Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies by Molly P. Rozum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies by Molly P. Rozum Tracy Sanford Tucker Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 474 pp. Hardcover, $75; paper, $35; e-book, $35. The development of an identity of place—and the interplay between place and regional or national identities—is the focus of Molly P. Rozum’s examination of the northern Great Plains. Crucially, Rozum’s scope includes the entirety of the northern Great Plains ecological region, introducing a helpful transnational perspective that is too often missing in our study of the culture and people of the Plains. Grasslands Grown examines the words and works of a number of writers, artists, ethnologists, journalists, politicians, and others as they reflect on their formative experiences on the land. Rozum assesses the ways that childhood nature play and exploration in particular helped children of new settlers to forge strong connections to local place. These highly personal and imaginative episodes involving animals, plants, and the earth itself created, in Rozum’s words, a “‘small world’ [of] wonderment, producing feelings and sensitivities that remained powerful for lifetimes” (94). These natural rhythms of the wild Plains shaped but were distinct from the rhythms of settler colonial agriculture, just as the mythology of the pioneer underpinned an evolving, deepening sense of place. Inversely, Indigenous children, subject to removal and assimilation at distant boarding schools, experienced a near-total disruption of these physical experiences with place, contributing to their dislocation from place and culture. But for the children of settlers on the northern Plains, “shared educational aspirations” inspired these young adults to travel and study at normal schools and universities, adding to their knowledge of “their” place as they learned of and experienced other similar places in the region, the nation, and the world (165). In so doing, Rozum says, they “recrafted” their versions of the [End Page 423] home place. Memories of childhood, selected and reframed by a mature understanding of geography, science, industrialization, and nationalism, permitted this generation to “overlay the ecological North American northern grasslands” with regional identity rooted in settler society (174). One of Rozum’s most intriguing chapters, “‘Old Woman Who Never Dies’ and Old Man’s Garden,” charts several important ways that the first generation of children in this settler society interacted with Indigenous people and culture. The children of settlers often made “an implicit argument that they had a claim equivalent to Indigenous peoples” borne of the very physical experiences discussed above; in other cases, they adopted their parents’ firsthand acquaintances with Indigenous people as their own in the selection of memories and crafting of their own identities (176). Though often sympathetic to Native people, the first generation of settler children still “revealed racial hierarchical thinking” that excused any appropriation of Indigenous knowledge and culture and denied the continuing damage done by colonialism (216). The literature ultimately created by this generation of children of the Northern Plains “conveyed a sense of place . . . by mixing memories and settler-society social experiences,” just as Willa Cather had done for the central plains of Nebraska earlier in the century (260). However, Rozum has identified a distinct ecological transnational region that functions and feels separate from Cather’s principally American Great Plains, despite the many commonalities between Rozum’s artists and writers and Cather’s own upbringing and childhood experiences. This useful analysis of place-making on the Great Plains helps to answer the question: when—and how— does one become local? [End Page 424] Tracy Sanford Tucker National Willa Cather Center Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...