The 32nd Land Institute's Prairie Festival (Sept. 24-26, 2010) included a musical performance honoring prairie pioneers called the "Perennial Polyculture Suite." The musicians -- Krista Detor, Tim Grimm, Malcolm Dalgish, Tom Roznowski and Scott Russell Sanders -- performed selections from WTIU's PBS film Wilderness Plots: Songs and Stories of the Prairie, based on the book Wilderness Plots by Scott Russell Sanders.Both the book and the video bring to life short stories about the settling of the American West. The live performance at the Prairie Festival included songs like "Rebecca Versailles," which is about a freed slave who found out, once she reached Indiana, that her children were not allowed to go to school with white kids. She was told that Indiana law forbid black children to be educated with white children, and she was advised to teach her children herself. But Rebecca Versailles, who was raised in slavery, did not know how to read or write.
Determined not to let her children go uneducated, Rebecca Versailles took the initiative to make pens and books that she then sold to the white school. The pens and books were of high quality, and eventually the school let her make them perched in the back of the school room. So the hard-working mother, while making the pens and books, quietly absorbed the lessons taught in school; and when she went home at night, she taught them to her own children. These children never took for granted the value of education, and when they grew up, they became teachers themselves -- teachers who vowed never to turn away someone who wanted to learn, no matter their race or creed.
Other songs from Wildnerness Plots are posted on youtube, such as "Wishing for More than I Dare Say."
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