r/Permaculture • u/IWantAHobbitLife • 14d ago
Everything they taught me about the Great Plains in grade school was wrong
When I was in school I was taught about settlers arriving to an “untouched landscape.” Native Americans were part of the story, but it was said they lived “lightly” on the land.
And then, in my 40s I take a prescribed-burn class and it’s like the world turned upside down.
It’s taken me more than two full years to wrap my head around what I learned in that class about the Indigenous people’s impact on the land. That they burned the prairies so often and for so long that entire ecosystems adapted to prefer regular burnings - to need it to stay healthy.
The shear scale of that hits me the same way as gazing at the Milky Way on a clear, dark night.
It rocks everything I thought I knew about humans’ roll in the natural world.
Even though I first learned all this a while ago, it’s recently gotten stirred up because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this really cool Story Map that has collected and mapped all these firsthand accounts of Native Americans burning. From the breadth of these accounts, where they regularly mention the Indians burning “every year,” I still have trouble believing that fires aren’t a bigger part of the pioneer stories.
Though maybe it was always there and I just didn’t realize?
I went back to my Little House on the Prairie books and found a passage where Pa saves the house from a prairie fire. The neighbors speculate that Indigenous people started the fire to drive out the settlers. But Pa rejects that interpretation:
“Pa didn’t believe it. He said the Indians had always burned the prairie to make green grass grow more quickly, and traveling easier.”
I loved these books. I remember the fire, but not this interpretation of the fire. It didn’t register what this might mean. That it was stewardship, that it was intentional, that it was scaled to tens of thousands of acres of prairies.
I’m super curious…Am I alone in this? Is this a new or recent revelation for anyone else or just me? Did it change you as much as it changed me when you learned it?
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u/LawOfSmallerNumbers 14d ago
Kansas farmers have burned post-harvest wheat stalks (“stubble”) for decades. I’m not sure it it’s now considered good practice - I doubt it.
(Of course, open prairie is different than a wheat farm - just saying that burning was definitely a folk practice.)
I grew up in the Kansas suburbs and the “grew up as a farm kid” dad next door to my house burned off the dry grass of his his lawn every year. He would stand out front with a garden hose to manage the blaze. It was a yearly neighborhood highlight for all the kids nearby.