ABSTRACT
Myth, ‘a composite of the legendary, religious, political, even economic concepts a society shares’ according to Diane Quantic, began to define the Great Plains before Europeans had much extended their domain, roamed over, surveyed and settled the interior of North America (1995, p. xvii). Myth brought with it an alien, disconnected language that had little to do with the reality of the grasslands but that greatly motivated possession of this vast region. Complicating the first European contact with the grasslands, in Robert Thacker’s assessment, was the ‘singularity’ of this biome: ‘no Old World topography equals the prairie’s stark expanses … . To Europeans glimpsing it for the first time’, he concludes, ‘the prairie was the most unfamiliar of landscapes’ (1989, p. 6). How to articulate the prairie experience confounded these early European explorers. Until visitors and settlers gained deeper experience and memory of the Plains, they had an insufficient vocabulary, an undeveloped grammar of landscape. Indeed, the reshaping of the Great Plains’ interior to suit European style farming and habitation so altered the original biome that settlers and their descendants bypassed landscape lessons that might have served them better long term. They never really had an embedded, home grown vocabulary to guide their settlement of the great North American Interior, nor did they honour the stores of knowledge from Indigenous Nations. Through a number of generations, Plains’ writers have learned to bend their ears to the grasslands’ voice, to translate its peculiar vernacular into legible text and to acknowledge their limitations as latecomers to the landscape. Diane Quantic’s insight into Plains’ fiction – ‘language of a prairie or Plains novel springs from the memory of the region, not from imitation or convention’ – can be extended to other forms of writing and defines the best of these writers (Quantic, 1995, p. 169). Experience, immersion and an open responsiveness to the grasslands’ idiolect have furthered the development of Plains’ speaking. In Robert Thacker’s view, ‘[this] process of imaginative adaptation to the prairie is ongoing, probably
never ending; it can be seen wherever one looks in prairie writing’ (Thacker, 1989, p. 224). At the same time, the sheer enormity of radical change of the biome has hindered development of Plains’ vernacular. The aftermath of colonization, the dismissal of Native communities’ deeper history on the continent, exacerbates this spatial illiteracy.
