded me that despite the everyday colonialism of my effort to make this landscape home, I inhabited a borderland characterized by constant hybridity, cultural interaction, and movement both to the north-south and to the east-west.  

Reading the debates about naming and defining this region struck me a bit a hard than I expected. Rozum doesn’t delve back into how the acts of defining (much less describing) a region once again traced the contours of colonialism across the region, but perhaps at this point the book, this understanding is tacit.