See the native land
Most of our place is an old hay meadow, a fairly rich one, with a mix of native grasses and flowering plants fast overtaking the introduced brome that dominated these acres just a few years ago. According to the deed, this is the last piece divided off from a much larger farm.
Its natural state, though, is tallgrass prairie, bordered on the west and north by the native oak-hickory forest that runs along the Coon Creek, which spills into the Kansas River about a mile north of here. In the creek bed, scattered among the limestone, are pink granite rocks, remnant erratics pitched from the glacier that reached this far south during the last ice age. This pocket of native forest is one of only a few in this county, with the signature understory of buckeye and spring ephemeral wildflowers on the north slope.
My flower production area is about 1.5 acres. The homestead—the house and outbuildings and kitchen garden and farmyard—are about another 1.5 acres. It leaves 13 or so acres to be managed as prairie and riparian forest. But I’m ambivalent, the way Thoreau was about “making the land say beans,” about having changed any of the land to grow flowers. I don’t want to do anything here that couldn’t be undone within a few years.
So much of Kansas and this continent has been utterly changed by Euro-American settlement. In the early 19th century more than 90 percent of this county was tallgrass prairie; now it’s less than 1 percent. There were black bears and mountain lions and wolves right here. The state song, common history books and Dan Flores’s American Serengeti describe a teeming wilderness of buffalo, pronghorn and other large fauna, including grizzlies, not far west of here. Now the vast herds have retreated to the Rockies, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the wheat and soybean fields that fill the state going back to prairie. Or the web and cluster of practices and livelihoods and opportunities that depend on large-scale crop farming changing to support prairie and wilderness again.
I didn’t see the land this way when I was growing up in the Kansas City suburbs. My world extended across Missouri to St. Louis and not much farther. I never drove west across Kansas until I was 20 and didn’t catch wanderlust until a few years later. What I see in much of this state and in parts of neighboring states now is an obliterated landscape, and I’m very sorry to say that. I’ve been able to work with research ecologists for the past 10 years, and that affects how much I know about what I’m seeing, but any of us who grows flowers and studies the land at all is concerned about wild country.
Both major universities in Kansas have adopted land acknowledgments that lay out briefly the facts of who was here before settlement and how the university lands came to be taken, but it’s still hard to get a mental picture of the Kansa people ever living along the river, right here.
I have my doubts about staying in this region year-round. My travels have fed my longing—a common one—to be in places with more public land, to wander freely part of the year, though it cannot be as it was for whole nations, like the Kansa, who traveled together.
Yesterday Biden nominated Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico incoming Secretary of the Interior, and I believe that is hopeful news for the land. She will have to be confirmed, and for that we will have to wait.
I think of a favorite student I worked with in my university job. He was from Jemez Pueblo, close to Laguna, and spoke of his home as magical and took us, once, all over the reservation to the places he loved most. In one spot, he climbed up some red earth and came back with three small crystals and dropped them into my hand. I don’t know if I can ever understand what it is like to really belong to a particular place, not that way. The Pueblo peoples are in their ancient place and have held onto it and been shaped by it.
There is only so much influence any one person, like Haaland (or Biden), can have, and I know many people pulled for this appointment. But my worry for wilderness eased just a little when I heard this news, that a native person, whose roots in her place go back thousands of years, will oversee the land itself.