Prairie Stories

Prairie Quotes

Mni Sota Makoce. "The land where the waters are so clear they reflect the clouds. This land is where our grandmothers' grandmothers' grandmothers played as children. Carried in our collective memories are stories of this place that reach beyond recorded history."
— Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota

 

"The power of the Dakotas had always dwelt in the land, from the great forest to the open prairies. Long before the white man ever dreamed of our existence, the Dakota roamed this land"
— Waŋbdi Wakiya, quoted in Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota

 

"One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence."
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

 

"As I looked out about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. . . . And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 

"This biota, through ten thousand years of living and dying, burning and growing, preying and fleeing, freezing and thawing, built that dark and bloody ground we call prairie."
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

 

"[M]any of this grand landscape's best features, paradoxically, are visible only close at hand."
— Paul Gruchow, Worlds Within a World

"Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail."
— Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness