The Great Plains of North America were not wilderness.

That word — wilderness — implies an absence of human management, a landscape that existed apart from human intention. The grasslands that stretched from the Mississippi to the Rockies, sustaining tens of millions of bison and dozens of nations of people, were shaped by human management as surely as any farmed field. The tool was fire.

Plains nations had used controlled burning to manage the landscape for thousands of years. They understood fire the way a gardener understands pruning — as a tool that, applied at the right time in the right place, produced a result. New grass after a burn. Concentrated grazing on the tender growth. Bison moving predictably toward the fresh feed. A hunt made possible by a fire set weeks earlier.

This was not accidental. It was a practice with specific knowledge, specific timing, and specific intent. The...