PC police take aim at the ‘Little Prairie’
Once upon a time, we were able to realize that honors didn’t equal an endorsement of every single part of a person’s life.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the beloved “Little House on the Prairie” books, is the latest American icon to fall under the tomahawk — if that’s a term Wilder’s critics will still permit me to use.
Wilder’s sin? “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 [Association for Library Service to Children’s] values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,” wrote the organization about its decision to rename the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In a February post about potentially renaming the award, the organization was less oblique, writing about “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.”
Yes, there are sentiments in the Wilder books that are concerning. Laura’s adored father wears blackface, and a couple, the Scotts, in “Little House on the Prairie” seems to hate Native Americans, with the husband saying at one point, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Although now altered, a sentence, also in “Little House on the Prairie,” read for years, “… there were no people. Only Indians lived there.”
But delve into the books themselves and there’s nuance. Wilder writes, after the “dead Indian” quote, that “Pa said he didn’t know about that. He figured that Indians would be as peaceable as anybody else if they were left alone.”
Wilder also attributes the lives of herself, her sisters, and her parents being saved by the intervention of an African-American doctor:
“Then the doctor came. And he was the black man. Laura had never seen a black man before and she could not take her eyes off Dr. Tan. He was so very black. She would have been afraid of him if she had not liked him so much. He smiled at her with all his white teeth. He talked with Pa and Ma, and laughed a rolling, jolly laugh. They all wanted him to stay longer, but he had to hurry away.”
And that sentence that implied Native Americans weren’t people? Well, in 1952, when an editor passed on to Wilder herself a reader’s concern about it, Wilder responded greenlighting changing the sentence, which became “… there were no settlers.” She wrote to the editor, “It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not intend to imply they were not.”
So while Wilder doesn’t always seem sensitive to the pain caused by racism in the United States, neither is she some racist caricature.
As a girl, I read and re-read the books. I marveled that Laura thought an orange was an amazing Christmas gift. I wondered at how her family lived in a home dug into a dirt hill. I couldn’t believe the amount of work she and her family had to daily do just to keep up a meager existence as a farmer’s family with clean clothes and food on the table. Growing up in a suburban neighborhood, I tried to imagine the vast loneliness of the prairie.
Don’t think that Laura Ingalls Wilder will be the last writer to be hunted down in the ongoing cultural purge. If we’re learning anything in our “woke” times, it’s that nothing is sacred. Even shows like “Friends” and “Sex and the City” — liberal, progressive shows that challenged cultural norms, arguably successfully — are now, two decades from their beginnings, being described as problematic.
Today, Wilder is only being denied an award named after her, but tomorrow, she may well be seen as unfit to read.
Katrina Trinko, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is managing editor for The Daily Signal. Her views do not necessarily represent The Heritage Foundation, her employer. Follow her on Twitter: @KatrinaTrinko
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