#GREEN HELL WATER PATCH#

1874 is not the only time that Mennonites impacted the environment or indigenous communities who have a different relationship with the land. The tiny object symbolised nostalgia for an agrarian past, seemingly peaceful but violent to the environment. On leaving the Goessel Museum, I received a vial of grain.

As Anna Tsing argues, the interdependent relationship between wheat and humanity is a long love affair, producing hierarchies of dominance and order. When Europeans arrived in the Plains, including Mennonites who planted winter wheat in Kansas, it symbolised a turning point in the perception of the prairies. But the same sentiment permeates wistful ideals about agrarian settlement. This ethic is clear in large-scale industrial farming, extracting as much as possible at low cost. However, connections with the land that evolved, enshrined in myths of migrating seeds, shaped environmental imaginaries concerned with production, consumption, and taming land. Seeds and their stories, as Susie Fisher’s work on Manitoba reveals, are central to Mennonite memory cultures and intergenerational relationships to place. Mennonites earned a reputation as guardians of “traditional” farming values. On a trip to Kansas in 1873, Christian Krehbiel described his surroundings: “an expanse of the best land, watered by various smaller and larger streams … luxurious growth of grass.” He had “room only for one thought,” that Mennonites had chosen well and could settle “without any reservations.” Krehbiel commented, too, on enormous buffalo bone heaps in Colorado but remarked that “their time has passed,” for men’s efforts “transformed these wastes into beautiful homes.” It is not novel to suggest that Christian theology can imply dominion over nature, but the Mennonite story reveals how this became entangled with nostalgia for American pasts. The construct of the American wilderness emerged from the settlers’ perception that the world they came to was ripe for appropriation and cultivation. I wandered through waving grasses on a warm August afternoon, alive with insects, buzzing echoes of lost landscapes.Īs damaging as the destruction of the prairies, and crucial to the reason for this transformation, is the social relationship with the land that evolved from this “prairie pioneer” religious mentality. This museum is dedicated to the culture and history of the prairies, and particularly to Mennonite stories.

#GREEN HELL WATER PATCH#

Today, outside the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas, a patch of restored tallgrass prairie grows. Mennonites were not the only settlers to transform “the Great American Desert” into agricultural land, but they were part of the process. We cannot now imagine the humming life that existed in these vanished worlds of grass seas. Within two generations, by the 1930s, this was largely destroyed. Until the early 1800s, North America had 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie, a rich, biodiverse ecosystem that supported life from prairie mole crickets to bison and where indigenous Great Plains people lived off the land. Kansas became the grain-growing heartland of the US, and the effects on existing environments were devastating. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. Bernard Warkentin (1841–1908), who cooperated with the US Department of Agriculture’s Mark Carleton to experiment with varieties, was praised in the Saturday Evening Post in 1910 “for making Kansas a great wheat state.” His impressive house still stands in Newton.

However, once winter wheat from the Russian Empire arrived, Mennonites became responsible for large-scale production, turning Kansas prairies into wheatfields. The story was never as simple as a few seeds in a chest. As David Moon argues, Turkey Red’s legend is deeply ingrained in Kansas and Mennonite histories, but Mennonites may not have been the first to transport it. In the surrounding fields, where the Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church gleams white against blue skies, the Mennonite legacy is evident. The Mennonite Heritage Museum in Goessel, Kansas, narrates their movement and settlement with cases of material objects of migration, re-creations of immigrant huts, and displays of agricultural machinery. The first wave arrived in New York in 1874 and journeyed to Marion County, Kansas, to find a place where they could live, farm, and worship, supported by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company, which provided temporary housing and travel. In the late nineteenth century, Mennonites from modern-day Ukraine, who spoke Plautdietsch, a German dialect, boarded ships crossing the Atlantic. The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works.

Green hell water