Restorative narrative: Nonfiction and the resetting of the grasslands' future

Abstract

The diminishment of the ancient North American grasslands on both sides of the forty- ninth parallel and the undermining of Indigenous ways of life are among the most disheartening histories of the western states and provinces. When trying to understand how such an alteration of the grasslands happened, writers and historians use words such as catastrophe, ecological holocaust, and unmitigated tragedy. In the centuries since European contact and the radical transformations of European settlement, the Great Plains of North America has endured a thorny, difficult, disruptive historical passage that has significantly tested Indigenous communities and the grasslands biome. In this essay, I focus on non- Native late twentieth- and early twenty- first-century essayists from the Plains of Canada and the United States who are helping to shift the paradigm and define restorative narrative.