Little House On The Prairie author’s name removed from award

LAURA Ingalls Wilder’s name will be removed from a major American literary award because of how the Little House On The Prairie author portrayed minorities in her novels. The announcement was made after the children’s division of the American Library Association – Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) – voted on Saturday.

“This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,” the association said in a statement after the unanimous vote.

According to the organisation’s website, “the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children”.

It will now be called the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Wilder was born in 1867 in Wisconsin, becoming a school teacher and moving to Missouri with her husband in 1894, dying at the age of 90 in 1957.

Her first book, The Little House In The Big Woods, was published in 1932 when she was 65. It told the story of five-year-old Laura and her pioneer family in Wisconsin.

It was followed by Little House On The Prairie in 1935, On The Banks Of Plum Creek in 1937 and By The Shores Of Silver Lake in 1939. The books inspired the hugely popular 1974-1983 television series Little House On The Prairie starring Melissa Gilbert.

Wilder was presented the first legacy award in 1954, after which it was named for her and presented every five years between 1960 and 1980, every three years between 1980 and 2001, every two years between 2001 and 2015, and annually since then. Other winners are E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Theodor Seuss Geisel, author of the Dr Seuss books.

The racial issues in Wilder’s books have been debated long before February, when the ALSC announced it would be voting on whether to keep Wilder’s name on its award, calling her legacy “complex.”

At the forefront of the argument is her handling of black and Native American characters, both in name-calling and characterisation, although her books are still published, and read and loved by many.

In 1952, a reader complained to publishers Harper’s about the author’s characterisation of the West as a place where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there,” The Washington Post reported.

Harper’s in 1953 decided to change “people” to “settlers” but other criticisms focused on Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans and some African Americans.

Some, however, have argued that the books and their handling of non-white characters can be used as a teaching lesson without ignoring the important family values they also portray.

“It would be easy to take these books off the shelf, to say that they – like many books of their time – are steeped in white supremacy and racism and therefore they do not belong in our canon,” James Noonan, a research affiliate with the Justice In Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote on the university’s website.

“It would also be easy to read all of the pages full of wonder and wild adventure and a family’s love and skip over the parts that inconveniently don’t fit that narrative. Instead, I am trying a middle path.”