The Future and Past of Manitoba’s Tall Grass Prairie

When European settlers first arrived to the prairies of North America they found the grass was indeed greener on the other side, and bluer and redder and yellower—the prairie was painted with a palate of countless grasses and wildflowers.

The tall grass prairie originally extended from southern Manitoba to Texas, covering one million square kilometres. The Manitoban portion of the prairie was situated along the Red River Valley and covered six thousand square kilometres. Its immense area was rich with colourful wildflowers and towering grasses, like big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), which can grow as tall as Manitoba’s 6 foot 8 Premier Brian Pallister. Today, less than one percent of Manitoba’s original six thousand remains.

The tall grass prairie once stood mighty and diverse in the middle of the continent, unlike the unsuspecting tawny fields you find today. The settlers didn’t see the value of the tall grass prairie, the plants of which were used by Indigenous people for ten thousand years for precious medicinal uses and food, so they plowed it away—the soil was fertile after all.

Beginning in the 19^th century, the tall grass was cleared away for agricultural use. Despite the dramatic loss of tall grass prairie in Manitoba, there are pockets of the province that continue to look how they did pre-contact.

The Living Prairie Museum is a tall grass prairie preserve located in the west end of Winnipeg. Established in 1968, the museum is a safe haven for more than one hundred prairie plants found amongst winding walkways and grazing deer, which have made a home in the forests that surround the preserve.

The museum quickly became one of my favourite spots in my hometown. It serves as a venue for various events from its opening—coordinated with the first bloom of Manitoba’s provincial flower, the prairie crocus (Pulsatilla patens)—until the end of the season as marked by Thanksgiving.

Prairie crocus (bwinesett, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

The museum serves as a hub for community outreach, a place for children to engage with natural sciences in an experiential way, and is the perfect backdrop for the myriad of arts events that happen in Winnipeg. This past June during the summer solstice, I met Weakerthans frontman John K. Samson walking along the museum’s self-guided trails shortly before a book reading by local poet Jennifer Still.

The presence of trees, wetlands, and boulders—which were deposited by receding glaciers—left areas like these too difficult for settlers to plow. Similar preserves extend throughout the original range of the prairie including areas in Windsor, Ontario, the Flint Hills of Oklahoma and Kansas, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa.

While some people are trying to preserve portions of the prairie that have survived, John P. Morgan is trying his best to bring the tall grass back to areas where it used to exist.

Morgan is co-owner and president of Prairie Habitats Inc., Canada’s first prairie restoration company. When Morgan and his wife, Carol, started their company close to thirty years ago, few people had prairie restoration on their minds. They do it all at Prairie Habitats; from consulting and supplying equipment like seed harvesters to restoration projects around the world and leading ecotours, field trips, and workshops on prairie ecology and restoration.

Morgan worked quickly to change the discourse around Manitoba’s prairies provincially and nationally. He played a large part in establishing the Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, an aptly named 20 square kilometre patch region in southern Manitoba that still stands today.

While working as a field biologist in the late 1970s, he had the opportunity to look over satellite data of the Red River Valley.

“We pulled out this beautiful, big mosaic of the Red River Valley and instantly I was drawn to an area in the southeast part of the province,” said Morgan. “This big area in what is now the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve stuck out like a sore thumb.”

This pristine section of tall grass prairie had gone unnoticed until then, which flabbergasted Morgan. Eventually the preserve was established after the Manitoba Naturalists Society commenced extensive outreach, fundraising, and breath holding.

“I could see that it wasn’t going to be there for long if we didn’t do something about it,” he said.

A large part of Morgan’s work nowadays is empowering others in their own restoration efforts.

“We helped other people get native prairie restoration businesses going all across Canada,” said Morgan. “I’m kind of good at getting things going and sort of stepping back and letting people with very creative ideas and better minds than me to go and actually run it.”

With Morgan’s help, the City of Winnipeg has restored a large amount of tall grass prairie. And Prairie Habitats Inc. equipment is currently used across the world in grasslands as far as Africa and Australia.

The continued loss of tall grass prairie today in Canada is in many ways a continuation of the colonial efforts that were responsible for the initial devastation of this ecosystem.

Big bluestem

The treatment of land as a government commodity that can be sold off continues to be one of the largest points of contention between Indigenous peoples and governments of all levels.

“The Conservative government, just a couple of years ago, sold off all of the [Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act] PFRA Community Pastures in Western Canada, which was just a horrible thing to do because almost all of those pastures were big areas of native prairies that had been preserved for almost a hundred years,” said Morgan.

And when government plans of austerity and privatization win, ecosystems lose. The loss of the tall grass prairie has had an effect we wouldn’t even think about.

“Prairies, especially tall grass prairies, are able to store four tonnes per hectare per year of carbon—indefinitely,” said Morgan. “By building the soil and building the prairie root system you store huge amounts of carbon, and it’s completely ignored in climate change discussions.”

The restoration of the tall grass prairie is an immediate and tangible way ecologists can take the first steps in reconciliation by decolonizing the land that has been stripped from its normal way of life for the last few hundreds years.

“When I go out on the prairie, it almost brings me back to that long ago time when we depended on the land for our sustenance,” said Morgan. “At some point there were 50 or 60 million bison out there, there were hundreds of generations of Indigenous people that lived and died and made their world around the prairie and knew it better than anyone could.”

For ecologists like Morgan, restoring the tall grass prairie is a tangible step in reestablishing the traditional knowledge and resources that this ecosystem once held within the current scientific climate. Not only do we owe it to the Indigenous people who held this knowledge for thousands of years and acted as the original stewards of these grasslands, we owe it to future generations of scientists so that they may explore the hidden secrets found within tall grass prairie foods and medicines, and, of course, we owe it to the Earth, for we are its guests.

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Header: Marilena, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0