Summary Of Recovering The Landscape Of The Ioway By Lance M. Foster

Recovering the Landscape of the Ioway by Lance M. Foster goes into great detail about what Iowa, or how the Indians who were natives here called it, Ioway, was once like. Foster states that the state of Iowa was once a vast prairie, but today less than 0.1 percent of that prairie remains. He states that Americans typically associate the buffalo with the great plains, rather than thinking of them once being in the tallgrass prairie that once covered Iowa and Illinois. Foster, being a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, explains just how big of a role the buffalo played to the tribes here when they once roamed. He also goes into some detail on some of the different methods in which the tribes would hunt the buffalo such as even …show more content…
In fact, wolves, deer, and even the occasional grizzly bear was seen here in the Iowa prairie. What we Teach Rural Children by Paul Gruchow was quite the opposite in regards to material as Fosters article. Foster’s article went into the detail of what Iowa was like before we started to change the landscape. When looking at Gruchow’s article, he explained that they were taught about farming life and how to be efficient. There was one instance where a geographer was showing Gruchow’s class a picture of a man unloading shell corn into a container. There were five machines in the picture and one …show more content…
When looking at Foster’s view, it was very much so the original history of Iowa and how it used to be a very vast prairie. When Gruchow expressed what he was taught, it was very much so about farming, how we have efficiently changed our farming ways to use machines and divide the land properly to make it as efficient for everyone as possible. Gruchow never learned anything about the true history of how Iowa used to be a prairie, and the many different animals that roamed it. This shows the differences in how both the authors viewed the prairie. Foster saw it as a beautiful place full of life that allowed for his people to survive. He explained the animals that roamed the prairie, and how the Indians would use each animal after they hunted it. Gruchow was taught to see Iowa as a vast farmland rather than the prairie it once was. He never even learned the animals that once were here or how Iowa was a prairie. In relation to Gruchow’s article, I do not think that we teach Iowa students enough about the true history of Iowa. Maybe some of us heard that it once was a prairie, or that buffalo once were very prominent here, but never did we, at least at my school, did we learn about the many different tribes that roamed this area, or the details about this vast prairie that once was. So, I do not think much has changed regarding Gruchow’s article. We may learn a