People who think sports are for REAL men haven’t seen academic arguments. But for lots of blood watch the competitions for first chair between concert musicians. Rugby is Red Rover by comparison. (thinking) No, we played Red Rover for maximum carnage. Tiddley Winks, then. 
Blake, why do you presume (as you seem to do) that fires on the prairie were human-set rather than natural? Lightning-strike fires are common, in my experience. Any good reason to think natural fires couldn’t have kept woody growth under control without human participation?
The cites you provided about woody growth incursions all describe human suppression of fires as the reason. That in no way supports your argument that Indians used fire to maintain the prairies as grassland. It could simply mean that the Indians didn’t (or rather couldn’t) suppress natural fires, while modern Americans do.
And a sidenote: you will persuade more people with facts than with your alleged credentials. We need better cites than “current thinking” or your own chest-thumping.
Despite claims to the contrary, I read a lot of sites dealing with steppes and savannas and not a single one of them even gave a passing mention of human intervention as a major cause of the relative treelessness. All of them, however, did ascribe it to scanty rainfall.
All of the sites wrote of steppes, such as the great plains betweein the the north-south line of the eastern borders of the Dakotas and the Rocky Mountains, as having the predominant vegetation as grasses and spoke of scattered trees. And that was true from the retreat of the glaciers onward. If there had been a profusion of trees mixed in with the grasslands the most likely descripto would have been along the lines of “mixed woodlands and grasslands.”
There is no doubt that people used fire as a method of land clearing on the prairies such as Ohio, Indiana, and the like, but there was no indication in the sites that human-started fire was either needed or used to the west.
You know, after reading it, I believe that saving this particular post for presentation might be very useful for pointing out why you have such difficulty educating the public.