Courtesy of Jillian Godshall
A still from the film, "Louisiana Grass Roots"
In the first couple of minutes of the short film Louisiana Grass Roots, Lafayette musician and cultural activist Megan Brown Constantin admits that, growing up in South Louisiana, she always thought that “the prairie” referred to swathes of monocultured tall grasslands. Her words are cut by close-ups of saltmarsh mallow, rattlesnake master, passion flowers, swamp sunflowers—just a handful of the thousands of species that actually make up Louisiana’s intricate Coastal Prairie ecosystem.
Today, Constantin is part of a growing collective of ecological and cultural activists working to restore the prairie. But her initial misperception of what the prairie is, or that Louisiana actually has prairie, is not uncommon—even to those whose families have lived in this region for generations. The landscape is increasingly rare, but where it does exist, “it’s not an easy ecosystem to drive by and recognize,” says botanist Larry Allain in the film.
“It’s been lost from the collective memory, as well as from what we see around us in the landscape,” said Phyllis Griffard, a biologist and producer of Louisiana Grass Roots, in an interview.
“They were the first places we put cattle on, the first places we plowed and built cities on,” explains Steve Nevitt, owner of Louisiana Native Seed company, in the film. “So, we just kind of forgot they existed, because they weren’t there anymore.”
But once you discover the ecological wonder that is the prairie, and come to understand it, Allain asserts, “you’ll fall in love with it.”
This is what happened for Lafayette-based filmmaker Jillian Godshall. She was mostly unaware of the prairie until she set foot on the Eunice Cajun Prairie as part of an Acadiana Master Naturalists program in 2021. “It’s this landscape that is pretty iconic, that I had never experienced for myself,” she recalls. “These very tall grasses, all these insects, just in the middle of town. It was a very immersive, unexpected experience for me.” Local scientists Dr. Malcolm Vidrine and Griffard were guiding the experience, explaining the importance, and the increasing rarity, of this distinctly Louisiana ecosystem. “It made such an impression on me, the ecological and cultural significance of the prairie.”
That very day, Godshall asked Griffard if she would be interested in assisting her in making a film about the subject, and the two set out on a two-year journey that has resulted in Louisiana Grass Roots, which premiered in the spring of 2025 and has since made its way across Louisiana.
With the assistance of an entirely Acadiana team, Godshall set about filming as a mode of discovery and research—"which is not always the approach I take for a film,” she said. In the process, she collected over thirty hours of footage documenting prairies growing at every stage of the year, including during planting and controlled burns, as well as interviews with individuals at the forefront of the Cajun Prairie preservation movement. Distilled into thirty minutes of well-packed (and well-paced) screentime, the result is its own immersive experience that joins science with unbridled beauty, informed by the determined passion of the activists we meet along the way.
Courtesy of Jillian Godshall
A still from the film, "Louisiana Grass Roots"
Godshall and Griffard’s grand achievement in this film is in delivering an experience that mimics their own initial infatuations with the story of the Cajun prairie—sparking a sudden desire to be part of it, in even the smallest ways. “In order for people to care about this, they have to understand it,” said Griffard. “And in order to understand it, we need powerful tools, especially with such a complex ecosystem. The temptation of a scientist is to break it down into parts, but sometimes you need the artist to whisper in your ear and go, ‘Maybe there is another way.’”
Using a combination of footage, explanations from scientists, and animations by Camille Broussard, the film implants the ecological importance of this disappearing landscape as a diverse ecosystem and host for pollinators, as well as a carbon sink. But in addition to the science of it all, Godshall also carefully delivers a poignant message about culture.
Interviews with Jeffrey Darensbourg, a member of the Atakapa Ishak Nation—which called this region home long before Europeans arrived—connect the land back to a forgotten past in which the humans who lived upon the prairie understood it and cared for it. By integrating music, art, and folklore into the story, Godshall winds this thread of the region’s history deep into the cultural identities of those of us who still call the prairie—reduced as it is—home.
[Read about other 2025 documentary films featured in our "Film & Literature" issue.]
Louisiana Grass Roots includes homages to Pat Mire’s 1988 film, Wildflowers of the Cajun Prairie, with archival footage from that initial documentation of the then-emerging prairie movement. Almost forty years later, Godshall follows in Mire’s footsteps with a new generation in mind. “It’s a similar moment in time, where there are these younger folks involved who are continuing the work, and more and more people in the community who are feeling called to do something to benefit the environment,” she said. “The prairie is just one way to do that.”
As part of their hope that this film is a beacon of inspiration for its viewers, Godshall and Griffard end it with the promise of a new generation of prairie planters. Megan Constantin tells of raising her children on a property where prairie plants are part of their everyday vocabulary. Outside of the film, Godshall is doing the same on her own front yard pocket prairie. “My son helped me plant that,” she said. “He’s four years old and he knows why native plants are better. He can articulate it.”
As Darensbourg put it, “The prairie is a place of homeland.”
Follow @louisianagrassroots on Instagram and Facebook for the latest updates on screenings around the region.
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