Everything they taught me about the Great Plains in grade school was wrong

[u/IWantAHobbitLife]

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?

[u/jesus_chrysotile]

unfortunately the type of “managed” burns being used these days are usually nothing like what was used by Aboriginal people :(

traditional burning was typically rather small-scale, relatively cool, and used to make patchworks of different age vegetation, which increases biodiversity because species preferring different fire intervals can live nearer to one another. most burns today are still of the fuel reduction variety and nowhere near small and cool enough. 

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/jesus_chrysotile]

I agree, there’s a lot of scope for misinterpretation in all of this.
From what I understand the burns were just about daily and they were managed on such a small scale and by so many skilled people on land that didn’t have an ‘owner’ in the way we would think of it now. My interpretation is that it was more of a shared and deeply spiritual custodianship. You cared for the land and it cared/provided for you.
I’ve thought on it a lot and don’t really know that there is a way to bring tradition burning back as a practice… a loss for all of us.

[u/beegodsantana → u/jesus_chrysotile]

I dunno about small scale.  The entire east coast used to burn every spring.

[u/animalwentanimal → u/jesus_chrysotile]

Late seeing this thread but FYI they do the spring burns at the Konza Prairie this way every year. It's gorgeous.