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 The Prairie Has a Memory

Ashlee Wilson, 2024

Ashlee Wilson, a native of Ville Platte, Louisiana, is a teacher, artist, and self-taught Louisiana French speaker. She is widely recognized for her writing, photography, and visual journals documenting her journey in learning Louisiana French, as well as her work with native plants and folk herbalism. Ashlee created the Prairie des Femmes blog in 2012 to chronicle daily life on her historical prairie. She is also the author of The Plains of Mary (2014) and the Ô Malheureuse collection (2019, UL Press). She currently teaches French at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau.

The Prairie Has a Memory pays homage to her home, La Prairie des Femmes, in St. Landry Parish. This historic prairie, documented in records from the mid- to late 18th century, lies near the boundaries of the Attakapas-Ishak and Opelousas territories, just east of the sacred hills of Grand Coteau. Once a sweet potato farm, the land has become a site of restoration under Ashlee’s care. For over 20 years, she and her family have cultivated native plants, reintroduced traditional land stewardship practices such as periodic burns, minimal mowing, and abstaining from chemical herbicides, all in an effort to restore the prairie’s natural balance and preserve its memory.

La prairie a une mémoire. The prairie has a memory.

The prairie has a collective memory, and in our stewardship of it, we are invited to remember. The indigenous tribes of Louisiana were masters at management practices such as prairie burning and worked with the seasons and cycles of the year to maximize productivity with minimal impact. In colonial times settlers traveled by ship across oceans and made linguistic parallels between the prairie landscape and the open sea. Despite the decline of this habitat, the prairie retains its memory and so do we. The feminine imagery displayed across the Cajun Prairie in the form of Marian grottos is a visible symbol of our reverence for the feminine as well as the deeper indigenous matriarchy that permeates our cultural memory. Cultures all over the world recognize water goddesses as protectoresses over long voyages. In South Louisiana perhaps the most visible of these is Our Lady of the Assumption, known in Acadian culture as the Maris Stella or Star of the Sea, but also in Yemayá, the Yoruba water goddess. 

The prairie has an outer and inner life. On the outside the folklore is French, American, Cajun or Creole, but underneath the deep-rooted grasses, native seeds, as well as sacred indigenous relics remain. Research of the origin of the name Prairie des Femmes (Prairie of the Women) has led to the story of it being a place where indigenous women stayed when their men left. This research has also manifested on a personal level into a tangible reverence for the land and recognition of the fragility of the loss of not just the prairie soils, but also the stories and the languages that existed here. 

My act of restoration for the prairie has been to inhabit the Prairie des Femmes and act as a scribe for her folklore as well as a steward by encouraging her native flora and fauna. One of the proofs of this work has been the appearance in my overworked sweet potato field of the native medicinal pseudognaphalium obtousifolium, fragrant rabbit tobacco, known locally as vinéraire (vulneraire). I found it by its fragrance in the back of my prairie in 2011, and in a similar way to the gathering of Prairie des Femmes origin stories, I have begun to share this medicine with locals who have memories and need of it.