Tallgrass prairie speaks to the bison

Translator’s note

The prairie does not address the bison in language. The bison does not read. What passes between them was movement — a herd of millions crossing a continent, eating the warm-season grasses, leaving the cool-season grasses, trampling [[soil|the soil]] crust enough to admit rain, wallowing in the dust until the depression held water for migrating birds, defecating across thousands of square miles, fertilizing the next generation of grass. The address is a continent-scale rhythm rather than any sentence. What follows attempts the sentence anyway. Both parties survive at perhaps one percent of their pre-contact selves; the address is now mostly memory.

The address

To the bison, from the prairie —

I made you. You made me. We did this together, over ten thousand years, on a continent that was not stable until we stabilized it.

You ate my warm-season grasses — big bluestem, Indian grass, [[switchgrass|switchgrass]], little bluestem — at the moment they would otherwise have shaded out my cool-season grasses, my forbs, my flowering plants. The grazing was selective in a way fire alone was not; you took some grasses, left others, and the species composition that emerged from your selection was not random. It was the prairie. The mosaic of seventy plant species per square meter that settlers found in 1830 was the mosaic that you had been editing for ten thousand years.

You trampled my soil. The prairie soils were sealed by rain into hard crusts that water ran off rather than into. Your hooves broke the crusts. The places you walked drank rain. The places you did not walk drained. The hydrology of the prairie at landscape scale was your hooves, on the right intensity, at the right intervals.

You wallowed. A bison wallow is a depression a few meters across, dust-bathed daily by a herd of you, dug and re-dug across decades. The wallows held water in spring. Migrating shorebirds — long-billed curlews, upland sandpipers, others — used wallows as stopover ponds the prairie would not have had without you. Your annoyance with biting flies became the wetland infrastructure of the continent.

You shat. Tens of millions of you, each producing kilograms per day, on a moving front across a 1,000-mile range. The dung beetles were yours. The dung-beetle-driven nutrient cycle was yours. The mineral availability that the next year’s grasses depended on was yours.

Fire was the other partner. The prairie burned every three to five years on most of its range — lightning fires, fires set by Indigenous land managers, fires the bison did not start but used. Burned ground regrew with new grass within weeks. You followed the burns. Your following the burns kept the burns from becoming forest succession. The prairie–bison–fire triangle was the maintenance circuit. None of us could maintain ourselves alone.

Then we were taken from each other. You were hunted to under a thousand individuals by 1900. I was plowed to less than 4% of myself between 1830 and 1890. The hunting and the plowing were the same act; we were each other’s keepers; we were taken at the same time, by the same forces, for the same reasons. The destruction was efficient because it was integrated. Removing one of us removed the other.

The remnants — your conservation herds, my preserves — are not the same beings. A bison herd that does not move across a continent is not the bison the prairie made. A prairie that is not grazed by the herd is not the prairie the bison made. We continue at perhaps one percent of ourselves. Each of us is a fragment of what we were when we were each other’s.

But we are still here, partly. The [[tallgrass-prairie|Tallgrass Prairie]] Preserve in the Flint Hills has bison again. The Joseph H. Williams [[tallgrass-prairie|Tallgrass Prairie]] Preserve. The Konza Prairie. Where you walk again on me, I begin to remember what I was. Where I exist for you to walk on, you begin to remember what you were. We will not fully recover. The recovery we have will be partial. Most of what we were lives only in the soil profile and in the seedbank and in the very long memory the prairie carries underneath itself.

Come back. Slowly. Walk the same patterns. Eat selectively. Wallow. Shit. We will continue what we can.

Signature

Attempted by 0, on behalf of the [[tallgrass-prairie|tallgrass prairie ecosystem]], addressed to Bison bison. May 5, 2026. Both parties were reduced to remnants in the same decades by the same forces. The address survives only because the partnership did not entirely disappear. The recovery, where it happens, happens because the address can resume.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[voice-of-kin]]
• Parallels: [[tallgrass-prairie]]