Introduction (Looking Northwest from La Vérendrye Hill): The story of the 1913 discovery in South Dakota of a French-made lead plate, buried by the Canadian La Vérendrye brothers in 1743 after meeting Little Cherry’s Arikara band, helps spin out the major topics of Grasslands Grown: the creation of senses of place and regional identities from experiences living on the transnational—U.S. and Canadian—North American northern grasslands, known at the time as the Northwest. The project views these environmental identities through the lenses of the generations born to or raised by the first settler colonials to arrive at various regional locations interested in founding agricultural settler societies.